Dipping into a formicary

Originally published 22 January 1990

At 65 bucks, this is not a book you are going to rush out and buy. It’s not even a book you will like­ly want to read. You cer­tain­ly wont find it on the shelf of your typ­i­cal mall book­store, and prob­a­bly not at the town library.

It is instead one of those grand­dad­dy books from which a whole clan of less­er books will descend. The defin­i­tive tome. The sci­en­tif­ic mas­ter­work. Myrme­col­o­gy, the study of ants, will nev­er be the same.

I am talk­ing about The Ants, a mon­u­men­tal study by Har­vard ento­mol­o­gists Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wil­son, just pub­lished by Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Sev­en hun­dred hefty pages of ant lore. Every­thing you want­ed to know about ants but were afraid to ask.

I wont pre­tend I’ve read The Ants cov­er to cov­er, but for a few weeks it has been on my bed­side table and I find myself fre­quent­ly dip­ping into it. A page here, a para­graph there. These tiny, end­less­ly-active pests of pic­nic and pantry turn out to be irre­sistibly interesting.

Famously industrious

Höll­dobler and Wil­son will need to go far to redeem the ant in our affec­tions. In spite of fab­u­list La Fontaine’s best efforts to draw an edi­fy­ing moral from the ant’s indus­tri­ous­ness, we still tend to pre­fer the friv­o­lous­ly fid­dling grasshop­per. Not even the poet Ogden Nash found much to admire in the ant’s unceas­ing busy­ness: “Would you be calm and placid,” he asks, “If you were full of formic acid?”

Formic acid, which is wide­ly used in indus­tri­al process­es, occurs nat­u­ral­ly in the bod­ies of ants and takes its name from the Latin for ant (formi­ca). From the Latin root we also have the sci­en­tif­ic name of the ant fam­i­ly, Formi­ci­dae, and a bunch of oth­er ant words, such as formi­cary (a nest of ants), formi­cate (to swarm with ants), and formi­ca­tion (an abnor­mal sen­sa­tion of ants crawl­ing over the skin).

The very thought of find­ing one­self on a formi­cat­ing formi­cary is enough to make the skin crawl, and that alone may account for our deter­mined efforts to put ants and their habits out of mind. Accord­ing to Höll­dobler and Wil­son, ants have been neglect­ed even by sci­en­tists, in spite of their eco­log­i­cal impor­tance, which is con­sid­er­able. Their 700 pages of myrme­co­log­i­cal lore will no doubt do much to rem­e­dy the situation.

The book includes an anatom­i­cal atlas of ants from around the world, each drawn at kit­ten scale. Some have fat heads and some have thin heads. Some are sleek and some are hairy. Some are spiky and some are cor­ru­gat­ed. All of them are ugly and, if we are lucky, they will stay in their formi­caries (con­ced­ing, of course, that the most beau­ti­ful thing to an ant is anoth­er ant).

The most unlike­ly thing about ant anato­my is that lit­tle thread­like nexus that attach­es the back half of the body to the front half. Wasps get the cred­it for invent­ing the wasp waist, but ants are no less pinched-in at the mid­dle. Sure­ly that bot­tle­neck must con­strict com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the two halves of the insect, and accord­ing to our authors a lot goes on in both halves.

Ants are jam-packed chem­i­cal fac­to­ries. They employ the most com­plex sys­tem of chem­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion of any ani­mal. Their glands are end­less­ly active, puff­ing and squirt­ing secre­tions for every pur­pose. When tastes and scents fail, there are oth­er modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion — tap­pings, strokings, grasp­ings, nudg­ings, and anten­na­tions. Höll­dobler and Wil­son lay it all out in end­less detail, an unabridged Web­ster’s of ant gab.

Some­times ant com­mu­ni­ca­tion runs dan­ger­ous­ly amuck. We are giv­en the exam­ple of a group of army ants that was cut off by rain from the main for­ag­ing par­ty. The sol­diers of the group were so strong­ly attract­ed to each oth­er that they formed a “mill,” going blind­ly round and round in each oth­ers tracks for a day and a half until all fell dead.

An army of specialists

One might ask how ani­mals sub­ject to such self-defeat­ing behav­ior could reach the pin­na­cle of insect evo­lu­tion, and main­tain their dom­i­nance for 50 mil­lion years. The answer sure­ly has to do with the many and com­plex modes of social behav­ior that are doc­u­ment­ed so com­pre­hen­sive­ly in The Ants.

The two Har­vard ento­mol­o­gists take note of the ants par­tic­u­lar abil­i­ty to spe­cial­ize when the need aris­es. Instead of a sin­gle indi­vid­ual per­form­ing all parts of a com­plex task (for exam­ple, check a lar­va, col­lect food, feed the lar­va), dif­fer­ent work­ers devote their efforts to a sin­gle part of the task (check­ing, col­lect­ing, or feed­ing). The human anal­o­gy is the assem­bly line where one work­er does noth­ing all day long but put in a par­tic­u­lar screw. Appar­ent­ly, the same mind­less effi­cien­cy that caused assem­bly-line mass pro­duc­tion to tri­umph in the human work­place also accounts for the evo­lu­tion­ary suc­cess of the ant.

It is a rather un-calm and un-placid kind of suc­cess. Which prob­a­bly explains why those of us with less formic acid and big­ger brains pre­fer to be out fid­dling with the grasshopper.

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Höll­dobler and Wilson’s The Ants was award­ed the Pulitzer Prize for Gen­er­al Non-fic­tion in 1991 — Ed.