Insect societies are remarkably coherent and suggest the best features of human social organization. Ants, termites and bees, like us, differentiate into castes with specialized roles, construct cities, organize food production and maintain military organizations. Ants, termites and humans are farmers. Cutter ant colonies harvest leaves to feed their fungal partners.
Mueller andRabeling described the remarkable features of cutter ant colonies: “The original fungus-growing ants were not leaf cutters, but debris collectors, using withered plant bits for cultivation of a relatively unspecialized mycelial fungus that retained close population-genetic ties to free-living fungal populations. Nest sizes were small, involving probably only dozens to hundreds of workers. The later evolutionary transition from debris collector to leaf cutter was accompanied by novel allocation of leaf-processing tasks to size-variable worker castes and a dramatic increase in worker number produced by long-lived queens. Some extant leaf-cutter nests are estimated to live for 10–20 years, have 5–10 million workers, and maintain 500–1,000 football-sized fungus gardens in an underground metropolis occupying the volume of a bus.”
Ant farmers have to deal with parasites and have their own version of the pest control using techniques similar to human biotechnology such as the use of bacteria to kill insect predators. For example, Panamanian leaf-cutting ants cultivate fungus gardens as a food source. A complex symbiosis has become apparent to researchers. Currie, for example, discovered that leaf-cutting ants carry colonies of actinomycete bacteria on their bodies. The bacteria assist the farming of beneficial fungi by producing an antibiotic that inhibits the growth of undesirable fungi. Currie and Clardy later isolated identified antifungal chemical, dentigerumycin. Currie revealed a complex interaction of bacteria and fungi required to digest the cellulose in the leaves.
Jones stated:” On a survey of one piece of Amazonian rain forest, social insects accounted for 80 percent of the total biomass, with ants alone weighing four times as much as all its mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and frogs put together. The world holds as much ant flesh as it does that of humans.” He reviewed Hölldobler and Wilson’s concept of an insect colony as a superorganism, single animals raised to a higher level of organization and intelligence. ” The world of superorganisms varies from dawn ants in Australia, which live in groups of a hundred or so separated only into sexual and asexual kinds, to the leaf-cutters, who cultivate fungal gardens and have millions of workers, divided into a diversity of castes, in a single colony. The whole place buzzes with information, passed on with chemical cues, taps and strokes, dances and displays.”
The ant brain is a tiny device, and yet, the will and ability to create and maintain complex social organization is stored in this highly efficient, micro-miniaturized living circuitry. Social organization is achieved by creating a metabrain from thousands of individual brains coordinated in a network using chemical signals. Investigation of the ant brain leads us to ask if the basis for human social organization is stored in an ant-brain sized nucleus in our own brain or have the “social circuits” enlarged and become more effective or less reliable? Can we become as well networked as ants? Can we achieve a high level of social organization that is stable over hundreds of millions of years?
From a computing perspective, we can admire the small brain of the bee and the ant that is capable of organizing a complex working and construction-based society that has been successful for hundreds of millions of years. In terms of social stability and success over time, a large brain is not necessarily better than a small brain. Human engineers now understand that linking a number of “small brains” into a large interconnected network is the evolutionary path of human societies. Ants perfected the social network a long time ago. Oster and Wilson described ant society in these terms: “Caste and division of labor lie at the heart of colonial organization in the social insects. What makes an ant colony distinct from a cluster of butterflies is its internal organization:
“The differentiation of its members into castes, the division of labor based on caste, the coordination and integration of the activities that generate an overall pattern of behavior beyond the reach of a simple aggregation of individuals.”
From Group Dynamics by Stephen Gislason
Mueller andRabeling described the remarkable features of cutter ant colonies: “The original fungus-growing ants were not leaf cutters, but debris collectors, using withered plant bits for cultivation of a relatively unspecialized mycelial fungus that retained close population-genetic ties to free-living fungal populations. Nest sizes were small, involving probably only dozens to hundreds of workers. The later evolutionary transition from debris collector to leaf cutter was accompanied by novel allocation of leaf-processing tasks to size-variable worker castes and a dramatic increase in worker number produced by long-lived queens. Some extant leaf-cutter nests are estimated to live for 10–20 years, have 5–10 million workers, and maintain 500–1,000 football-sized fungus gardens in an underground metropolis occupying the volume of a bus.”
Ant farmers have to deal with parasites and have their own version of the pest control using techniques similar to human biotechnology such as the use of bacteria to kill insect predators. For example, Panamanian leaf-cutting ants cultivate fungus gardens as a food source. A complex symbiosis has become apparent to researchers. Currie, for example, discovered that leaf-cutting ants carry colonies of actinomycete bacteria on their bodies. The bacteria assist the farming of beneficial fungi by producing an antibiotic that inhibits the growth of undesirable fungi. Currie and Clardy later isolated identified antifungal chemical, dentigerumycin. Currie revealed a complex interaction of bacteria and fungi required to digest the cellulose in the leaves.
Jones stated:” On a survey of one piece of Amazonian rain forest, social insects accounted for 80 percent of the total biomass, with ants alone weighing four times as much as all its mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and frogs put together. The world holds as much ant flesh as it does that of humans.” He reviewed Hölldobler and Wilson’s concept of an insect colony as a superorganism, single animals raised to a higher level of organization and intelligence. ” The world of superorganisms varies from dawn ants in Australia, which live in groups of a hundred or so separated only into sexual and asexual kinds, to the leaf-cutters, who cultivate fungal gardens and have millions of workers, divided into a diversity of castes, in a single colony. The whole place buzzes with information, passed on with chemical cues, taps and strokes, dances and displays.”
The ant brain is a tiny device, and yet, the will and ability to create and maintain complex social organization is stored in this highly efficient, micro-miniaturized living circuitry. Social organization is achieved by creating a metabrain from thousands of individual brains coordinated in a network using chemical signals. Investigation of the ant brain leads us to ask if the basis for human social organization is stored in an ant-brain sized nucleus in our own brain or have the “social circuits” enlarged and become more effective or less reliable? Can we become as well networked as ants? Can we achieve a high level of social organization that is stable over hundreds of millions of years?
From a computing perspective, we can admire the small brain of the bee and the ant that is capable of organizing a complex working and construction-based society that has been successful for hundreds of millions of years. In terms of social stability and success over time, a large brain is not necessarily better than a small brain. Human engineers now understand that linking a number of “small brains” into a large interconnected network is the evolutionary path of human societies. Ants perfected the social network a long time ago. Oster and Wilson described ant society in these terms: “Caste and division of labor lie at the heart of colonial organization in the social insects. What makes an ant colony distinct from a cluster of butterflies is its internal organization:
“The differentiation of its members into castes, the division of labor based on caste, the coordination and integration of the activities that generate an overall pattern of behavior beyond the reach of a simple aggregation of individuals.”
From Group Dynamics by Stephen Gislason