 life-histories will convert you to myrmecophily (myrmex- ant, phílos- love). The fact that ant workers readily sacrifice themselves for what seemed to be ‘the greater good’ of the colony posed a serious problem to Darwin when he was formulating the theory of natural selection (1859).
How could evolution have favoured a strategy where individuals only very rarely reproduce themselves? In essence, viewing ants and other animal societies, and especially social insects, as ‘superorganisms’ has gone a long way to answer Darwin’s vexation. These superorganisms are comprised of individuals that are usually very closely related, and thus promote the inheritance of their genes indirectly (a theory called ‘kin selection’) by helping their relatives reproduce i.e. the queens and drones. Natural selection then works primarily not at the level of the individual, but at the level of the colony, and thus workers optimize the running of the colony to increase the success of their own genes via the reproductive members of the group (Lach et al., 2010). This also only works in an evolutionary sense because colonies are so much better at completing tasks than individuals. By using “series-parallel” operations, workers switch from one task to another when it’s efficient to do so, meaning that each task is completed more quickly and efficiently than if it was completed by the same number of uncoordinated individuals. This reasoning also scales up – larger colonies are more efficient at completing tasks than smaller colonies (Hölldobler and Wilson, 1990; 2009). Isn’t that an interesting metaphor for human societies?
I’m not done. Ever wonder why all ant workers are female? WELL! You’re in for a treat. Animals have a whole range of different methods to differentiate the sexes of offspring during development. Humans have the X-Y determination system; females have two X sex-chromosomes and males have one X and one Y sex-chromosome. Simple. Ants, on the other hand, have a system called ‘haplodiploidy’ where females arise from being diploid, i.e. they have a set of chromosomes from both their mother and their father, whereas males are haploid and only have a set from their mother. So males inherit their entire genome from their mother and never meet their father. How poetic. The differentiation between workers and queens is a complex melange of environmental and genetic factors which myrmecologists have yet to fully deconstruct, but factors such as diet and how genes are expressed at different times are likely factors that determine which females are fated to one day become queens.
Obviously, the study of these organisms in their own right is incredibly exciting (for some more than others), but specifically the investigation of their place in the wider ecological community as a group is essential in understanding terrestrial ecosystems and how they work, particularly in the tropics. As Lach and colleagues put it:
“… the study of ants has led to significant advances in our understanding of insect evolution, global biodiversity patterns, competitive interactions, mutualisms, ecosystem responses to change, and biological invasions. But ants are also important to study and understand because they are different…”
Indeed, the field of modern biogeography was furthered primarily by a mathematical ecologist (Robert H. MacArthur) and a myrmecologist (Edward O. Wilson) in their book The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967). Though much of the theory has evolved over the years, it has its roots in studying the ants of Melanesia (MacArthur and Wilson, 1963).
From their vast ecological importance and their interesting life-histories, to their use as model organisms to study sociality and species distributions, ants are certainly worth caring about just that little bit more.
AntCat (2019): http://antcat.org/
Floren, A., Biun, A., & Linsenmair, E. K. (2002). Arboreal ants as key predators in tropical lowland rainforest trees. Oecologia, 131(1), 137-144.
Lach, L., Parr, C., & Abbott, K. (Eds.). (2010). Ant ecology. Oxford University Press.
Lucas, J. M., Clay, N.