Martial ants

Army ants are not called such because they wear fatigue uniforms with matching boots or carry out an equivalent of their human counterparts’ (the ones who specialize in "oakwood") most recently demonstrated skill – explosive-installation in shopping malls. I suspect humans called them "army ants" to pay tribute to the broader military, an aspect of human organization, or at least to what we thought was commendable about it. Army ants are one of the most distinguished examples of self-organized behavior in nature. They are found mostly in Central and South America and forage in the jungles at daytime, rendering them accessible to a multitude of scientific probes. Sociobiology is a branch of science that deals with the biological, with special focus on the ecological and evolutionary, aspects of social behavior. Socio-biologists devote time and resources looking at non-human creatures and try to see if there are larger behavioral patterns in nature that can help us stretch our understanding of the bigger picture. This week, we march out a little in sociobiology.

The total number of ant species known so far is close to 9,000 and the species called Eciton burchelli is the most studied of them all. The following are several features about these army ants (also known as "killer ants").

First, on fealty. The E. burchellis serve a wingless queen whose singular job is to lay eggs that can range between a million and four million a month. Even if she is wingless, she can see which is not the case with the worker ants. Yes, worker ants are extremely poor-sighted that they are practically blind. They have eyes that contain only a single facet (in contrast with the dragonfly’s eye which has 20,000 facets). This is literally "blind obedience" at work in nature.

Second, on marching cadence. The mostly blind worker ants move as one in order to be effective and serve their role in nature. They smell a chemical trail left off by other ants that helps them move as a singular million-member body to forage. These trail patterns are what intrigue biologists the most. So far, studies show that these chemical cues have helped manage to keep these ants in their fundamental biology, alive and the same, for about a 100 million years now. Any ant that wandered off or lost the capacity to take full advantage of the chemically inspired marching cadence simply lost its biological right to be part of the army ants.

Third, on rank movement. With army ants, this is literal rank movement and it seems that so far, army ants are extremely good in keeping their ranks well in tow. This they do even as individual ants respond only to their biological traits, in other words, to their fundamental nature, without knowing the bigger picture. No one ant knows the map of the terrain to be trekked in order to find food and survive as army ants. But in the millions, they know and are only effective and successful in foraging when they act as one according to their fundamental nature as Dr. Martin Burd, of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, found out in his studies. Army ants, as also revealed by Iain D. Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University, and his colleague, Nigel R. Franks, of Bristol University’s Center for Behavioral Biology in England, after they performed some computer modeling of ant movement related to foraging behavior, seem to have found an excellent traffic scheme to facilitate movements among themselves going one direction as well as that of returning cargo-burdened ants. They are moving in diametrically opposed directions but army ants are still able to find a way to somehow make it work and serve nature, theirs and the broader nature. It turned out that cargo-burdened army ants are kept on the center lane by two outer lanes formed by other army ants yet on their way to forage. In fact, these "self-organizing" patterns are so evident in the insect world that mathematicians like David Sumpter, of Oxford University, also study them. While I have come across scientists who find such serenity and assurance that things "work" in nature, social scientists I know who study the self-organizing principle and try to find evidence of it in the human species find the enterprise extremely more complex and even exceedingly stressful.

Lastly, on waterloo. Aside from natural events like fire and huge servings of water that can kill colonies of army ants, army ants are also known to extinguish themselves by their own internally guided failures. This has to do with the lead/caboose-ant phenomenon. A trail of ants just follows the one in front of them making whoever is at the forefront the "leader." This leader, however, when faced with an obstacle, would sometimes have to move across a wider angle to overcome it and end up on the tail of the last ant, the "caboose ant." This would set off the army ant trail in a circuitous path and as they take time at this circuitous path, they become hungrier and seem to get more anxious and thus, move faster, and since it is not in their nature to break out of the circle, they all starve and die. Army ants follow a biological compass that both helps them survive and causes their demise. It is a compass held within their nature.

As nature and science writers always remind each other, a metaphor is a metaphor and not the thing itself. But at the same time, one should not shun metaphors too hastily. The trick is to know which aspect of the metaphor sheds light on the aspect of reality one wants to try to understand and to what extent. Nature does play that trick on us. Fealty, marching cadence, rank movement and waterloo. We should remember that we humans named these army ants after our own organizations. Army ants have been around for a hundred million years and the human counterpart only for a negligible portion of that in that time scale. And in this country, couching it in the lifetime of this science-writer born in the 60s, I still have not seen it "working" and "serving" as one, a nature or nation, in manner and period, approaching intelligible coherence at the very least. But army ants are ants and as I said, a metaphor is a metaphor and not the thing itself. In fact, in a lot of times, they make a lot more sense.