Discovery:
The new study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, points out
that both humans and ants (termites, too) live in societies that may
consist of up to a million plus members.
"As a result, modern humans have more in common with some ants than we
do with our closest relatives the chimpanzees," Mark Moffett, author of
the study, told Discovery News. "With a maximum size of about 100, no
chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health,
infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies,
mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture
and animal domestication, warfare and slavery."
"Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems,"
added Moffett, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of Natural History. He pointed out that only humans and
ants have developed full-blown warfare.
Moffett analyzed ant societies, and specifically those of the
Argentine ant. This ant has colonies that expand hundreds of miles. One
colony, with a total population probably in the trillions, spans over
621 miles from San Francisco to the Mexican border in California. An
even larger colony exists in Europe, with supercolonies of Argentine
ants also in Australia, New Zealand, and ever-widening regions of Hawaii
and Japan.
What makes such size and growth possible for a society is that
membership can be anonymous, Moffett determined. Members are not
required to distinguish each other as individuals for a group to remain
unified. Societies are instead bonded by shared identity cues. For ants,
those are largely tied to pheromones.
That is an interesting way of looking at society.
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