Simplification of Biology: Ants and Man

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Ants and Man are alike in many ways.

Ants conquered the world 100 million years ago and have been successfully and aggressively defending their territory ever since.
Man has conquered the world 500 years ago and has been successfully and aggressively defending his territory ever since.

Both

shape their environment to suit their needs,
use organized division of labor,
build infrastructures like mass transit,
tame and use nature, and
defend their territory to the death with warfare.

Ants range in size from less than a millimeter to 15 centimeters and lack lungs and blood vessels. Ants have colonized almost every landmass on earth and form

about 25% of the terrestrial animal biomass, the same like humans.

It is estimated that there are 1,000 to 10,000 trillion ants alive on earth at any one time. Their success in so many environments can be attributed to collectively working together by communicating and sharing knowledge of their environment and spreading their dominion over vast distances, just like man does. When ants cooperate they can move mountains and make highways thru jungles. Just like man can.

Most ants communicate mainly with their highly developed sense of smell. They leave a minuscule chemical trail as a track that others can follow. A milligram of the chemical is enough to make a trail that goes 60 times around the earth.

Unlike with man and sheep, there is no leadership telling the ants what to do and where to go. The more ants that follow the trail, the more chemical is left on the trail. Choices as to where to go for food is decided by a chemical democracy. Even death is determined by smell. When ants die, they emit a smell of death that causes the living ants to remove them from the nest.

Some ants are hunters while others are farmers. Some ants settle and make complex city like structures up to 8 meters deep under the ground causing the excavation of up to 40 tons of earth. In human scales this is like digging tunnels 1 kilometer deep and building structures as big as the Great Wall of China. Other ant species remain nomads and live in trees. Some can even live under water.

Ants modify habitats, tap resources, and defend themselves. They form colonies ranging from a few dozen to a few million. The colonies are actually single mom families, with the one and only mom called the queen and her many sons and daughters called drones and workers.

The mother lays an egg every 3 seconds and she can lay as many as 200 million eggs in her 20 to 30 year lifespan. The eggs hatch in less than a week.

She selectively fertilizes eggs with the sperms she collected on her nuptial flight.

The eggs that are fertilized become wingless daughters whose only purpose in their 1-3 year lifespan is to be workers. They are sterile, not able to produce eggs.

Some of the fertilized eggs, depending how they are fed, turn, like Cinderellas, into winged virgin queens who are little more than flying eggs.

The remaining eggs that are not fertilized become winged sons called drones who are little more than flying sperm. The winged drones and the winged virgin queens, as well as the mother queen, stay in the nest for about a month and are taken care of by the wingless sterile female workers who feed and wash them. The only purpose of the drones and the virgin queens is to wait till they are called out to participate in the nuptial flight. Then, the drones and virgin queens of other neighboring colonies fly to a designated place at a designated time where they meet and mate.

On this very special day of love, high up in the air, the flying sperm machines impregnate the winged virgin queens who are hopefully from other colonies. The virgin queens become flying sperm banks holding 20 to 30 years worth of sperm from 3 or more males.

Once the males ejaculate, they explode in an orgasm and die.

The virgin queens, filled with sperm, land and shed their wings and

try to find places to start their own colonies

before they are eaten by the birds that are waiting for them. Only one in a million new queens survive and successfully start new colonies.

Ants are the only known animals other than man that garden and domesticate other animals. Ten thousand years ago, man turned from a hunter and a gatherer into a farmer and was able to settle and found civilizations. The ants turned into farmers 50 million years ago. Just like man grows cows in a barn that needs to be ventilated, ants grow mush- rooms underground. A shaft for ventilation has to be dug and maintained to ventilate out the CO2 that the mushrooms breath out and to to provide fresh O2 that the mushrooms breath in. A division of labor also has to be organized. The smallest workers stay in their nest tending the mushroom gardens and feeding and cleaning their mother, their brothers and their Cinderella sisters.

The larger workers carry the grass which they cannot digest and cut it into small pieces to serve as compost for the mushrooms to grow on. Ants are such good foragers that they compete with man's cattle. Colonies can forage nearly half a ton of grass a year.

The biggest workers who are 300 times bigger than the smallest serve as soldiers protecting the colony.

Other species of ants specialize in herding a certain kind of caterpillar and milking them of their honeydew just like humans herd cattle and milk them of their milk.

The caterpillars are herded by certain ants, led to feeding areas in the daytime, and brought inside the nest at night.

The caterpillars have a gland which secretes honeydew when the ants massage them.

Other species of ants are meat eaters, eating more meat than all other meat eaters combined on earth. A colony can consume 10 million insects in a single year.

Some plants and animals use species of ants to ensure their own survival.

Plants in fire-prone grassland systems are particularly dependent on ants to carry and disperse their seeds safety below the ground.

Ants are known for their superb strength. Some species can support 100 times their own weight while standing upside down on glass. Other species can close their jaws in 130 microseconds, the fastest recorded movement for any animal. Others can bite thru and cut leather. Some termites form associations with certain ant species and use them as a security force to keep away predatory ant species.

Ants are able to effectively protect their territory either by stinging venom, spraying formic acid, or biting and tearing enemies apart like a well-trained army till they have killed their enemy.

Against floods, they have developed ingenious methods, from wedging holes together with their bodies for hermetically sealing holes in their nests, to joining together their bodies to form lifeboats that can float for a few months, and

even collectively drinking the water from their flooded nests and peeing it outside to drain them.

Alone, ants are like neuron cells, but together in a colony, they are like a brain. Sometimes the colonies are described as super organisms because ants appear to operate as a unified entity, collectively working together to support the colony. Ant societies have division of labor, communication between individuals, and an ability to solve complex problems. Many animals learn behaviors by imitation but ants may be the only group apart from mammals where interactive teaching has been observed.

As similar as ants are to humans, they have major differences that will ensure that they will survive us when and if we become extinct.