by Nina Burton
This all seemed eerily familiar and set my mind in motion. Ants’ battles for territory seldom brought lasting results, so entomologist Carl Lindroth wanted to view them from a broader perspective. Since ants lack serious enemies, perhaps they had to depend on one another to keep their population within reasonable boundaries. From a global perspective, their wars can be viewed as a braking mechanism that prevents their numbers from growing excessively.
I pondered this. After all, from a societal standpoint, ants are the animals that most closely resemble us. We don’t have any enemies to keep us in check either, for we have decimated every threat against our world dominion and have become the apex predator. Could it be out of some biological need for balance that we are always on the verge of destroying each other and ourselves with increasingly devastating weapons?
These similarities made biologist E.O. Wilson weave ant and human narratives together in a prizewinning novel, Anthill. Like Wilson himself, protagonist Raff becomes fascinated by ants on his lone ramblings as a child, and they later take centre stage in his research. In Wilson’s case, this was all thanks to an accident. As a child he happened to get a fishhook stuck in his eye while fishing alone, and since he was afraid to see a doctor his distance vision was permanently affected. But he turned his lemons into lemonade and became one of the world’s leading experts on ants. He was the one to determine the role of pheromones in their communication, among other things.
Wilson himself found communication crucial, so even as a renowned professor at Harvard he didn’t settle for confining his research findings to academic circles. He wanted to show everyone the life of ants. In just the same way, he allowed his protagonist Raff to craft his dissertation into a Homeric epic about the rise and fall of several ant kingdoms.
The tale begins with the death of a queen in an ant colony, which faces its downfall as a result. When the queenless ants are challenged to a tournament by a foreign ant colony they are defeated and must rush to entrench themselves in their nest. As they shelter there they are eventually forced to eat their own larvae, and when the conquerors finally invade the nest the entire defeated colony is destroyed, just as the Romans destroyed Carthage. The few ants who manage to flee are only able to survive on their own for hours or days.
But no kingdom lasts forever, and even victors must be conquered. Due to a mutation, another colony nearby has lost their sensitivity for territory-border scents. Even the scent of their own queen is so faint to them that minor queens are established in an ever-widening network. Without respect for ritual border tournaments, the immoderate realm soon swells into neighbouring domains and takes over. No other ants can control this super-colony, so its only weakness is its excessive nature. These ants keep hordes of aphids, which suck the life out of the plants, and the ants themselves scare off pollinating insects by eating up their larvae. There are simply more ants than the habitat can support, and they are on the verge of destroying themselves.
At this point, a higher power – from an ant’s perspective – swoops in. These are beings who might bring gifts in the form of leftover bits of picnic food, but who also have the power to eradicate them. In this instance, they vanquish the entire supercolony with a chemical pesticide.
Behind each detail in the book is Wilson’s own research on ants, although the parallels with human civilisation are clear. For instance, he allows protagonist Raff to see the similarities between the growing complexity of the ants’ society and the kaleidoscope of specialists at Harvard. The interspersed ant epic resembles our own historical chronicles and also provides a frightening vision of the future. In the introduction, Wilson declares that his story has multiple layers. It’s about the human and ant worlds alike, but its lessons are also applicable to the biosphere and the Earth, where each species must exist in reasonable proportions.
The ants tirelessly continued their caravan across the wall of the writing nook. There was something singular about the way they stuck together. It had become so crucial to their survival that ants on their own were condemned to death, almost as though in coming together they built an organism.
Could they, in fact, be seen this very way? Maeterlinck was of the opinion that an anthill really should be considered a single being. And it does turn out to be the case that an ant colony, throughout its long life, undergoes changes in character just as an individual does. Younger colonies are sensitive and impulsive like teenagers, while older colonies are more stable. It doesn’t matter that each ant lives only for a year or so – each one comes from the same queen, and the society on the whole reflects her age. Ants cooperate not just like loyal citizens and sisters, but like cells in a body. Ten per cent of a colony’s residents can be lost each day without much of an effect, for hundreds of thousands remain and new life is constantly being born to preserve the whole.
Wasn’t this also the case in my own body? Millions of my cells die constantly, and new ones are always forming. All in all, I am crowded with 37 billion cells, and each one is a tiny living thing of its own even though they cooperate like ants. Like ants, then, they must have a chemical system of communication and a division of labour.
It wasn’t hard to see the parallels with an ant colony. Ant soldiers had their counterpart in immune cells, which drive off all foreign invaders, and the ant queen could be compared to the endocrine system, which organises cell division, nutrient absorption and blood circulation. Without making any conscious decisions, it organises the work of the cells and provides constant nourishment for a future.
I took a jaunt to the mirror in the writing nook. What I was looking at was a massive colony of social cells. They created my senses and my brain, the parts of me that could take in my surroundings and let my thoughts wonder about themselves. Even though a thousand brain cells died each day, and with them all their connections, I remained the same. Was it by way of words that I attempted to create a definite me?
In my body, there was so much going on of which I was unaware (‘I’?). Everything had a different format than what I saw around me. Entire rivers coursed through my tiny blood vessels, which together would reach all the way around the world; in my brain, tiny electrical storms raged as communicating neurons feverishly searched for patterns in the world. In all of this invisible micro-life there was such a paradoxical vastness that it reminded me of outer space. There were as many neurons weaving together impressions, impulses and notions as there were stars in the Milky Way. Among themselves, too, they had tens of thousands of connections that formed a network of everything I had ever heard, felt and seen (‘I’?). Each individual brain cell was as limited as its neighbours, but together they linked into a network that could reach far beyond their own purview.
The same went for the cells in each organ. I had only to open my eyes and a fresh, massive concert was set in motion. With every passing second, the 125 million light-sensitive cells of my retina sent new impulses to my brain. There, 10 billion brain cells would construct an image before forwarding the impulses to my 640 muscles.
In every part of me, these were astronomical sums. What could be the meaning behind all these incomprehensible numbers? There had to be some purpose. Consider too that these microscopic fragments were made up of even smaller worlds, for cells consist of atoms. Still, most inconceivable of all was the fact that the better part of all of these components is nothing but emptiness – just as is the case in outer space. If the electrons of my cells were compressed the rest of me would be about the size of an ant.
How could all these countless tiny parts full of inner space create an image of the world? Could the ants give us a clue? While they continued their endless march on the wall, I weighed a USB drive in my hand. It contained the half-finished manuscripts of a couple of books, and a lot of facts. If microchips could hold so much information, shouldn’t the same be true of ants’ brains?
There are important differences, of course. In contrast to the world of computers, the chem
istry of ants, like all life, is carbon-based. Nor is ant cooperation programmed from without; it arises from inside the ants themselves, and their connections reach out to other forms of life. Still, computer researchers have begun to use social insects as models for self-organised systems. After all, in a data processor, seemingly insignificant ones and zeros come together to transmit complex information quickly.
The explanation lies in a pre-programmed decision node or algorithm. A similar thing was probably taking place in my own brain, and it definitely was in the ant colony. There, each individual makes a simple decision without having a complete picture of a given problem. That decision is often based on the behaviour of neighbours, so, for instance, if many ants are streaming in from a food source, that source is judged to be rich. When a lot of small, local decisions come together, the sum may be much greater than one individual contribution. The limitations of each ant are, in fact, an advantage – if one were to act of its own accord, the greater whole might be jeopardised.
No central decision-maker is needed in this kind of hive intelligence. Ants, like cells, show us how a complex whole can arise from the interaction of smaller parts. Just as a thousand is more than a dozen, a crowd in itself has intrinsic value. All of its individual parts taken together can provide a statistical pattern.
One scholar of this phenomenon was Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. He enjoyed synthesising information from varied disciplines such as anthropology and statistics, and sometimes he found interesting connections. In 1906 he noted that eight hundred marketgoers together successfully guessed the weight of an ox, even though no individual even came close to the actual number. Some guessed too high and some too low, but between them was an average value that provided the correct answer. With a smaller crowd it wouldn’t have worked.
Was it possible, then, that out of quantities and crowds new qualities could arise? That was a little hard to absorb. I belonged to an individualistic culture and had devoted countless years to studying the pioneering figures of the Renaissance. On the other hand, I had also written books about the conditions of creativity, so I knew that no new gains were possible without the millions of tiny ant-steps that were taken by thousands of other people. Oftentimes, in fact, it was those very anonymous contributions that made new discoveries possible. That was probably more or less the way my brain cells worked together to create an image of the world. When enough puzzle pieces had been gathered, a hint of a pattern emerged. It could seem to happen suddenly, and in the realms of art and science credit went to those who spotted it first. But any number of unnamed individuals would have paved the way for such a breakthrough. Together they created the conditions necessary for the emergence of this new thing that had been awaiting discovery.
Nor was this really a new idea. Aristotle saw how complex patterns could be formed in the interplay between simple structures or behaviours. These days the phenomenon is called ‘emergence’ and it appears to be a basic requirement of life. Atoms together make molecules; protein molecules arranged in a certain way make living cells; cells organised in a certain way make organs; organs are organised to create organisms, which themselves create societies. And so on and so forth in all spheres of life where all the parts fit together and constantly create new patterns. They’re built from the bottom up or the inside out, not from the top down.
Outside, the hammering from the other outbuilding had stopped. The tradesmen had left for the day, and I was exhausted from trying to understand what the ants had to tell me. I was getting hungry; or perhaps my cells were experiencing a collective hunger. No matter; it was time to eat. It was past five o’clock, but the sunshine was still warm as I left the writing nook, and the air was fresh after the rain. Perhaps I could sit outside to eat?
Just as I finished making a salad in the kitchen, I saw a winged creature on the windowpane. Oh, an ant queen! I recalled Maeterlinck’s lovely description of a nuptial flight and cautiously let her out. But then another ant queen appeared, and once I’d also helped her outside I discovered a third. That was odd. How had they gotten inside? I looked around and realised that a number of ants were crawling on the west wall. They seemed to be coming from a dark border at the junction between wall and ceiling. I approached anxiously and gasped. The dark border was made up of swarming ants. They hadn’t accidentally gotten into the house at all – quite the opposite; they were trying to get out. It almost looked like the guts of the wall were welling out.
The realisation hit me like a bolt of lightning. All at once, the ants became troops in gleaming armour who challenged all my territorial instincts by violating the border of the wall. There was no time to think. In an instant, the situation and I transformed. What weapons were at hand? The vacuum. As I raised its orifice to the dark border on the wall it unleashed a commotion among the ants. Alarmed dispatches were sent in every direction to find a way to escape disaster, for this was similar to a war of extermination. But I was merciless. Like a fury I searched for ants in every corner to suck them into the dark belly of the vacuum.
Afterwards, I was shaken. A swarm of ants coming into the room was a different story from the solitary bees and bumblebees on the outside of the cottage. This was an invasion. And how did ants come to be living in the wall? They needed the moisture of soil. Was there moisture in the wall? This was doubly worrying.
I pulled up a chair and sat down heavily as I tried to come to grips with the situation. Even if the ants in the vacuum died, new ant queens would be born next year and go on more mating flights, and the cycle would only continue. Thanks to their constant birth rate, I would never be able to ignore the presence, in my very home, of these creatures that pre-dated humanity. A wall ought to be a border with the world outside, and if the wall contained life of its own that border was very porous indeed.
I had lost my appetite, but I still tried to pick away at my salad. On the wall where the ants had appeared was a reproduction of a late-19th-century breakfast scene. It was summer, and the light was reflected in the porcelain and glass; in the background was a wall of foliage. The dining table had been moved outside to be truly close to nature. But now I knew you could indeed be close to nature indoors as well. Suddenly the kitchen walls seemed as flimsy as the art poster, and I was sure that just behind it was a much more active scene than in the painting itself.
Then I recalled something Harry Martinson had written in a nature essay: it had once been common practice to place entire anthills in the walls of houses, because the mixture of dry, sandy soil and evergreen needles made cheap insulation and was thought to keep vermin in check. There might be a whole score of anthills in a large farmhouse. What would it have felt like to live in a building with the walls full of them? Surely it was simply thought of as insulation. But Martinson felt something more for the life of anthills. As a poet, he imagined how every single needle had been carried in and put in its place by some tiny ant. He also saw the anthill as a realm of its very own, in a timeless tradition. In the long chronology of ants, it could have been the 1,059th realm of the 16,000th series, where each series covered 2,000 iterations of state. In the world of the ants, time was measured so differently, both because they were tiny and because they were ancient. Faced with insignificant but infinite numbers of realms throughout time, Martinson felt the same awe as when he thought of all the stars in the sky.
I was beginning to feel ashamed. In my excitement, I had blown things out of proportion. Tiny black ants are, in fact, harmless – unlike carpenter ants, they can’t drill through wood. Surely their society had existed on the property for the vast amounts of time Martinson mentioned. The fact that they were small made them no less worthy. After all, they were of the most common dimensions found among Earth’s creatures.
Besides, size is relative. Maeterlink and Martinson both pointed out that the bodies of ants are made up of atoms with orbiting electrons not unlike the planets around stars. From this perspective, ants and people alike exist some
where on a spectrum between the incomprehensibly tiny and the incomprehensibly huge. We find ourselves in the very same situation, just like the time I shared my vulnerable state on the deserted island with an ant.
When I thought of her, I became even more gentle of spirit. She must have been separated from her sisters as the thunderstorm approached while they were out gathering material for their shared nest. The others would manage without her, but she would never survive without them. She was just a minuscule piece of the larger context that gave her life meaning. ‘Little ant,’ I murmured.
That was when I recalled that I too had once been called by that name. I could see the setting clearly, because it had been a big part of my life. There wasn’t much light down in the research room of the Nobel Library, where I had spent many years writing. It was below street level, and the medieval arches gave me the feeling of a profound era in which I was a vanishing piece of something larger. Above me, life went on, on several levels, although I couldn’t hear it; outside the window I could see legs hurrying past on their way to other destinations.
A number of women usually sat down there, and although we didn’t speak to each other there was a sense of camaraderie as we each soldiered on with some topic. I could often be found among the foreign-language stacks and could only slowly make my way through unwieldy arguments and thickets of footnotes. Nearsightedly, I sought a path among words that together formed sentences, and among sentences that together portrayed contexts. When I caught the scent of an interesting trail I knew it was only the start of an equally arduous work when salvaging the find, and persistence was a virtue here.