Secret Lives of Ants

16. War and Slavery: From Full-Scale Slaughter to Bloodless Warfare

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 from full-scale slaughter to bloodless warfare War and Slavery 16 A soldier’s severed head rolls onto the ground. There have been heavy losses all day in this seemingly endless battle. Every soldier on the field faces impossible odds, outnumbered by as many as two or three to one. There is no way they can possibly stem the tide of the enemy’s relentless assault. Some of the swifter soldiers race to the rear to call in reinforcements . . . . A battle scene that sounds as though it could have come from a war in ancient mythology. But this war story comes from today’s real-life battlefields of the ants. While we do not yet know if there are frontline commanders who shout commands like “charge” or “retreat,” scientists have observed messenger ants that race back to the nest when reinforcements need to be called in. Bert Hölldobler discovered this phenomenon during more than a decade of observing the battlefields of the honeypot ants of the Arizona desert. Ascertaining the Strength of the Enemy to Formulate Strategy Ants have no concept of numbers as we do, so how can they estimate the strength of their enemies’ forces? They definitely do not do it by counting the number of soldiers on the enemy’s side and then comparing that number to the size of their own forces. Human beings are believed to grasp the concept of numbers at age five or six, approximately. Studies have also shown that some animals, such as some birds, mice, and nonhuman primates, also understand the elementary concept of numbers. Crows and parrots demonstrated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . t h e p o l i t i c s o f a n t s o c i e t y 140 their ability to make the connection between numbers and specific amounts of objects quite some time ago. A chimpanzee named Sheba has even been observed performing single-digit addition. Ants seem not to be able to count objects per se, but biologists speculate that ants can probably indirectly compare the strength of their own forces to that of their opponents. Bert Hölldobler has observed three ways that ants do this. The first is that they estimate which side is larger based on whether they bump into their comrades or enemies more frequently when they engage each other on the battlefield. If they run into enemy soldiers more often, then it is time to prepare to retreat. When they are doing battle with an ant species that contains different body-sized workers, they may also measure the size of enemy forces based on how often they encounter large-bodied enemy soldiers. Only the largest colonies are capable of producing large numbers of large-bodied workers. This means that when a colony sends a certain number of largebodied workers into battle, it is also possible to guess how many A large-bodied worker and a small-bodied worker of the Costa Rican Pheidole ant. The more large-bodied workers in a colony the stronger is its army. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . w a r a n d s l a v e r y 141 of the smaller-bodied workers have been left behind, as well as the total size of the colony. The third way involves observing how many enemy soldiers have shown up on the battlefield but are not participating in combat. According to Hölldobler, the honeypot ants use all three. Bloodshed is common among the savage beasts of the animal kingdom, but not many animals are inclined to fight each other to the death. Animals that engage in large-scale massacres the way humans do are even rarer. The only animals that can compete with human beings in terms of bloody warfare and slaughter are bees, wasps, and ants. Coincidentally, all these animals have developed highly organized societies. Perhaps massacre and tribal warfare are an inevitable side effect of social evolution. Ant warfare is not always bloody. Ants often use rituals that involve minimal bloodshed and end confrontations relatively peacefully by estimating the strength of each other’s colonies. These rituals are much like the Maring tribe of hunter-gatherers’ “nothing wars” on the island of New Guinea. In these rituals, the tribesmen don traditional costumes and march single file to their border to shout at their enemies and dance. This ritual is nothing more than a show meant to shock and awe. If no...