Notes from a Summer Cottage

by Nina Burton

  I sensed it at the time, and it has since been proven, that even insects can feel fear. That must have been the feeling that filled the ant, beyond the protection of its community.

  It hardly seemed likely that we could comfort one another. I was used to interpreting other beings through voices, if not with words then with songs, purrs, growls, howls or hisses. I could also respond to another creature’s feelings with a look, an expression or some body language. None of this was possible with the ant, for she was entirely different. Even aliens, in science fiction, are given human proportions and features. They have two arms, two legs, two eyes and a pair of ears on either side of a nose and mouth. They communicate with language-like sounds and experience us more or less as we do them. Tiny, peculiar earthly creatures, however, can seem far too unlike us to make a real connection.

  The ant’s body really was bizarre. Its naked chitin skeleton had a cool, metallic gleam, and her eyes were not only tiny but they were made up of facets, so I couldn’t make eye contact with her. What little knowledge I had about ants had come to me through books and science. The entomologist Carl Lindroth, for instance, had written a children’s book about an ant named Emma, and since it was based on facts about ant life my biology teacher had read parts of it aloud. In it, the courageous Emma encounters antlions, slave-maker ants and parasitoid wasps, and eventually she also gets lost, because one joint of her antennae was broken off when a nursery ant pulled her rather carelessly out of her cocoon at birth. Had something like that happened to the ant in my tent? And what did she feel? A few years later, I would see enlarged X-rays of an ant’s brain, where different areas had different colours. It glowed like a church window. I would also see an insect’s heart beating in another X-ray film. It didn’t look like my own, but it pulsed with just as much life.

  The ant sat as if paralysed in a corner of the tent, so incomprehensible to her. We were equally minuscule under the darkened sky, and as such she became, for me, the symbol of a bare and solitary existence. The very fact that we were both caught in our own experiences gave us a type of solidarity. We were alone together. At the same time, I felt deep down in my anxious heart that no man is an island. I come from a city of islands, connected by bridges, and it was those very connections that made the city a whole. Those bridges were life, and they extended even across the boundaries of species.

  It was nothing new for an author to combine ants and existential questions. Their tiny size can illustrate the condition of being a vulnerable speck in a massive cosmos, and the meaninglessness of the individual is made plain in their incredible numbers. Only the scent of a constantly birthing queen can keep them alive. And that begs the biggest existential question of all: are we humans just the same? Have we ourselves made up the gods that steer our lives?

  Questions like these consumed the Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. In my history-of-literature past, I had compared his play The Blind with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which may have been inspired by Maeterlinck. Both plays revolve around a perpetual, futile wait for a leader, and in Maeterlinck’s play said leader was particularly essential, as those waiting for him were blind. What they couldn’t see was that the leader was already sitting among them. But he was dead.

  Although Maeterlinck was best known for his symbolic stage plays, he also wrote eminent books of essays on biology. He dedicated the first one to the bees, as he was a devoted beekeeper. When he was asked to write a film script in the 1920s, he actually tried, to the horror of the producer, to make a bee the hero. Still, in his book, he said some fairly derogatory things about solitary bees. In his opinion, they ought to take the leap from narrow-minded egoism to brotherhood. I got a little stuck on the choice of words, since neither ‘narrow-minded egoism’ nor ‘brotherhood’ really describes bees, but I understood that his goal was to extol the virtues of beehive life.

  Ants were to an even greater extent his ideal, and in 1930 he wrote a book of essays about their lives as well. As a symbolist he could see our own fate as humans reflected in the simplest anthill. After all, we knew as little about the secret of life as ants did. But the symbolism wasn’t heavy-handed, and his book was so full of fascinating facts that it sparked my own interest in ants.

  He gave a beautiful description of their lives. It began with tiny eggs, almost invisible, that other ants constantly tended by licking them. Perhaps the ant colony’s organisation arose as it did for the very reason that their offspring needed constant care, Maeterlinck mused. Similar things had been said about our own societies, and he thought he could almost see human forms in the larvae that emerged from the eggs. Viewed through a microscope, they resembled grumpy little babies with scornful expressions, or sometimes hooded mummies in sycamore coffins. All the eggs looked identical, except for the one that would become a queen.

  After she was helped from her cocoon, veil-like appendages hung along her sides – these were her wings. It was mind-boggling to think that wings were a memory from the winged ancestors of ants. They would override millions of years of earthbound life just for a day, for a crucial moment. During a few minutes’ worth of delirious flight, high above the everyday march, each and every queen could mark the beginning of something new.

  It happens each year on a very special afternoon between the hours of five and eight o’clock. The sun shines again after a rain that has softened the ground, and the air is saturated with 70 per cent humidity. It’s a mystery how the ants know it, but it never fails. Around dinnertime, the anthills simmer with activity as the young queens are escorted to the surface.

  Although they know nothing of the sky, their wings lift them in flight. They’re not alone. Each newly born queen in the area takes to the air, and so do the winged ant princes who will fertilise them. It’s as if they’ve all synchronised to intermingle their colonies and reduce inbreeding.

  Who gives the signal? No one, just a primeval sense for the right time and the right weather. Entire clouds of flying ants rise into the sky beneath hungrily circling birds. Like smoke from an invisible, smouldering fire, they fly until night, when the bats come to take those who are left. Only a small percentage of the thousands of ant queens will survive the day, and the situation is even more dire for the males. After mating, those that escape being eaten by birds fall to the ground, where the workers from their former nest can kill them – they’ve already made their contribution to ant society on this, their one day of life. With a flurry of excitement, life was given a chance to multiply a thousand-fold. But just as night follows day, death comes right on the heels of life to keep it from collapsing under its own numbers.

  I understood why this mating flight had captivated Maeterlinck. It was like an existential landmark, closely related to birth and death. The mating flight of the honeybee is similarly intense, although in this case there are no swarms. Instead, the queens test the drones by rising ever more boldly towards the sky. They reach points high above the normal flight altitude of bees, until they aren’t even visible as tiny dots to normal eyes. This moment is the reason drones have the sharpest vision of all bees. They must not lose track of their queen, for only the one who can follow her to the highest point of her celestial flight can mate with her, although it will cost him his life. During the sky-high act of mating, his innards are pulled from his body; while the queen is filled with life, he falls dead to the ground.

  For ants, the mating flight is both a test of strength and a dramatic contrast to their flightless everyday lives. Maeterlinck described it as a country wedding, where the queen’s shedding of her wings was like her bridal gown falling away. It was a romanticised image, for there is no party afterwards. The queen must quickly save herself and the lives she will bear by burrowing into the loose soil. In reality, she’s digging her own prison. There, in the dark earth, she will lie motionless for all the years she has left to live.

  She begins by laying a handful of
eggs, which she carefully licks with a nourishing, antibiotic saliva so that no bacteria from the soil will infect them. But her strength is waning, so in order to keep going she must eat some of the eggs she’s so carefully tended. There are still millions of sperm in storage inside her body, and from now on it is her life’s work to constantly lay fresh, fertilised eggs, as regular as a heartbeat.

  Millions of stored sperm … I counted silently. An ant queen can live for upwards of twenty years, and even if only a fraction of those sperm were to fertilise her eggs that could mean hundreds of thousands of new ants. No wonder there are ants everywhere. Ninety-nine per cent of the queens who join the mating flight may die without consequence, because those who survive will multiply and are able to keep the ant society thriving uninterrupted. By caring for and protecting their youngest members as thoroughly as we humans do, they help their young survive the dangerous childhood phase that, for so many species, comes with such a high rate of death.

  In Maeterlinck’s admiring eyes, the ants’ matriarchy was the ideal republic that we had never managed to create for ourselves, and perhaps it was possible because all of them truly were sisters. He considered ants to be some of Earth’s most honourable, courageous, generous and devoted creatures, driven by a common altruism. The whole colony would be affected if any one of them were to take more than their share of the common resources, so solidarity and peacefulness ruled among ants. If they encountered other ant colonies, it was only to engage in friendly sporting competitions and games.

  It was around this point that I realised Maeterlinck was idealising the ants. Certainly, it was crucial to keep the peace within a colony, but territorial instincts are the bottom line when it comes to the outside world. What Maeterlinck viewed as games and harmless sporting events were described by entomologists as territorial demonstrations of strength. Indeed, the behaviour is so ritualised that it’s called a tournament: hundreds of ants doing all they can to impress others. They stretch their legs into stilts and prefer to stand on a piece of gravel to increase their height even further. But it’s not just a game. When a larger colony arrives to confront a smaller one, it’s time to hurry back into the nest and guard the entrance. For as soon as one side has proven itself to be the stronger, the tournament derails into raids and the weaker colony is enslaved the moment its queen has been killed.

  There turned out to be a multitude of similarities between ant societies and our own, and I found that fact a bit discomfiting. The reflection ants aimed back at us from their Lilliputian world could be rather discouraging. Our development of larynxes, which gave us speech, and hands, which allowed us to use tools, have been offered as explanations for the success of our civilisations. Yet ants, with neither larynxes nor hands, still developed organised societies millions of years before we did. They can clearly communicate splendidly through scents, tastes and vibrations, and their jaws can grip just like hands. They can use those jaws to pull loads that weigh twenty times their own body weight, and when other ants pitch in they actually look like fingers on a hand working in tandem. More than any other creatures, ants demonstrate that cooperation can pave the way for advanced societies.

  Each ant species demonstrates this in its own way. Weaver ants of the genus Oecophylla, for instance, build nests of joined leaves. A single ant can fold a leaf on its own by taking hold of one edge with its jaws and the other with its hind legs. But it takes teamwork to put two leaves together. One ant must grip the first leaf while another holds her rear end and a third holds the second ant’s rear end, and so on, until someone can reach the second leaf. Between the leaves are crowds of these ant chains, which sometimes almost braid themselves together. And when the edges are finally lined up, it’s time for the next problem: the leaves must be stuck together. The solution is to bring over a larva that’s about to spin a cocoon. One ant holds the cocoon-spinner in its jaws and moves it back and forth across the leaf edges, like a shuttle, as it releases its sticky threads. In this way the half-grown pupa becomes a living tool. The work continues until the whole nest looks like a giant, silky, shimmering cocoon of joined leaves.

  Ants can also use their bodies as a type of construction material. Fire ants crowd together into a compact mass to create watertight rafts. Tropical army ants can join their bodies into giant tents that both protect the queen and regulate heat and humidity. What’s more, ants can use materials from their surroundings; the genus Aphaenogaster transforms porous leaves into sponges with which to transport liquid food. In other words, ants have proven themselves capable of using tools.

  Thus, even tiny insects can build advanced societies, and they had even done so before us humans. By the time we started tilling the soil about ten thousand years ago, ants had already been cultivating for 50 million years and had been involved in a number of other enterprises as well.

  In Texas, so-called harvester ants subsist on a particular variety of grass that they cultivate by weeding out other plants. The tiniest blade of grass is, to an ant, the size of a tree for us, so they must also be lumberjacks, and this in a terrain where each pebble of gravel is essentially a boulder. Even more sophisticated are leaf-cutter ants of the genus Atta. Their diet is a fungus that they nourish with so many leaves that they must harvest and process them on a massive scale. Each day, thousands of workers head out to various harvesting sites to pick leaves and cut them into smaller parts. With their multitudes and organisation, the ants can defoliate an entire tree in a day or so, after which huge columns of ants transport the harvest to their mushroom farm. Because the leaf pieces are larger than the ants themselves, it looks as though streams of green dots are flowing all on their own across the land, for the paths, which can be a kilometre long, are constantly cleared by designated road-worker ants. Sometimes smaller ants ride on the leaves like children on a haycart, but these are very serious guards who protect the load from parasites.

  It all moves like clockwork. Back in the colony, the leaf pieces are taken to hundreds of underground rooms, which given their size and number resemble factories. The ants have even built a ventilation system, because the fungus farm releases carbon dioxide. This could be dangerous for the ants whose job is to chew leaf pieces into a substrate for the mushrooms. Should any leaves prove to have been treated with pesticides, rendering them harmful to the fungus, the harvest workers are ordered to quickly change growing locations. The ants down in the underground caverns are very observant, and they regularly purge foreign species from their preferred fungus. Besides fertilising it with excrement, they give it growth hormones and a type of antibiotic that protects against microorganisms – both of these are substances produced by their own bodies. At the end of the process, waste is handled by older workers who can be expected to die soon anyway. Everything is as organised as in any industry.

  And it’s not just cultivation that ants have been up to for millions of years. Long before us, they practised a type of livestock management, although naturally it involves very small animals, namely aphids, which excrete a sweet, energy-rich substance when they eat the sap of plants. It’s called by the euphemistic name of ‘honeydew’, although it’s not an ant variety of honey but the profane waste product of a plant louse. The ants diligently milk the honeydew by stroking the aphids with their antennae, and they collect it in such amounts as to suggest a dairy farm. It’s also apparent that the ants view it as an animal husbandry endeavour, for when ladybirds arrive to feast upon the aphids they’re attacked like predators, and when the aphids grow wings they’re torn off just as humans clip the wings of poultry. Black garden ants even store aphid eggs in their nests over the winter, so that in the spring they can place them in a suitable pasture.

  The larvae of the blue butterfly genus Phengaris also produce honeydew, so some species of ants take these larvae home to their nests where they are nourished with the ants’ own eggs in exchange for sweet secretions. Over the winter the larvae pupate in the safety of the nest, and in the spring the n
ew butterflies are chivalrously escorted out by the ants who provided them a home.

  Clearly ants are willing to go to great lengths to obtain their honeydew. But they themselves actually eat very little, and they can go months or even a year without food, as long as there is some moisture in the soil. They collect the aphid juice in special pouches on their bodies to feed the ant larvae, which can devour ten kilos of it in a summer. The larvae also need protein, and to provide it the ants drag various insects home. Flies, mosquitoes, butterflies and beetles, worms, spiders or millipedes – they all have larvae that can nourish young ants, and each ant colony goes through a million insects each year. If the victim resists, a dose of formic acid will make them comply. Formic acid is so effective that it’s even used by beekeepers and birds, although in their case it’s to get rid of mites and other parasites. Starlings will even flat out plop themselves down in an anthill to let the inhabitants squirt their acid on them, and sometimes they even take a few ants in their beak to rub them on their feathers. On top of everything else, an anthill is one of nature’s pharmacies.

  Indeed, ants truly demonstrate a well-organised society in every way, and the sum of it all rather puts humans to shame. Before we’d even arrived on the scene, ants had had agriculture, animal husbandry, tools and an industrial society for millions of years. We humans were not the creators of the first civilisations on Earth. Ants were.

  Of course, advanced societies have their price. They must be defended, for instance, so 15 per cent of the individuals in an ant colony might be soldiers. It’s clear which ones they are – they have a sturdier build and sharper jaws than others. But even regular old workers take part in battles when it comes to surrounding an enemy. Although they’re often old ladies, in an age sense, they fight like bold Amazons. Ovid wrote that in Greek mythology the gods had transformed ants into a particularly war-prone tribe of people, the Myrmidons. And ants certainly have an astounding variety of military tactics. They make use of infiltration and guerrilla warfare, blockades and sieges, storming and veritable extermination; indeed, they even have suicide bombers that can explode and coat the enemy in a poisonous goo.