As we head to the polls in November, about 18 billion ants beneath our feet here in Rhode Island will also be busy voting. Although they probably won’t be crowning their next queen, their collective decision-making processes will influence everything from where they forage to where they live and whether or not they’ll revolt. The nature of social organization in ant societies has been a source of inspiration for artists, political philosophers, and myrmecologists for hundreds of years; often motivated by a desire to take lessons from what is natural and use them as models for our own behavior. The history of how we understand ant societies is strongly biased by our own dominant, sociocultural paradigms. While we once described the largest ant in a colony as a “king,” this changed to “queen” following the realization that they lay eggs, and even this title later shifted in some contexts to “mother.”
These shifting terms reflect the patriarchal disenfranchisement of women in a relatively powerless and subjugated role, creating models for matriarchy and maternity only strengthened by research showing that colony decision-making authority was decentralized, residing among the population of worker ants. In social insect colonies, the workers are relatively uninformed individuals, each only having access to information on a relatively small scale. Through their interactions with each other, groups of workers are the source for the complex and adaptive collective decisions at a global scale that underlies virtually all aspects of colony growth and development. Common acorn ants such as Temnothorax, for example, have entire colonies that live within a single hollow acorn and they are often on the move; as one acorn deteriorates, they need to find a new one to move into. Individual ants fan out and search for new nest sites, comparable to how we may browse Zillow listings, they evaluate the relative space inside – the ambient lighting and humidity, even the size of the hole serving as a doorway into the acorn.
In a series of experiments with these ants, scientists have demonstrated that colonies can use quorum-sensing to make decisions about the optimal nest to move into. Even if every individual hasn’t had a chance to check each potential option, and even if decoy options are present that would otherwise impose cognitive bias on human decision making, the colony as a whole can make optimal decisions even without specific leaders to direct them. Artist Kuai Shen, who studies the rain ants of Sarayaku, reflects on the inverted hierarchy of social-insect societies, saying that “to be inverted is to look with excitement into the dirty, messy, and fluid business of invertebrate beings … to imagine the circulatory transmission of messages, mouth-to-mouth, between ants; for this to happen you need to think about an inverted metabolism in which pheromones act as semiochemicals produced and exuded by your body in order to communicate with your kin, in order to create social intimacies and strengthen community relations.” The anarchist Peter Kropotkin similarly drew inspiration from ants engaged in feeding each other through trophallaxis and praised ant and termite societies for having “renounced their Hobbesian war” in favor of a model based on mutual-aid. Without minimizing the importance of voting, we might do well to keep in mind the value and power of taking care of each other in our communities, regardless of who is ultimately crowned, be it a king, a queen, or perhaps one day soon, the workers. •
Illustration by Danika Valentine. Follow Dr. Jane on Instagram @antlabpvd or lovetheants.org.
