"Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans."
That is possibly an understatement, to judge by a singular experience I once had in the woods involving ants.
I was thinking again of my very weird carpenter ant story. Had I shared this on TMP before? A search didn't give me any joy.
I must share this one every few years, to see if anyone reading it knows of a similar experience/observation:
This took place in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, in the first week of July, 1982.
We were using chainsaws to cut old fallen trees into manageable pieces to haul back to camp for firewood. My cousin would throw a chain around the pieces and drag them along the gravel road behind his three-wheel Honda ATV, and then somebody would split them up to burn.
I was walking around the end of a fallen stump that he had cut off. He had moved further into the trees, looking for more fallen wood. I was looking for the strategic places to apply the chainsaw to cut the rest of the dead tree into sections.
The stump, before it had been cut off, had been elevated, as the entire dead tree had been lying across another beneath it for some years. The stump had dropped c. two and a half feet to the ground. The tree was very old. All that remained of the roots were a few blunted ends. The wood was sun baked, sans bark, smooth and pale grey.
So as I walked around to the sunlit side, the shiny, black patch of ants packed together in a dense circle instantly caught my attention. It was directly under the afternoon sun. You could have drawn a ninety degree angle from the sun's position directly to the shimmering circle of ants.
I bent down for a closer look. Some scores of large ants (over a hundred, two hundred ants? I couldn't tell because they were so close together that no grey wood showed beneath them) were all facing inward. My eyes followed their facing to the center of the circle. There was something going on, or about to happen there: at first I couldn't accept what I was seeing, as four warrior ants held a fifth by the two rear legs and feelers. A sixth warrior ant climbed onto the pinned one, and there was a slight pause of some seconds.
As if on a signal, the entire "congregation" of ants turned as one and broke up their circle (about the size of a dinner plate) and wandered off in all directions.
As they were moving away, the ant mounted on the back of the pinned ant, sawed through the joint of thorax and abdomen with a few deft scissor cuts of her jaws, the hinder part falling in the grass below. Then the "executioner" turned and beheaded her. The ants holding the feelers let go and the head dropped into the grass. The "executioner" got off the headless, truncated body, and the two ants holding the rear legs let go. The rest of the dead ant joined its fore and aft parts in the grass. The squad of executioners then wandered off in solitary directions.
Of course I was stunned. There was so much of the ceremonial or ritual about it all. It was so anthropomorphic. I looked up and yelled something and yet it was too late. Nobody had seen it but me. It had lasted less than two minutes.
My cousin heard my story and treated it casually. It sounded so made up or imagined. He dragged the stump back to camp, jouncing and banging on the road behind his ATV. But the ladies in the family did not want an ant-infested stump near our campfire, so it was dragged across the road and pitched in the scrub beneath the pine trees.
Next morning, I wandered over there to take a look at the stump, curious if there were any ants still in evidence. Man! were there ever: the space between the derelict stump and the nearest pine tree (a space around a yard wide) was a battlefield. The stricken colony, they of the "ritual execution" the day before, had been dumped by us upon the territory of another carpenter ant colony living in the base of the live pine tree. It was of course impossible for a human to tell ant from ant, so no way to tell who was winning. In some places dead and dying ants and pieces of ants were already several bodies deep. I stayed on my elbows and knees all morning and afternoon watching the mutual carnage. Warrior ants could be seen displaying the most horrific damage possible, and still fought on. Some were missing parts of legs, antennae, even abdomens. Some sported the severed heads of worker and warrior ants with frozen jaws still clamped to their legs or feelers. Some ants were lying still, with no visible mark on them, apparently expired nevertheless. Others were completely bereft of legs, with only stumps remaining to churn the ground and bodies beneath, while they fought on with champing jaws amidst a swarm of enemies still trying to chew them to pieces.
It was the most engrossing thing in Nature that I have ever seen, made more so by the large size of the ant species: warriors could be as large as half an inch long or slightly more.
But always in the front of my thoughts was the question: What had I seen happen yesterday? What did the concerted actions of the entire ant colony mean? What are the implications, vis-à-vis intelligence and awareness in creatures?…
gets his DNA results, and starts thinking about wargaming.
