Ants, Ants, Ants

Is one ant an animal? It seems to be one. Formally speaking it may be a member of the species Lasius niger, the common black ant, which lives in my garden. I fetch my magnifying glass and train it on one of the flagstones outside my back door.

Dots of reflected light shine brighter on the body. Two of the three segments, head and abdomen, taper: one to twig-like mandibles, the other to a point a little darker than the red-brown of the rest. The spots of the eyes show up indentations, the markers of a compound lens. The antennae are always mobile, socketed flexibly in the head. The middle part, the thorax, has the jointed legs of all insects, all six moving in a rapid, not-quite-rigid gait. The abdomen has rings of minute hairs. The ant changes direction often, comes back to the same spot, but never seems to be aimless. There’s always a feeling of purpose.

In build, in action, it is a perfect animal. But this ant can’t breed; it’s not pursuing the goal of most creatures. In a way it is a limb of a larger entity – the queen, or the colony as a whole. For some Victorians, possibly inspired by the biblical Proverb “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise”, the idea of human society as an expanded version of an ant nest had appeal: every individual having a place in serving a greater good – and there was no risk of any kind of disorder.

In the allotment leased by my daughter’s school there’s an ant nest under a plank of wood. Lift it (it comes away suddenly, as though held down by some force against the earth, and catacombs are revealed. But these are chambers of life, not death.

In Rome, I walked from the centre of the city to the subterranean graves beyond the imperial city walls. The guide showed paintings, symbols and ancient bodies. It was cold, and the electric lights seemed fragilely connected. For the ants in the nest, the close link between present and past I felt then does not exists. Everything is now, and the range of tunnels and rooms in which the queen’s grubs lie like white commas are immediately swarmed with workers. They lift the young gently in their jaws and prepare to carry them to safety.

This is when we put the plank softly back. Imagine the headlines about the community pulling together in the face of this alarm.

Much recent Western thought about ants has taken a different view. Reaction to the twentieth century’s addiction to extreme forms of government caused heavily ideologised magnifying glasses to be turned onto ants. Ants as communist super-warriors (Them!), ants as ultra-feminists (John Wyndham’s unpleasant Consider Her Ways), ants as faceless plotters laying the seeds of apocalypse (Phase IV).

Positive and negative metaphors rely on a perceived equivalence between ants and humans, an idea that they have a society comprehensible in a similar way to eighteenth-century England or medieval Japan. But an ant in my garden carrying a fragment of some organic matter is not the same sort of being as me, no matter how socially conditioned I might be considered. The neural biology, the question of self-awareness, prevent it.

In the world of ants, it may be that only a colony has “agency” – all the activities of queen, males, workers purely serve the nest’s needs to survive and propagate itself. So is one ant an animal, or can it only be thought of as part of a larger organism, like the photophores in a Portuguese man o’war?

Last time an ant bit me, I was thinking about these things. The unresolvable niggle of my speculations was echoed in the faint tingle of the bite, a sensation like that of the thinnest of wires being slipped under my skin. I’ve been bitten by ants a lot over the years – a consequence of many hours watching them.

A colony lived at the top of my parent’s drive. The flagstones grew hot on sunny afternoons, except where the back end of the car cast its shadow. The ants shone like fragments of quartz caught up in a wind along a beach. I would try to follow one individual’s activities, out to wherever it was going, and then back.

But I don’t remember them going anywhere. They just went around, close to the holes in between the drive and the tarmac pavement, left, right, back, forward, without any clear direction. I always hoped to follow one that would pick up a beetle or something and disappear into the underground tunnels with it. This never happened, but I did see how the ant I was following would interact with others it met. They put their heads together and rubbed each other with their antennae. It looked like a conversation, and in a way it was, but in pheromones rather than words.

Once a group of other ants appeared, and were attacked by the resident workers. I don’t know if our human neighbours had anything to say about the crazy boy always lying on the ground staring down at these pestiferous insects.

Every year the ants would put on their winged show. On normal, days I’d have to tap the ground around the nest holes to summon up a few workers, but each July or August the ants would rise of their own accord. Thousands of workers would froth at the nest mouths, living crumbs of soil. Among them glittered the wings of new queens and males, broken glass shifting, suddenly shooting up into the air and out of sight. I was transfixed. The idea of other nests deriving from this one was both exciting and strangely phantasmal. This was the nest. What could others be like?

Ants receded into the background for me for many years, occasionally glimpsed in a garden, or on TV, or in the Disney film Antz, which combined lip service to individualism and the value of difference within the community with encouragement to accept the reigning order. They also underlay the dystopian culture of Star Trek’s Borg. That reworking of the metaphor ended by implying Captain Picard’s continued entanglement in the Borg’s collective mind even after he had returned to the cosily self-determining world of the Enterprise. Can you have just one Borg, or is there just one Borg?

But last year I visited Aston Rowant nature reserve, on a chalk hill split by the M40 and overlooking the Oxfordshire plain. On the grassy hilltop are the domed nests of meadow ants. Their yellow bodies are the colour of summer grass, and of the sunlight. The field they live in is a minefield of colonies – it would be awful to trample a nest a hundred years old.

Since then I’ve taken more interest in the ants in my garden. This has been a good year for aphids, and the ants have supported them. In my youth there was a band called Alien Ant Farm. I don’t remember actually hearing any of their music, but their name comes to mind whenever I see the ants tending the aphids.

They protect the greenfly, blackfly or whitefly from predators, and corral them in feeding areas. They do this to obtain a sweet liquid, honeydew, that the aphids secrete when rubbed by the ant attendants. This feeds them and their grubs in the nest.

Aphids generally reproduce asexually, so a whole group can be genetically identical. Is one aphid an animal? Am I going mad if I think I see ants touching the ribbed abdomens of their creatures with tenderness? (Yes.)

The relationships and forms of being outside the human sphere are far more complicated and further from conventional understanding than they first appear. Is it possible for a piece of writing to tell what it is really like to be one ant?