We are not alone. No, I’m not talking about aliens. No, not about surveillance either. We’ve been living with another intelligent life form for a long time. In fact, they’ve been here much longer than we have. They’ve developed their society over tens of millions of years, creating a highly efficient and complex social hierarchy that even humans should learn something from. If you haven’t guessed from the title, I’m talking about leafcutter ants.
Yeah, I’m really talking about ants. It’s a bit hard to believe that ants form one of the more advanced civilizations on Earth, but let me convince you otherwise. Although one ant by itself isn’t necessarily “intelligent”, the structure of their society is. A given leafcutter ant can belong to one of four casts, which are based mostly on its size. The Majors are the biggest of the bunch. They act mostly as soldiers, protecting the colony against any invasion that comes its way. They can also serve as serious muscle, in case something heavy needs to be carried back to the nest, or debris need to be cleared from the foraging path. Speaking of foraging, the Mediae are next on the list. They’re smaller than the Majors, and act as “field agents” for the colony. They find a harvestable plant and cut bits of it off (not necessarily the leaves). They then carry those bits, while patrolled by the third cast, the Minors, back to the nest, where they’re delivered to the Minims. The Minims are the smallest of the four casts, and they have a special job. They’re farmers. Not in some abstract sense of the word; they are agricultural farmers. The Minims cut what the Mediae give them into little pieces and then put those pieces into a fungus garden. The fungus feeds on the leaves, and then produces food for the ants, which can be readily harvested and fed to larvae. This simple yet very efficient relationship between the leafcutter and the fungus has proved to be a very successful strategy. Leafcutters can be found all over the place, and their colonies are quite impressive: their nests are roughly 30-600 m2 in area, and can contain eight million ants. So I’d say they’re a pretty good contender for the “best society on Earth” title, and I encourage you to read more about their interesting little lives. Sometimes it’s the little things that can surprise you.
Science Scholars 2019 