The Strange and Turbulent Global World of Ant Geopolitics

Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own. An excerpt from an Aeon article: In their native ranges, these multi-nest colonies can grow to a few hundred metres across, limited by physical barriers or other ant colonies. This turns the landscape to a patchwork of separate groups, with each chemically distinct society fighting or avoiding others at their borders. Species and colonies coexist, without any prevailing over the others. However, for the 'anonymous societies' of unicolonial ants, as they're known, transporting a small number of queens and workers to a new place can cause the relatively stable arrangement of groups to break down. As new nests are created, colonies bud and spread without ever drawing boundaries because workers treat all others of their own kind as allies. What was once a patchwork of complex relationships becomes a simplified, and unified, social system. The relative genetic homogeneity of the small founder population, replicated across a growing network of nests, ensures that members of unicolonial species tolerate each other. Spared the cost of fighting one another, these ants can live in denser populations, spreading across the land as a plant might, and turning their energies to capturing food and competing with other species. Chemical badges keep unicolonial ant societies together, but also allow those societies to rapidly expand.

Keep it ant-related.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't draw any parallels to human society in this thread. Thank you.

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[BoogieChile]

Jane Goodall might have a differing opinion, given some of the memories that wake her up in the middle of the night. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Flashbacks

[bosef1]

Thanks, now I'm flashing back to Kurzgesagt videos... 'cause I didn't have enough existential dread in my day already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Planet of the ants

[TractorBarry]

Since being a small child I always thought this was the planet of the ants.

On an ant related theme there's also a great Philip K. Dick short story called "Expendable" which is well worth a read. Decent synopsis at https://philipkdickreview.word... [wordpress.com].

Story itself also at http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd... [narod.ru] (n.b. ".ru" domain, so take precautions etc.)

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[dcooper_db9]

I never thought of it as the planet of the ants, but I was fascinated by them. I particularly remember one strange behavior. As a child I lived in Southeast Asia. I used to climb over a wall in front of our house and it was always covered with ants. Those critters were big and could inflict a nasty bite, so I didn't want to cross paths with them. When I first started climbing that wall I'd put my hand on it slowly and the ants would move out of the way. After a while I'd come running up to that wall a

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[kackle]

Ground vibration would be my guess. I saw a snake slither into a hole just as I was jogging in its direction.

This reads like the opening scene of a movie.

[jonadab]

Specifically, this reads like the narrator's opening lines for a mid-twentieth-century B-movie horror flick.

Seriously.

Awesome story

[spaceman375]

Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert (author of Dune and many other excellent books) is a portrayal of a human society based on insect behavior. First published in the 1970s. I think it would make a fantastic horror movie. Its full of controversial stuff, like applied eugenics and behavior modification with pheromones and hormones. There's even a scene where the hive members take off the limbs and head of a woman but keep her torso alive for breeding. Side note: Just like Clark predicted comm satellites in his stories, Herbert predicted using a laser through a window as a discrete, remote microphone for surreptitious listening in this story.

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[HiThere]

Sigh. Authors rarely predict. They just look at the present and exaggerate certain features that they see. E.g. 1984 was based around 1948 and Spain, and some of the things Orwell saw there. He set it in the future, but it wasn't intended as a prediction, only a warning. (I think Heinlein may sometimes have actually been trying to predict, but that's a rare case. And even he usually wasn't.)