In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

116 appendix b Lecture “The Life of the Ant” Note: This is a transcription of the speaker’s lecture that was provided in English. Punctuation has been added to assist reading but it may or may not reflect the speaker’s intended phrasal and/or sentence boundaries. Section 1 Good afternoon folks. I want to talk to you today a little bit today about ants. There are a number of different aspects of the ant that I would like to tell you about. I want to start with the question of “What is an ant?” And there are basically three ways to look at this, I think. One is as a type of insect, then as an individual, and as a member of a colony. So, ants, as a kind of insect, turn out to be closest related to the wasps. And if you look at an ant closely, which many people don’t, but if you can get one to hold still long enough and look at it close up, it looks a lot like a wasp without wings. But when ants are mating, the females and males both have wings and what happens is that they, that lets them fly and disperse out to other places. And when the . . . when the males are done mating, they just die. When the females are finished mating, they land, bite off their wings, and start a new colony. So, some people think that ants are related to termites but it turns out that they’re very, very far apart. Termites are actually most closely related to cockroaches so—they basically couldn’t be more different and still look kind of the same. Um, ants as individuals are kind of problematic because they always live in colonies and so individual ants are in some ways more like blood cells or the parts of an organism than they are like individual animals. Uh, but they do have variations. Some ants like to always turn to the right when they go foraging. Other ones turn to the left when they go out to forage so they do have individual characteristics, but, in general, an ant cannot survive without a colony. Lecture : 117 So what does being a member of a colony mean? Well, it means that they always interact with other relatives because they’re all born from one, basically from one queen, maybe from two, but there, the two queens will be related to each other. Um, all the ants you ever see walking around are all females. You never see a male. And as a member of a colony, they relate to each other very differently than they do other ants from other colonies. They have a particular colony smell and they have—lay down trails that only members of the colony follow. So th- . . . so, basically they’re related to wasps, as individuals they’re kind of lost, they can’t survive on their own, and they always live with others of their kind that are related to them. Section 2 The second thing I’d like to talk to you about (cough) is what is the world of an ant? What does the world look like to an ant? What’s it like? Um, first of all, all ants are born into colonies. Some colonies are small, maybe only fifty or a hundred individuals. Others are phenomenally huge. They can have fifty or a hundred thousand individuals in the colonies and all of these are related to each other. And not sp- like human brother and sisters are related but the genetics is another question. So an ant is born in a colony and most of them are the worker ants. When they’re very young they, uh, work in the nursery, that is, they tend the eggs and the very young, uh, larvae. But when they become what you would call an ant, before they’re ants, before they look like ants, they actually look like little worms. Those are the babies. Um, once an ant-, a worker ant gets older, within a few weeks of death, that’s when they go out to forage. So it’s a very interesting—it’s very interesting, uh, uh, to think of wh-, of why that is. The ones that go out to forage are in fact the most experienced ones. And ants can learn things. Not, not a lot maybe, but they do learn. Outside is a very peculiar...

Share