Antastic

(Abridged from ML OT forum)

Social insects- ants, bees, wasps, even butterflies- represent an understudied realm of biosocial reality and possibility, with certain key interesting features: flexible, self-organising embryological, ontological, reproductive and behavioural repertoires, networked sensory and perceptual communications and emergent social properties.

It's too big and beautiful to easily condense, but life cycles of social insects and their colonies in all their diversity raise and speak to key questions about genetic determinism, heirarchy, and bio-social levels of organisation/action. Individual ants develop to fulfill roles determined by colony dynamics, which are not (as has been historically/semiotically superimposed) under direction of the 'queen'. The anthropocentric concept of 'the individual' is strained and transformed by the unfamiliar kinships of hymenopterid colonies, and by role-transitions during ants' lifespans. Current knowledge gives only hints of the complexities and interactions that occur during networked communication and behavioural accomodation of individuals and classes within hymenopterid colonies.

One of the most interesting questions raised by the ethology of ants is the biological level at which selection is operating. Mendel and Dawkins place this firmly with the genome of an individual, but this polarisation becomes less meaningful when acknowledging epigenetic influences on embryology and ontogeny, non-diploid patterns of reproduction and the usefulness of 'colony', 'society' or 'species' as useful and augmented concepts. This biological observation, without intending reductionism, has ramifications for a political, complex, anthropocentric world too. How can we be 'individual' when our very cells are symbiotic assemblages? Meme and kinship webs continue to obscure further what is individual in our social species. Hoping 'Multitude' (Negri and Hardt), should I understand it, could amplify some of these themes.

Resources-
Ant titbits:
Six living ant colonies here
A south-migrating swarm of monarch butterflies here
Report of synchronised mating flight of Falsius niger (common black garden ant), 28/7/04 here

Hymenoptera-relevant books:
1. Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized. Deborah M. Gordon, Michelle Schwengel. Short, accessible and wondrous exposition of self-organisation
2. The Ants. Bert Holldobler, EO Wilson. The bible.
3. The Forgotten Pollinators. Stephen L. Buchmann, Gary Paul Nabhan. Commensuralism between insects/birds and flora.
4. The Fabulous Insects. Charles Neider (ed). Archaic, 'Boy's Own' naturalist adventures.

Antastic links:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/arthropoda/uniramia/hymenoptera.html http://www.antcam.com/
http://www.antnest.co.uk/
http://www.ameisenshop.de/en/shop_/pi-555096749.htm?categoryId=0 http://rufaman.proboards15.com/index.cgi

Haplodiploid reproduction:
http://www.animalbehavioronline.com/socialinsectreproduction.html
http://members.aol.com/YESedu/MBP11.html

The synchronised mating flights of winged male and female black ants on 28th July 2004 was stupendous- the pure biomass alone was spectacular. Colonies all over central Scotland had somehow tacitly agreed to release flying gametes on the same day, so that Arthur's Seat was literally swarmed and crawling with bloated flapping ants. The mating flight might be earlier this year, but this time an Ant Farm is standing ready for a captured fertilised queen to colonise.