Anthill

by Edward Osborne Wilson

  The Woodland Colony added its first soldier only when the worker population reached approximately two hundred. The colony grew swiftly during the long hot days of the summer. When the total population reached a thousand, more soldiers were added. The year following the Supercolony disaster, the total Woodlander population approached ten thousand. Of this number, five hundred were soldiers, ready and waiting for any call to action. Their presence made the colony almost invulnerable to invasion by fire ants and other enemies short of armadillos and poison-wielding gods.

  This summer the formerly meek Woodlanders were at the height of power for a colony of their species. They found themselves on the edge of an unexplored ant continent left empty by the god-given extinction of Supercolony. As they expanded their territory, in a growing circle foot by foot away from their nest, the colony as a whole grew in overall intelligence. The mental life of the colony was not shared by each worker equally. What any worker knew and thought was only part of what the colony knew and thought. The colony intelligence was distributed among its members, in the same way human intelligence is distributed among the gyri, lobes, and nuclei of the human brain. One cadre of Woodlander workers knew about a particular part of the territory outside the nest, a second cadre knew about another part. Groups of nest-builders remembered their way through various sections of the nest perimeter, and still others were informed about the condition of the brood. Different veteran huntresses had experienced separate conditions of rain, enemy combat, and the nectar-milking of aphids and other sap-suckers. A few scouts knew the way to the expanding frontier of the colony territory.

  The Woodland Colony as a whole learned in this manner by calling up pieces of knowledge and putting them together as need demanded, communicated by means of a pheromonal language. Because the superorganism knew much more than any individual ant, it was far smarter.

  Enjoying its good fortune, the Woodland Colony also learned the price of prosperity. It was soon cramped in its original hiding place. The workers had been excavating new tunnels and rooms beneath and around the original nest, piece by tiny piece as large as a single ant could carry between her two mandibles. But the meager duff and soil in which the nest was sited was too dry and friable to be ideal for a colony of this species, and the rootlets all around were too thick and tough for the workers to cut. Even worse, the tangled and heavily shaded scrub woodland at the site was poorly suited for foraging.

  As scouts explored the Supercolony ghost town, they quickly discovered the large and widely dispersed system of tunnels and chambers left by the former inhabitants. There were many exits, although most were now filled with collapsed earth. Some of the scouts exploring the new terrain began to lay trails from the available exits back to the scrub-woodland mother nest. A few of the nestmates returned along the trails, but their response upon arriving at the Supercolony exits advertised by the scouts was halfhearted. They then either laid weak, fragmented trails of their own, or else returned home without communicating the information to any other nestmate.

  Meanwhile, the housing problem at home was becoming severe. The Woodland Colony began a serious search for a better location. By laying and following trails to more and more potential sites and with varying degree of vigor, the colony members voted on the locations presented to them. Some candidate homes received a few votes, others none at all. At first the response failed to build a surge of trail-laying to any of the competing sites, and in time the recruitment died out for most. Then, one mid-August morning, a few scouts hit upon an unusually favorable spot, near the center of what had been the old Trailhead Colony nest. They dug into the plug of soil that closed the original main entrance. As they broke through into the partially empty nestwork below, their enthusiasm grew. At shorter and shorter intervals, some reported back with the good news. Others arriving at the site laid trails of their own. The combined trails grew strong, and some of the more excited scouts began to tap their antennae on the bodies of their nestmates to add emphasis. The message proclaimed urgently, Follow me! Follow me! The voting then swung decisively to the newly favored site. The number of workers running back and forth from the mother nest grew exponentially. The more trail substance laid and the more scouts tapping with their antennae, the more nestmates left the mother nest to inspect the new site. The formicid electorate was soon decided. The communal intelligence said, This is the place! Excavation of the new nest quickly began in earnest. By noon the cleaned-out vertical shaft was three feet deep, and the construction of new lateral galleries and rooms and reopening of old ones was far advanced. The living space came to resemble a snake skeleton, with the central shaft the spine and the lateral galleries the ribs sticking out in all directions.

  All through the nest-changing process, from the most aggressive early recruitment to the excavation, elite workers led the way. A tunnel begun by just one such leader caused others close by to help deepen it, or to start tunnels of their own. Elites inspired followers and work generated more work of the same kind until each task was done. The colony depended on the elites to initiate change, and then to keep nestmates on the job.

  As shadows of the longleaf pines began to lengthen across the now-teeming center of the Woodlander territory, the underground construction was mostly complete, and the emigration began. The colony had to hurry. If the moving column was caught between the old and new nests after nightfall, when dangerous nocturnal predators emerged, the Woodlanders could easily be wiped out. First came workers carrying nestmates who had been reluctant to undertake the journey. Slackers were a problem for the colony as a whole. Ant colonies may have elites to lead them, but they also have layabouts who need strong encouragement.

  Each transport was performed the same way. The recruiter faced the ant to be carried, and pulled gently on her jaws. Quieted by the touch, the ant grew passive, allowing the recruiter to grasp her more firmly on her jaws or another part of her head. The recruited ant next pulled her legs and antennae close to her body, in the same posture she had as a completely immobile pupa. This allowed her to be lifted up and curled over the body of the recruiter. She became an inert package easily carried to the new nest site.

  At the peak of the emigration a large majority of the workers were active in the transfer of all the other colony members. Out came the pupae and grublike larvae, held gently in the jaws of a recruiter. Also carefully moved were clusters of eggs laid recently by the Queen and not yet hatched into larvae.

  Then out came the Queen herself, sluggish, careful, timid, dragging her abdomen swollen with eggs. A praetorian guard of nurse workers swarmed over and around her, hiding her body from view. Some guided her by gently pulling at her mandibles. She was too large and heavy to be lifted and carried swiftly like a worker, even by a team of nurses. Her painful progress was the critical step in the entire colony emigration. If a bird or lizard saw her and plucked her out as a tidy morsel, or if a force of enemy ants broke through the guard and killed her, the Woodland Colony would be doomed. This time, as in the case of most such rare attempts by colonies of this species, she made it to her new home.

  By the time the longleaf pine oasis darkened into twilight, the Queen and almost all of her colony had settled into the new nest. A few individuals still streamed back and forth over the heavily reinforced odor trails, but to no great effect.

  The Woodland Colony, having grown into a giant compared to the dying midget of the previous summer, soon reached a size as large as any superorganism of the species other than a supercolony could hope to be. The land given to it by the gods stretched beyond the capacity of the colony to fill its entirety. Woodlander scouts regularly traveled farther from the home nest than those of any other colony at Dead Owl Cove.

  So it was inevitable that by early the next spring the boldest of the explorers, one of the Woodlander elites, encountered a scout from another colony. She had never met an individual that belonged to the same species but carried a different colony odor. The two strangers warily examined each other with repeat
ed sweeps of their odor-testing antennae. Then they broke off and hurried away in the direction of their faraway home nests.

  In the days that followed, more Woodlanders ran out along the trail laid by the first scout. They too encountered strangers from the foreign nest. The rising incidence of hostile exchanges resulted in more and longer odor trails. The same increase occurred with the aliens. In time a large number of workers from both colonies were patrolling the disputed area.

  As in earlier wars at Dead Owl Cove, the scouts tried to intimidate their opponents by pretending to be soldiers. They puffed up their abdomens, straightened their legs to gain height, and posed on top of small pebbles to give the impression of even greater size. Real soldiers also came out to join in the displays. The instinctive pattern of the tournament, with circling, sniffing, and mutual bumping, had been established in this new place. Neither colony would escalate it into outright physical attack. Each waited for signs of weakness in the display of the opposing players.

  A territory boundary was drawn, but that was of no great consequence. The Queen of the Woodland Colony was young, the colony's population larger than average for the species, its land rich and productive, and its strength and durability beyond threat.

  That summer the Woodlanders also began to produce virgin queens and males. The royals left the nest to mate on schedule. The fecund young queens then flew far beyond the boundaries of their home to distant, unknown lands. The Woodland Colony was reproducing itself. It had won the Darwin game.

  The collective mind of the Woodland Colony could only grasp a part of the reason for its outstanding success. Its oldest members could remember the deadly enemies that suddenly disappeared. They had learned about the resources of the vast terrain so abruptly given their colony. They and their younger nestmates had explored and mastered most of it. They held a map of it in their collective heads. If they grasped the existence of the moving-tree gods, they might have surmised how these mysterious forces, no less than storms and lightning-kindled ground fires, had decreed to them such a great good fortune.

  Thus ended the Anthill Chronicles. A chain of cycles had been completed. The miniature civilizations of Dead Owl Cove had come full circle. The territory of the original Trailhead Colony witnessed two wars of total destruction, followed by a catastrophe inflicted by the ant gods. The habitat, this little segment of the Nokobee tract, was returned to what it had been at the start. All that was in the past. Now a new mound nest typical of the species stood at the original site. The occupant was fittingly not the Supercolony but a daughter colony of the Trailheaders, the first of the occupants. The resiliency of the ancient longleaf ecosystem had been tested there, and found to hold.

  The chain of cycles continued as it had for thousands of years. But now it might change. The tree-trunk gods had arrived and were present all around. They had the power to take everything away, at a whim, and by a single stroke. For the first time in the history of Nokobee, the entirety of all of it, ant, colony, and ecosystem, was at stake.

  That winter hard rains soaked the Nokobee pine flats. Three freezes came and went, coating the nest dome of the Woodland Colony with ice, while the inhabitants crouched in dormant sleeping clusters in the deepest chambers. Directly above, unknown to them, gods walked back and forth, measuring, planning, and speaking to one another with their strange sibilant voices.

  V

  THE ARMENTARIUM

  28

  THE FATE OF every living thing now depended on one decision by the members of a single family. The Jepsons of Jepson County had owned the Nokobee tract for five generations, keeping it pristine as an outdoors heirloom across 150 years. They were burdened by no more than light county taxes. Wealthy from cotton and outside investments, they chose not to cut even a small part of the valuable longleaf timber. By the end of the twentieth century, however, almost all of the younger family members--by that time a majority in the Jepson Trust--had left the Gulf Coastal Plain. They were settled in the assizes of wealth in Atlanta, Miami, and New York. When the projected market value reached a certain level, they would likely sell to the highest bidder.

  "When do you suppose that will happen?" Raff was seated on the sofa in his Uncle Cyrus Semmes's office. Now beginning his third year at Florida State University, and unsure of his own future, he was also growing increasingly anxious about the future of Nokobee.

  "Can't say exactly," Cyrus replied.

  He had pulled up a chair to face his nephew. He lit a Havana cigar, slipped his eyeglasses down his nose to peer at Raff over the rims, and said, "Why do you ask? You heard something I haven't?"

  "Nosir. I just like to keep up with things there."

  Cyrus tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and blew a smoke ring. Holding this posture as if in deep contemplation, he said, "Well, I can tell you this much. The word on the street is that the county will be paving the Nokobee Lake road in the next two or three years. That'll bring the value of Nokobee up. My guess is that the Jepsons know that and they're holding off till it happens."

  "Well, do you think whoever buys it will develop it? I mean, cut down all the trees and stuff and build houses there?"

  "Count on it, Scooter." Cyrus leaned over and laid the cigar on an ashtray close by on the coffee table. "That's the only way they'll be able to break even, much less make any serious money."

  "But it's one of the most beautiful places in this part of Alabama. You said that yourself, and you'd think there's got to be some way--"

  "Well," Cyrus interrupted, "just because it gets developed doesn't mean it has to be any less beautiful. You've been down to Destin with your parents and seen how nice they're making those resort places and housing developments along the Gulf. They blend in with the landscape just perfectly."

  "But they aren't natural. What happens to all the trees and animals and--"

  "Scooter!" Cyrus interrupted again. His expression changed from avuncular to annoyed.

  "Scooter, I know how much the Nokobee tract means to you, and your mom and dad too, and I admire you for that. If I were a very rich man--and I'm not--I might buy that land myself. It would be a sound financial investment for the family. I don't know where you're going with this, or what you want to do about it. I'm not even sure why you brought it up. You haven't changed your mind about anything, have you?"

  "Nosir. I was just--"

  "Well, it wouldn't do any good if you did, and just studied biology and planned to stay out at Lake Nokobee. I know you'd be a top-notch wildlife manager or professor, or whatever, but what good would that do for the Nokobee tract, and all those other great places down here you'd like to save?"

  "But shouldn't we try to do something?"

  "Maybe you've forgotten what I told you when we made our deal. If you want to save land, you've got to have power. That means you've got to have a lot of money, or else you have to be in a position to influence land deals and business development. I know it takes a lot of hard work, and for sure you're not going to enjoy all the courses and training you'll have to go through, but if you want real power--and I want you to have it--you've got to succeed inside the system. Now, I'm telling you, just continue what you've been doing. You get on through law school, and do the best you can, and then I'll help you all I can."

  Raff felt trapped. He knew, but hadn't yet faced, the solution his uncle had put before him, that maybe the only way to erase such a dilemma of opposing forces was to satisfy both. It takes commitment to a long-term goal and exceptional effort, but there, he thought, you have it.

  "You're right, you're right, of course...I want to thank--"

  "There's one more thing," Cyrus started up again. "You're not going to like this, but the Nokobee tract is going to be developed no matter what anybody does. I don't know exactly when, and nobody can say, but it could be as soon as five years and for sure on the outside in ten years."

  Raff froze. He held his breath and stared at his uncle. He thought, Here it comes, bad news for sure.

  "Raf
f, I wasn't going to tell you this, but it's something you oughta know. Sunderland Associates has bought the Dead Owl Cove parcel, and at a pretty steep price. Drake Sunderland wouldn't make a move like that unless he intends to acquire the whole west side of the Nokobee tract. When the Jepson family puts the property on the market, and that is surely going to happen as soon as their trust irons out a few wrinkles, like how much and who gets what, Sunderland will move fast. He will be on it like a chicken on a june bug, count on that, Raff. He'll bid high, and as soon as he gets it he'll cut the timber to make up the front money, and he'll do that fast too, and then he'll leverage the funds to develop the whole property."

  "I don't understand. Why can't Nokobee be left alone, as it is?" Raff's question was naive, he realized with embarrassment, but now he was grabbing for straws.

  "That's elementary. You should know better. The Jepsons want the money."

  "Why can't the State of Alabama take it over as a nature reserve?"

  "Well, now, that would be nice, wouldn't it? But you're talking twenty million dollars, maybe thirty million with the Nokobee lakeshore included. Then more to fix the road, for a lot of traffic that isn't there now, and still more to put up and maintain park facilities. The state, I'm sorry to say, is broke. It's got a lot of parks already, and it's not going to put up a fortune like that in taxpayer dollars for another one, especially in a remote area with limited access like Nokobee."