Ants in the City: Go to the ants, learn her ways, and be wise… maybe?

The Providence College Friars made headlines last week, not for an exciting win, but for the behavior exhibited by their fans. During a game with a team from Brigham Young University, students in the crowd called out shamefully offensive chants. They were allegedly stopped by a staff member who later said, “That does not represent who Providence College is and what we stand for.” At a school that strongly values its Catholic & Dominican identity, we might wonder how policing these identities also shapes crowd mentalities and what we can, following Proverbs 6:6 (“Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise”), learn from the ants.

Tribalism is often portrayed as an inevitable part of human evolutionary psychology, an outcome of a self-preservation drive coupled with our ability to distinguish membership in one group versus another. Ants too, can be sensitive to group membership, using their antennae to detect each other’s cuticular hydrocarbon profiles. These profiles, based on the composition of chemicals embedded within the ant exoskeleton’s waxy coating, serve as recognition cues that can inform each other about their parental lineage, their age, nutritional status, recent behaviors, and even their respective health. These attributes can be sensed by individuals through antennal contacts with each other and integrated across entire colonies. They play key roles in the emergence of dynamic and complex collective behaviors and can also be used for territoriality. Warfare among neighboring colonies can take many forms, from violent dismemberment to pacifist standoffs resembling a cold war. In a few species however, individuals from distant regions fail to show any aggression towards each other and are said to belong to enormous supercolonies.

The unsurpassed ecological wonder of cooperative supercolonies, potentially billions of ants working together across thousands of miles, was once hypothesized to be made possible by the loss of their ability to detect the chemical markers that would otherwise signify membership in rival colonies. Without the ability to distinguish “self” from “other,” some myrmecologists thought this might be the key to social harmony (and unbounded growth). Unfortunately, this model did not fully survive the last two decades of research into supercolony success. Genetic diversity and flow within supercolonies likely helps maintain a common hydrocarbon profile and minimal aggression within colonies, but different supercolonies still maintain distinct chemical identities and conflict between them may be spread out across a continent, but is no less epic in its scale or toll.

When institutions within society seek to establish a core identity, it is not sufficient to simply brand or market slogans without care for their membership because it is precisely that composition that, as in supercolonies, can define how the institution works. Providence College declares on its website that it takes pride in being a “loving, diverse, and inclusive community,” but it also has a complicated history in these areas. While once a beacon not only for Catholics but also Jewish students and immigrants from across the Smith Hill neighborhood who faced discrimination from other local institutions, the same could not be said with as much vigor today. In the last year, the college lost its first trans staff member who worked within its DEI office, and it promoted an outspoken advocate of conversion therapy to a newly created executive position. Until changes are made in how inclusion is more actively embraced on-campus, it is unlikely for the college’s identity to manifest externally any other way. As a colleague recently shared privately, “we’ll never be a beloved community as long as we’re othering.”

While Proverbs commands us to learn from the ants, it doesn’t say we necessarily have to emulate everything about them. Ants and humans may both be prone to tribalism, but altruism is something we are also remarkably capable of. Firefighters rush into burning buildings to save the lives of strangers, students jeopardize their careers to protest injustice, and brave individuals can expose themselves to the risk of martyrdom even on city streets in broad daylight, fighting for others and for the greater good. Perhaps all it takes is recognition that we are all part of a much larger, and more diverse, group. •

Illustration by Danika Valentine. Follow Dr. Jane and her research lab on Instagram @antlabpvd or on the web www.lovetheants.org.