Animal

Country diary: the solitary ant will not live long


Initially it was just a dark mote on the edge of the bath. I turned and was astonished to find myself face to face with a solitary black ant. It crouched on a table of its four hind legs and raised its antennae, as if it were processing the weird white-tiled desert all around it.

I say “astonished” because I’ve not seen Lasius niger since October, when the species hibernates in underground nests. What on earth was one doing by my bath? The only thing that seemed certain was its sad fate.

For singletons are doomed without the security and resources of their many sisters. The colony can encompass extraordinary levels of specialisation; individuals can perform a multitude of tasks, but each thrives only in the presence of the collective whole.

Among the most remarkable examples of ant diversification are the “repletes” found in certain Mexican and Australian species, whose abdomens are so soft and elastic that they expand into great storage tanks swollen with honeydew, which is consumed by the sisterhood.

Perhaps even more extreme is the specialisation that occurs among leafcutter ants from the Americas. The workers go out to cut vegetation, which they use as the fodder crop for their “mushroom” farms (an agricultural model, incidentally, that predates ours by 50m years).

As they go, these leafcutters are accompanied by “minim” workers that can weigh several hundred times less than their sisters. The minims ride on the big workers’ backs and, while they play no part in the leaf-harvest, they protect their kin from parasitic flies.

Leafcutter ants carrying sections of leaves, to be used for cultivating nutritious fungi, in Santa Rita, Costa Rica.



Leafcutter ants carrying sections of leaves, to be used for cultivating nutritious fungi, in Santa Rita, Costa Rica. Photograph: Bence Mate/NPL/Alamy

My forlorn companion on the bath’s edge may be lost to its mother colony, but it struck me as having this last purpose. A single black ant seems a good metaphor for the individual lying in the bath, whose own species assumes that its fortunes lie only in concrete, chrome, tarmac, steel, porcelain, plastic and all the other dead stuff of civilisation.

In truth we have no future without flowering and fruit-bearing plants, wind-pollinated grasses, phytoplankton, fish, fungi, insects and all the other multitudinous citizens of our living planet. To paraphrase Proverbs 6:6-11: go to the solitary ant, you sluggard; consider her ways and be wise!



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