Secret Lives of Ants

Preface

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv P R E F A C E I give a lot of lectures for the general public and schoolchildren , sometimes more than a dozen a month. My career as a public speaker began shortly after I returned to Korea from the United States in 1994. I even appeared on national TV and gave a six-month-long weekly lecture series on animal behavior. People seemed to enjoy listening to my animal stories but rarely asked me questions afterward. It was different, however, when I gave a lecture on ants. Quite a few hands went up before I even finished talking. There were questions like, “Can we talk with ants?” and “Can ants learn new techniques and improve their lives?” “What imagination!” I thought; I’d been studying ants for more than a decade but had never asked such imaginative questions myself. I was so impressed by these questions that I asked the audience how they could come up with them. They all told me about the science-fiction novel entitled Les Fourmis (Empire of the Ants) by French author Bernard Werber. I rushed to a bookstore, bought the book, and read it overnight . It was quite interesting indeed. But soon, such questions started to rather annoy me, because a nearly identical set of questions hounded me every time I gave an ant lecture. As interesting as it was, Werber’s novel was fiction. So, I decided to write a book of my own based on scientific facts. Mark Twain once commented on truth being “stranger than fiction”; indeed, the reason that Werber’s novel is so impressive and does not seem to be as hard to swallow as many other works of science fiction is that Werber himself had spent many hours observing ants since he was a child. Nevertheless , the amazing reality of ant society is many times more fascinating than anything even Werber was able to imagine. In fact, my book, too, merely scratches the surface. I hope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p r e f a c e xvi that many of the students who read this book go on to study ants and many other mysteries of nature as well. In writing this book I have tried to use a conversational style and ordinary language to describe the results of a great deal of scientific research on ants. In 1990 Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University compiled and published theseminalworkTheAnts—732pagesmeasuring26x 31centimeters (10.2 x 12.2 inches), weighing in at 3.4 kilograms (7.5 pounds). The well-known scientist and author of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, once said that it does no good to cheat readers in the name of writing simply. This means that accuracy must not be sacrificed in this process. Despite my best effort to achieve this, I am sure that there must be parts that are not so easy to understand, but I do hope that you the reader will see them as opportunities to challenge yourself. In this book I tell stories of my own journey to the world of the ants. I also describe the economic structure, society and culture, and political systems of the ant world. By looking at these creatures who, long before human beings, developed ranching, dairy farming, agriculture—a highly developed division of labor that resembles the assembly lines of humankind’s automobile factories —and multinational enterprises we get a glimpse of ourselves. I have also included tales of ant culture, its foundation of selfsacrifice and a finely tuned chemical language, as well as how this culture has helped to maintain systems of monarchy and slavery. Ants are among the few creatures besides humans to engage in large-scale warfare, and the tales of their massacres and atrocities, as well as the struggles for power in ant monarchies, are all too reminiscent of our own. In some respects, ants are more like us than is the chimpanzee, whose DNA is nearly 99% identical to our own. Although physically ants do not resemble us at all, if I had to choose the animal whose way of life most closely resembles modern mankind, I would not hesitate to choose the ant. By observing the way ants live, we can clearly see how strikingly similar their lives are to our own. At times my anthropomorphic imputation of human qualities to the ants may be pushed a bit too far. I hope that . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p...