Ants lack human consciousness. They don't make decisions, they respond to stimuli -- with a limited number of algorithms at that. Yet it's hard to absorb E.O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler's "The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies" without projecting human awareness onto them.
That's because Wilson and Holldobler, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for their 1990 collaboration "The Ants," seem less like naturalists than anthropologists reporting on a highly developed, newly discovered civilization. Not only have social insects produced architectural marvels -- subterranean fortresses with sophisticated air-conditioning systems -- but they engage in human-looking social rituals, such as making cemeteries for their dead.
As a result, reading "The Superorganism" is like learning a foreign language spoken by a large group in your hometown. You discover a world that had been hidden in plain sight -- one you noticed only when, say, its citizens overran your picnic table. Wilson and Holldobler have studied a variety of social insects (bees, wasps, termites), but the undisputed stars of this book are the ants. And the most dazzling of these are the Atta leaf-cutters, whom Wilson and Holldobler term "Earth's ultimate superorganisms."
As Aesop pointed out in his famous fable, ants do indeed plan for the future -- because they actually have a future. Unlike honeybee workers, which die of old age after a few weeks, worker ants in some species can live for years. During that time, they learn things, store sensory memories and record events in their lives. Based at least in part on "prior cognition," the authors observe, ants decide what they will do next: finish a chore, look for a new chore, stand guard or rest.
They also speak a rich chemical language.
"Most species of ants learn their colony odor, a complex bouquet of hydrocarbons resident in the outer cuticular layer of the exoskeleton," the authors write. Not only do ants recognize family members by scent, but they also mark trails with pheromones and use them to distinguish between castes within the colony. By explaining in great detail how chemical language works, the authors argue convincingly that the leaf-cutters have "the most complex communication system known in animals."
