3 Contemplation upon Ants
I took a horse and cart and a good sharp spade and went across to a field that had to be ploughed up. It had been neglected for many years and now contained a large number of ant-hills. To promote easier ploughing the removal of these hillocks was necessary, and this was my task. My method was simple: first a hard blow downwards with the perpendicular blade through the centre of the mound; then a similar thrust at right angles across that cut; after which a few digs at the base enabled me to take out large slides and throw them on to the cart. When it was full I drove it away and dumped the lot into a pit. It took me some weeks, working all day, before I had cleared that field of ants.
And the odd thing is that I can say this, I can write it down here, and it will be accepted by the reader as a perfectly ordinary proceeding, a normal and rather tedious piece of agricultural work. That is all it is, provided we do not pause to think. I do not advocate that we should thus pause: for how could Man face reality, the reality of what he daily does, and yet pursue his way? When I did pause, sometimes, to consider what I was doing on that field I could not fail to feel the enormity of my act. The shining blade crashed down through the centre of a city built up with skill and labour; the inhabitants were thrown into confusion; then another flash and crash of the blade, and another, till bits of the home were flying through the air – thus my work for hour after hour and day after day.
Sometimes I stooped down to watch the effect of this spade-work, and saw the ants hurrying about desperately in every direction, most of them carrying white parcels considerably larger than themselves, going a little way in one direction then turning back at an obstruction and trying another route. Then my spade got to work again, sometimes neatly taking up a whole hill and chucking it into the cart. My power of destruction over this ant-world was really prodigious, as if a giant with legs the height of Snowdon and arms as long as the Sussex Downs were to throw London away in an hour or so. I wondered whether even the ant-specialists (who I now began to study) could really imagine just how these ants would begin to restore order upon the heterogeneous conglomeration into which their planned cities had been thrown.
Mankind has often been depressed and sometimes alarmed by ants. Schopenhauer, never notable for excessive cheerfulness, was much pained by contemplation of the Australian bull-dog ant. For if it is cut in two it fights with itself, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself ferociously by stinging the head. Such battles have been known to last for half an hour, until the combatants died or were dragged away by other ants, themselves perhaps appalled by the spectacle. Still, Schopenhauer might have been cheered by the thought that at any rate here pain, as we know it, was absent, just as it was surely absent in that spider reported by Forel to have made a meal of its own leg amputated by itself, and in those caterpillars who occasionally devour their own tails.
Yet a creature like that Australian ant which can be increased by division is phenomenal, since animals differ from plants precisely in the fact that when you divide plants you multiply but when you divide animals you destroy them. That bull-dog ant was behaving like a curious kind of plant; but of course its double life was as brief as it was brutal. It is true that the head of an ant does not represent its capital in the same way as our heads do, and that decapitation need not always imply death. Dr C P Haskins mentions an ant which carried on a fairly normal life for forty days without its head, but he does not suggest that this was a good thing for it, or that such a mode could be encouraged and developed. In a battle, a complete ant may be seen engaged in combat with a number of still ferocious heads, but those heads have no future.
An average specimen of the species, when it has all its limbs intact, presents a formidable design. What it lacks in beauty it gains in function. When we contemplate its two stomachs, one social and the other personal; its sting and poison bag; its four pumps; its brush and comb; its teeth that serve in turn as a battle axe, a pair of shears, a flour mill, and even a leg; its two elongated and movable noses with which it speaks, and with which it sees the shapes of things, and which serve it as a compass when far from home – we feel that personal functionalism could go no further. Yet its individual equipment is enhanced by its resource in composition; for not only can a single ant become a bottle, a door or a carriage when necessary, but a company of ants can turn themselves into a boat, a bridge, a tent, a ladder, a tunnel, or a covered road according to the needs of the hour.
The strength of their muscles in proportion to their size is such that we must compare it with that of a man who could easily lift his motor car over a fence, while their speed at getting about should be compared with a man going at twenty-five miles an hour on foot. Their endurance is so great that some can live without food for three months. They can do without air for a week, or if drowned, come to life again. Their energy seems indefatigable. This very morning, one having arrived on my book and run across it, I turned the book round so that it ran up again. I kept turning it round every time the ant reached the end. It never paused for breath. A long time passed and still I turned my book presenting it with an everlasting hill, and still it ran at a tremendous rate without need of rest or fuel, and making no distinction between the flat and perpendicular. In the end I grew weary of my role and anxious at its anxiety.
This Form in which life has been able to express itself, has been found so suitable – or so necessary to the economy of the world – that there are now over three thousand five hundred different species of ants, none of which can inter-breed. Their history is of immense length, disappearing into the misty millions of years that preceded the arrival of man. Thus by now their variations are many and extreme; especially in terms of size, for in this matter they differ so monstrously that some are a thousand times larger than others living in the same nest, the difference being truly as great as if one kind of man could walk about in the palm of another man’s hand, or climb the Everest of his brow. Their adaptability and their expeditionary zeal are so pronounced that they can be found everywhere (except in Iceland, for some strange unreason). In regions of perpetual snow; in the burning sands of the desert; on the loneliest islands of the ocean; in the thick of the massive vegetation of jungles; on ships sailing in every direction – wherever we choose to look, there we shall find colonies of ants adapting themselves to their circumstance, displaying bright colours in warm climates, black and grey in cold countries, and discarding their eyes when, like the Stigmatomma, they live wholly beneath the soil in coniferous forests or seek to set up their galleries in the vastnesses beneath mighty rocks. The celerity and thoroughness of their movement in colonial expansion finds the best exemplar in the Iridomyrmex which in fifty years had spread from Argentina to England, and from England to Asia.
The number of the different species is immense, but of course some lines are more famous than others, commanding the astonishment and sometimes the fear of their human spectators. We think of the terrible carnivorous Siafu ants who, though blind, nose their way on vast expeditions, attacking any creature they come across, large or small, with insatiable savagery and blind impassioned gluttony. All living creatures, including man, fly before the holocaust of the locust-like tempestuous plague. Fowls, horses, and donkeys are dispatched by them in a single night; the skeletons of mules and monkeys, of parrots, rats, and mice are left in their wake; the largest serpent in Africa does not escape them; while at Tanga it is said that the natives found them killing a leopard. We think of the Legionary Ants, the nomads who find no rest, doomed for ever to scurry in long marching columns across the forest floors in search of flesh and blood, never able to stay and colonize but condemned to march onward in unappeasable hunger. These are they who bivouack in tents composed of their own living bodies, who conduct their nymphs through roads arched by themselves when the sun is too hot, who again use their bodies in the composition of a bridge when they come to streams, and who, rolling themselves into a
compact ball, float down rivers to new destinations.
These have been called the Visiting Ants, and they are fighters. But many more of the species fight, and indeed carry on wars in a deliberate scientific manner. These wars have engaged the notice of mankind perhaps more than any other of their activities, for on this subject we are glad to find other species as bad as ourselves. And it is true that war, as opposed to jungle-fighting, is the correct word. For it is cold-blooded and planned. They do not fight for the immediate satisfaction of hunger, but for theft. One species will attack the fortress of another with the sole object of carrying off the larvae for future food or slaves. Thus the militant Polyesgus captures every year forty thousand cocoons from the Fusca or the Rufibarbis, while one Amazon colony has been known to carry out forty-four raiding expeditions, squadrons and cohorts deployed in strategic formations carrying out concerted movements of attack bearing an extraordinary resemblance to the warfare of mankind. Unlike men, they are their own weapons. Just as they grow tools upon their bodies for civil life so they are their own sabres and their own flame-throwers. A quick thrust from the battle-axed mandible of a soldier-ant and the head of another is pierced to the brain. An enlarged picture of an ant squirting its poison-jet at the advancing foe is almost an illustration of the terrible flame-throwers that scattered the Germans in 1944 (a weapon so ghastly in conception no less than execution that we pretended not to know about it). Battles between ants provide many strange scenes. It is then that we can see a giant ant overcome by a company of small ones running along its legs, climbing upon its head, and sawing off its limbs. Then we may witness a victorious ant, minus a few limbs, with the severed heads of its attackers still biting, and fastening upon it like the gargoyles on a cathedral. We may even see the heads of two enemies, after decapitation, carrying on the combat. The fury of some of their battles has been known to continue without cessation for as long as a month and a half.
We pass, and we pass willingly, from these scenes to the contemplation of their peaceful pursuits. They live in what might almost be called cities. The nests in the shape of little hills such as I have been digging out and carting away, provide but one example of their architecture. They make them in earth in Europe, on trees in forests, in sand in the desert; they may raise them dome-shaped or dig below the surface making a crater or rampart above; they build round the stems of grass so that the stalks make a pillared hall of many compartments; they get beneath stones, employing the slab as a ready-made dome; they use marshes and peat bogs, the crevices of rocks, the cavities of certain tropical leaves, the caves of oak-galls, even the perpendicular tunnels of dry stalks; they sculpture their homes out of the trunks of rotten trees and beneath the barks of sound ones; they find room for their communities in the beams of houses, chalets, and bridges, sometimes causing them to fall; they make carton nests by using their glandular secretions to consolidate wood-rot, sand, or fungus; they cultivate gardens in the forks of trees, planting the epiphytes of the genus Cordin, the resultant roots giving them the framework for their arboreal habitations; and many of the nests to be seen upon the trees by the astonished traveller in Eastern lands are made of leaves and the finest silk woven by means of the thread of their own larvae which serve as shuttles.
Equally various is the interior arrangement of galleries, corridors, storerooms, nurseries, and dormitories. Here, then, they live their lives, many hundreds of them together on the basis of mutual service. In short, they are societies. That is how we see them: as individuals working together deliberately for the good of all. But they do not see it like that. They do not see it at all. They have no conceptions. And if occasionally the glimmering of intelligence seems to inform their actions it is generally when they do something foolish and in vain. They are not held together as we are held together, by an economic nexus and by conscious motives. Invisible wires draw them together as if they were a whole giving an illusion of parts. We cannot fathom this. We may utter the word instinct, but can we understand, can we conceive life lived under the command and in the keeping of a directing force not consciously obeyed? Can we, even with a mighty effort, imagine living for a single day when nearly all our actions are done for us as some of our actions, notably the movements of our stomachs, are done for us without thought and without reprieve?
It is too difficult, and more profitable, to contemplate their economy and exchange. Their distribution of labour is based upon a scheme of bodily structure. They act according to their speciality. The females can lay eggs and rear their young; the males can fertilize the females after which they cast themselves aside, now useless, and therefore unworthy to live. The remainder, wingless workers, carry on according to the tools they display. Thus he who has a jaw like a battle-axe will act as soldier; he who has mandibles like clippers will cut leaves; he who has grain-grinding jaws will serve as miller and make flour; he who has a head like a wall will live the life of a door; he who has a head like a bucket will be a wheelbarrow; and, above all, he who has a good communal stomach will be a barrel. This last has been celebrated by all myrmecologists. In order to be prepared against barren days when food is scarce, a considerable number of worker-ants suffer their social stomachs to be filled with a great amount of liquid food until they swell so much as to look like barrels with a few handles in the shape of claws. These sacks of skin are hung in rows along the ceiling of the storerooms in the nest; and there they can be seen, living honey-jars, ant-bottles, awaiting the day when they shall be tapped for the benefit of the community. They are never thrown away as empties, but are continually refilled by their fellows. They remain where they are; that is their life now, they know no other; they hang from the roof until they die. This is intolerable! we say. It must be torture, such an existence. They can have no feelings, they can have no thoughts. They cannot really be individuals, for no separate being could be capable of so total an obedience, or so great a sacrifice.
Thus ants are specialized in activity, but they all share common destinies and dooms. All, for instance, are without ears, and live in a world dedicated to silence. Here again we cannot easily conceive this life. There is silence along their streets, and even on the field of battle there is no sound. And since they are deaf it seems certain that they are also voiceless. It may be that we have not the ears to hear the utterances of insects even as we have not the eyes to see the tiniest of their brothers. Anyway the fact is that we don’t hear anything and it is probable that the silence is absolute. Just as we can watch a spider attack a fly caught in its web and see it slowly eat its living meal without a sound being heard, so also, however close we might bend down upon cohorts of embattled ants, we will hear no shout of insectual command, no cry of triumph, no moans of the dying, and even when a head is sawn off or a severed limb falls to the ground, no shriek of pain will humanize the scene.
Ants also share the possession of remarkable antennae. Their sensitivity to smell is perhaps their salient characteristic. They are able to detect objects from a long way off by their antennae, which can best be described as extended noses. These serve the ants as a far more reliable guide for finding their way about than their eyes, when they have any. By smell alone they are able to sense the shape of things – which is as good as seeing them. And since they are movable, the ants can use them for other purposes as well. They can wave them as flags, thus signalling directions to each other. They can apply them as whips to urge sluggards to action or awaken them to danger. Most important, these antennae are their chief means of speech. They hold antennal conversation, expressing their feelings, their discoveries, their anxieties, and their intentions with the aid of signs which they read as easily as we read the book or the tongue.
Each species of ant has a different smell and thus the formicaries are consolidated by a brotherhood of smell. By this means one species is able to spot the vicinity of another species that will supply them with slaves. For though ants support each other in their nests and formicaries on the basis of mutual exchange even to the e
xtent of feeding one another by process of regurgitation, they raid other species for extra labour. Foremost amongst these are the Amazon Ants who advance in strategic formation upon a suitable alien fortress in order to carry away the larvae and subsequently train up this progeny. Larvae are used by ants as a form of food. They often eat their own larvae. But since this practice is as unsatisfactory for them as it would be for hens to live on their own eggs, they seek to procure the larvae of other species. Thus there is an evolution here from food to slavery. Certain ants began by raiding other nests for larvae as food. But sometimes they didn’t eat them all and the larvae hatched out and grew into workers perfectly ready to serve their masters, since naturally they were unaware that those ‘parents’ were really masters and they were slaves. The process continued until gradually the habit of procuring larvae for slaves as well as for food became established. This developed until the slave workers did practically everything for their owners who at last could not even eat without assistance, and if neglected, starved in the midst of plenty: for here, as elsewhere, we see the end of all slavery, which is the turning of the tables, the revolution of the wheel, when the masters become slaves and the slaves masters.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 25
