Human ants
LOOKING down on the world below recently from high rise apartments in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Yangon, my bird’s eye view revealed fellow humans moving like ants along well marked trails – highways and roads. This sensation I had only experienced once before, sitting very high in a grandstand at Old Trafford, United Kingdom, whilst watching the home team Manchester United play the German football club Bayer Leverkusen. From my seat the 22 players were ant-sized! Ant facts and figures
Ants are part of the family Formicidae (derived from the Latin for ant – formica) of which there are thought to be 22,000 species. As humans we have relatively recently evolved from Neanderthal man. Ants evolved from wasp-like insects about 99 million years ago. The earliest ant-like insects were recently dated in a piece of Myanmar amber. Flowering plants came into being on Earth about 100 million years ago. Ant species are found on all continents apart from Antarctica with tropical countries exhibiting the greatest diversity of ant species, which make up an estimated 25 per cent of terrestrial animal biomass of these areas.
It is estimated that at any one time, there are between one and 10 quadrillion live ants in the world. The total biomass of all the ants living is equal to the total biomass of the entire human race. For every living human today, there are a million ants. In August, the human population was 7.4 billion people and estimated to rise to 9.5 billion by 2050. No doubt the ant population will keep apace.
Perceptions of ants
We tend to view ants as menaces and intruders in our homes and gardens. In Malaysia, ants often enter our houses via tree branches overhanging our roofs. Most ant species, like most humans, are omnivorous, feeding on the nectar of flowering plants, seeds, fungus and, indeed, upon other insects. Carpenter ants, however, particularly like decaying, wet, mouldy wood and can cause expensive devastation to wooden houses and timber-framed windows.
Often this species of ant is wrongly confused with termites which, in fact, are quite a different species of insect. Termites are mistakenly called ‘white ants’ but are more closely related to cockroaches. We consider ants as pests as they compete for our food resources and can cause considerable damage to certain crops but they should also be seen as natural biological pest control agents.
In the tropics ants are active all the year round but in temperate climes they go into a state of semi-hibernation in winter. Very few ant species are venomous but one Malaysian species of worker ant, Camponotus cylindrdensis secretes acetopheromes and other chemicals that immobilise smaller insects at which point the worker ant dies. Most male ants live for only a few weeks but worker ants have a lifespan of between one and three years.
Human/ant similarities
Ants, like humans, are highly organised social creatures living in colonies and commuting to work. Each ant colony is not unlike our million plus-sized cities. Singapore is the most densely populated country in the world with 7,796 people per square km, thus it is no surprise in a country where land is scarce that the urbanscape is dominated by high rise Housing Development Board (HDB) flats and offices. There, as many as 1,000 family units may be found living in one block.
Ants, too, have restricted territories and thus build their anthills skywards. As new towns or satellite towns develop around cities to cater for our population overspill, when an ant colony reaches a state of overpopulation or ‘bursting point’ a ‘queen’ ant will leave the colony to set up a new one.
Humans, like ants, work to support fellow creatures and in both societies there is a marked division of labour. We may distinguish managerial, whitecollared and blue-collared jobs. Sterile female ants are classified as worker or soldier ants and subdivided according to their size into minor, median and major, and thus given appropriate jobs. As in communist societies, the workers labour for the welfare and support of the colony. A colony’s population is maintained through the activity of some fertile males, called ‘drones’ and one or more fertile ‘queens’. These reproductive ants have wings.
‘Soldier’ ants are equivalent to a country’s defence forces, protecting the ant colony from intruders from other colonies. Occasionally, as in some human societies, the soldier ants attack another colony and capture its ant eggs, which they bring back to their own nests. These eggs hatch into ‘slave’ ants, which are given the most menial of tasks in maintaining the physical structure of the nests and in providing cleaning services.
In their day to day tasks, worker ants use their pheromones and touch and sound to communicate with each other and leave chemical trails to lead others along established routes to their food sources. This is not unlike humans leaving scent or odour trails for tracker dogs to pursue fugitives. As ants congregate around a sweet food source or a dead cockroach, so humans congregate at churches, temples and mosques or amass at pop concerts. Marching ants sometimes stop, when sensing danger, not unlike our vehicle traffic accumulating at traffic lights awaiting the green light to progress along the route.
Robotic ants; robotic humans
With their compound eyes, ants have rather mediocre vision and thus rely on their sensitive antennae to detect air currents, and feel vibrations. Looking upwards from urban pavements they may see humans following their iPads or mobile phones while walking from A to B.
As ants can detect and circumnavigate obstacles in their path so our new technology, referred to as ‘Ant robotics’, has developed driverless cars. Ants, unlike some driverless cars or aeroplane autopilots, do not experience crashes or near misses.
From my high rise perch in the city, the daily march of our cars at rush hour remind me so much of the armies of soldier or worker ants, also at ground level, going about their daily business. Ants and humans have more in common than we may really want to recognise.