Yesterday I discovered that an ant colony has been mining the peanuts I use to bait my squirrel trap. With a cursory visual check from the kitchen window it seemed nothing had been going on there. After several days, all that remained was a thin film of peanut dust on the trigger plate. So I cleaned the trap, moved it from under the cypress tree to a spot on the patio. This morning while checking my garden I checked out the the squirrel trap. It was an (ah ha) gestalt moment, like scientists in Africa, flying over great herds of migrating wildebeest and zebras. Too far down to single out one animal from another but certainly many, many thousands of them all strung out like gridlock on the freeway, as far as you could see.
I got down on my hands and knees for a closer look. Too small to distinguish one from another there must have been thousands of ants so tiny, brown pinpoints with legs too small to see, I wouldn’t notice one if it were on my countertop in front of my face. The stream of living creatures, maybe a half inch wide, crawling all over each other, it stretched from the wire/cage into the grass a foot away at the patio’s edge. Some ants were carrying their microscopic morsel back to the colony while others were moving up to collect their portion and follow the leader home. The idea that such complicated creatures exist, so small, so many and they cooperate so remarkably; that kind of stuff blows my mind.
I have been watching the Olympics, gymnastics in particular. Watching young women twist and spin, leaping, somersaulting their way along a four inch balance beam from end to end then launch airborne, still twisting/somersaulting, off the beam without missing a beat and stick the landing, that’s mind blowing too. But I understand how that works. From many thousands of little girls around the world who want to be olympic gymnasts, only a few have what it takes and of those, you can count them on your fingers, they do their routines while (not falling off) a four inch beam, then fly like a bird and with a cloud of chalk dust, stick their landing. I understand how it works. What I don’t understand is how tiny ants, crowded together by the thousands, cooperate without incident. They do it without a brain, no brain at all. All an ant has is a few (ganglion) small clumps of nerve cells that control and regulate the ant’s life. Considering their size, how big can a ganglion be, and it works just like it’s supposed to!
I cleaned and moved the trap again. I don’t think that ant colony will suffer from the loss of my feeding station. I put the trap on a hard-pack gravel pad where I park my utility trailer. I have no idea how long it would take those ants to relocate my trap again. It’s about a hundred feet from the patio and the same from the cypress tree. That would seem far enough but then again, why should I believe the other ants in the far corner of the yard didn’t wake up to a peanut buffet on top of their hill? All I want is to relocate a pesky squirrel.
I wasn’t completely truthful when I said I didn’t understand the ants, they just leave me slack jawed with wonder. I am not an authority but I do read their books. Ants, like humans, are a super-social species. E.O. Wilson is one of, if not the world’s authority on ants. His book, ‘Sociobiology’ was controversial in 1978, the idea that he could correlate human behavior with ant activity. But after 40 years his then-critics have all come around to embrace Sociobiology and super-social species.
Wilson identified a dozen or more species that have a much more demanding social requirement in their nature than other similar animals. Most of them were insects, ants and bees in particular. They must be able to cooperate in very large numbers (ants farming food, waging war, attending the queen, etc) Like the proverbial coin, the thing has two sides. The 'tails' side, drawback, is that they cannot adapt to change. They can’t change the rules. If Something happens that interrupts their continuity, the colony dies, all of them. A few dozen free thinking ants can not sail off like the Pilgrims and start a new colony.
Making it more complicated, there are other super-social species that cannot cooperate in large numbers the way ants and bees do but what they can do is, they can (flip the coin) be creative, manipulate the situation to meet the need and they can change the rules, create and use tools. Chimpanzees are good examples. They cooperate with puzzles that require teamwork getting to the food. One pulls the tree limb down, another gives a third chimp a leg up to reach the low hanging fruit and they share the food. They are clever, smart, creative and cooperative as long as it is with familiar (usually related) friends. The number of individuals a chimp can know and trust is about 20-25. Beyond that they can’t deal with belonging, authority, proximity and identity issues, too much to overcome and turn into a bunch of frustrated, dysfunctional, fight-or-flight monkeys.
Now comes the revelation: only one super-social species is capable of both cooperating in large numbers and creative, rule changing diversity. No surprise, they are us. What other species could send hundreds of students (strangers to each other) to fly on airplanes flown by strangers to study under dozens of other strangers, learn multiple new, different skills, then trusting each other to do what they are supposed to do, cooperate in teams and apply the new skillset to address needs that had never been satisfied? Only Humans can do that.
This super-social capability isn’t perfect. Humans have problems that have gone unresolved since pre history. The rational, logical part of the brain that gives us unparalleled diversity does not (no it doesn’t) control the primitive, stone age emotional part that tells us how we feel. Not surprising, humans would much rather feel good than be right even though they believe the opposite. There is an ongoing struggle between ‘reason’ and emotions, in all humans, all of the time. Sadly, the stronger the emotion the less likely ‘reason’ can set aside the feeling and prevail. What usually happens when feelings overrule logic, the human subconsciously creates an alternate story (we are really great at creating story, even if it isn’t true) that feels better and, in a convoluted way, satisfies the perceived need. The conscious part is in the believing as it feels perfectly reasonable and if that’s not an oxymoron I give up. Those two parts of the brain are in constant negotiations with each other without either our knowledge or permission. So being doubly super-social has its up side that we wear like a crown, grant diplomas: and there is a down & dirty side that we haven’t learned how to manage yet. We are born selfish/greedy, and we never get over it. We covet more than we need and that makes material gluttony feel really, really good. I will take on Selfish/Greedy another day. It is time I checked my squirrel trap.
I got down on my hands and knees for a closer look. Too small to distinguish one from another there must have been thousands of ants so tiny, brown pinpoints with legs too small to see, I wouldn’t notice one if it were on my countertop in front of my face. The stream of living creatures, maybe a half inch wide, crawling all over each other, it stretched from the wire/cage into the grass a foot away at the patio’s edge. Some ants were carrying their microscopic morsel back to the colony while others were moving up to collect their portion and follow the leader home. The idea that such complicated creatures exist, so small, so many and they cooperate so remarkably; that kind of stuff blows my mind.
I have been watching the Olympics, gymnastics in particular. Watching young women twist and spin, leaping, somersaulting their way along a four inch balance beam from end to end then launch airborne, still twisting/somersaulting, off the beam without missing a beat and stick the landing, that’s mind blowing too. But I understand how that works. From many thousands of little girls around the world who want to be olympic gymnasts, only a few have what it takes and of those, you can count them on your fingers, they do their routines while (not falling off) a four inch beam, then fly like a bird and with a cloud of chalk dust, stick their landing. I understand how it works. What I don’t understand is how tiny ants, crowded together by the thousands, cooperate without incident. They do it without a brain, no brain at all. All an ant has is a few (ganglion) small clumps of nerve cells that control and regulate the ant’s life. Considering their size, how big can a ganglion be, and it works just like it’s supposed to!
I cleaned and moved the trap again. I don’t think that ant colony will suffer from the loss of my feeding station. I put the trap on a hard-pack gravel pad where I park my utility trailer. I have no idea how long it would take those ants to relocate my trap again. It’s about a hundred feet from the patio and the same from the cypress tree. That would seem far enough but then again, why should I believe the other ants in the far corner of the yard didn’t wake up to a peanut buffet on top of their hill? All I want is to relocate a pesky squirrel.
I wasn’t completely truthful when I said I didn’t understand the ants, they just leave me slack jawed with wonder. I am not an authority but I do read their books. Ants, like humans, are a super-social species. E.O. Wilson is one of, if not the world’s authority on ants. His book, ‘Sociobiology’ was controversial in 1978, the idea that he could correlate human behavior with ant activity. But after 40 years his then-critics have all come around to embrace Sociobiology and super-social species.
Wilson identified a dozen or more species that have a much more demanding social requirement in their nature than other similar animals. Most of them were insects, ants and bees in particular. They must be able to cooperate in very large numbers (ants farming food, waging war, attending the queen, etc) Like the proverbial coin, the thing has two sides. The 'tails' side, drawback, is that they cannot adapt to change. They can’t change the rules. If Something happens that interrupts their continuity, the colony dies, all of them. A few dozen free thinking ants can not sail off like the Pilgrims and start a new colony.
Making it more complicated, there are other super-social species that cannot cooperate in large numbers the way ants and bees do but what they can do is, they can (flip the coin) be creative, manipulate the situation to meet the need and they can change the rules, create and use tools. Chimpanzees are good examples. They cooperate with puzzles that require teamwork getting to the food. One pulls the tree limb down, another gives a third chimp a leg up to reach the low hanging fruit and they share the food. They are clever, smart, creative and cooperative as long as it is with familiar (usually related) friends. The number of individuals a chimp can know and trust is about 20-25. Beyond that they can’t deal with belonging, authority, proximity and identity issues, too much to overcome and turn into a bunch of frustrated, dysfunctional, fight-or-flight monkeys.
Now comes the revelation: only one super-social species is capable of both cooperating in large numbers and creative, rule changing diversity. No surprise, they are us. What other species could send hundreds of students (strangers to each other) to fly on airplanes flown by strangers to study under dozens of other strangers, learn multiple new, different skills, then trusting each other to do what they are supposed to do, cooperate in teams and apply the new skillset to address needs that had never been satisfied? Only Humans can do that.
This super-social capability isn’t perfect. Humans have problems that have gone unresolved since pre history. The rational, logical part of the brain that gives us unparalleled diversity does not (no it doesn’t) control the primitive, stone age emotional part that tells us how we feel. Not surprising, humans would much rather feel good than be right even though they believe the opposite. There is an ongoing struggle between ‘reason’ and emotions, in all humans, all of the time. Sadly, the stronger the emotion the less likely ‘reason’ can set aside the feeling and prevail. What usually happens when feelings overrule logic, the human subconsciously creates an alternate story (we are really great at creating story, even if it isn’t true) that feels better and, in a convoluted way, satisfies the perceived need. The conscious part is in the believing as it feels perfectly reasonable and if that’s not an oxymoron I give up. Those two parts of the brain are in constant negotiations with each other without either our knowledge or permission. So being doubly super-social has its up side that we wear like a crown, grant diplomas: and there is a down & dirty side that we haven’t learned how to manage yet. We are born selfish/greedy, and we never get over it. We covet more than we need and that makes material gluttony feel really, really good. I will take on Selfish/Greedy another day. It is time I checked my squirrel trap.
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