or anticipate how the masses will respond when food is found or enemies encountered. A raid arises through a series of simple actions by each worker and others like her, in an engagement that can truly be described as “self-organized.”
Humans constantly have to work around issues of self-interest that would otherwise impede the emergence of social institutions and infrastructure. Our clannish devotion to networks of kin and friends has proved particularly problematic in the context of modern warfare. The solution has been to divide armies into squadrons small enough for the troops to bond and be willing to take risks for one another.31 Ant workers, of course, don’t recognize nestmates as personas in the way I picked out the stump-antennaed individual,32 and they never throw themselves in harm’s way so that particular compatriots might live. What we perceive in ants as acts of heroism and devotion are really more akin to acts of patriotism. Since it is only the superorganism that matters, ant workers instinctively toil and die for the benefit of the colony, without recognition or recompense other than the remote possibility of augmented reproduction by the queen, the one member of the group who is indispensable. Mortality seems to be the basis of the domestic economy for prodigious, combat-savvy ant societies.33 It is difficult not to think of the Spartan mothers who sent their sons off to battle saying, “Come home either with your shield or on it.”34 Brute force, apparently, is the key to tactical success for mass-foraging marauder and army ants.
3 division of labor
In the short grass of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, I dropped to my knees, then lowered myself to my elbows and, at last, to my stomach, eye pressed to soil, camera extended in front of me. My perspective standing up had been abstract, like that of a general assessing the movements of troops from a hilltop, where they were more pawns in a game than people engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Now, seen close-up through my camera lens, a marauder minor worker stood tall and solid before me, antennae moving as if to sniff me out. Her forebody was raised, forelimbs almost lifted from the ground, mandibles open. She was ready to pounce. Suddenly I saw the silvery blur of some creature, through my lens the size and shape of a tank, and the worker was yanked from her spot. I recognized the beast as a roly-poly, or pill bug, a quarter-inch multilegged crustacean presumably flushed at the raid’s front lines.
My worker had seized one of the pill bug’s furiously moving legs. Though knocked about violently, she managed to hold on. Two other minors, and then three more, grabbed the pill bug by other legs or the edge of its carapace. One whose head somehow got smashed released her grip and fell away. The others were strong enough to bring the pill bug to a halt. It tried to roll into a ball—a ploy that gives the bug its common name—but the tightly anchored workers prevented it from protecting itself. From the left, a media worker lumbered into view. She used her antennae to survey the scrimmage. Then she opened her club-shaped mandibles wide and struck. The pill bug’s pale underbody went limp. Watching this skirmish conclude, I couldn’t help but think about how groups of early humans brought down woolly mammoths using nothing but guts and some simple stone tools.
When I left Boston for Asia in 1981, I had a premonition that I would discover amazing things about the marauder ant—so amazing that my thesis committee might suspect I had concocted stories while smoking an illegal substance with an Indian guru. Knowing I had to come home with indisputable documentation, before I left for Asia I bought a how-to book on photographing supermodels, Cosmopolitan-style. With $230 in equipment that included a used Canon SLR, a macro lens, and three $15 flash attachments that gave me electric shocks, I miniaturized the glamor studio the book described by affixing the flashes to the front of the lens with a pipe clamp. By adjusting the strength of my lights, I adopted the concepts of “fill” and “hair light” to accentuate the gleaming exoskeletons of my minuscule models, defining each limb and chiseling every fiber on film.
During my travels in Asia, I used my camera to observe ants, triggering it whenever something happened that I wanted to examine later. In India, trying my equipment for the first time outside, I was stunned to see that through my lens, ants towered. Soon I was stalking them through the viewfinder with all the thrill nineteenth-century hunters must have felt tracking lions. With both quarries, the trick is to go unnoticed, to catch everyday behavior without being bitten—admittedly a more high-stakes proposition with a lion. Still, when tracking an ant in this way, I would forget her size, and she gained all the grandeur of the king of the jungle.
A minor worker stands a couple of millimeters tall. Photographing such a tiny insect requires concentrated effort and lots of illumination. When I focused the camera on my leg, my cheap flashes gave such an intense pulse of heat and light that smoke rose from my jeans. Fortunately, reducing the setting to one-quarter power solved the problem while providing sufficient exposure, but even then, the part of the picture in focus was often only a fraction of a millimeter deep—the length of a paramecium. With the flashes toned down, most ants ignored my “light cannon,” especially when struggling with prey. Like a lion, an ant is easiest to approach and photograph when it is preoccupied.
In my six months in India, my photography budget was tight, but I took an occasional picture of marauders swarming, collecting seeds, and being harassed by hairy Meranoplus workers. Before I flew to Singapore to continue my work in Southeast Asia, I wrote the Committee of Research and Exploration at the National Geographic Society, which had given me a grant, to ask if they could develop my film. The committee’s chairman, Barry Bishop—a member of the first American team to climb Mount Everest—kindly agreed. I put six rolls of Kodachrome 64 film in an express package and sent it off to him. Two weeks later, I was surprised by a Telex announcing that a writer from National Geographic was flying to India to meet me—about what, it didn’t say.
A few weeks later, I left Sullia and traveled to Bangalore, where I was to meet the writer, Rick Gore, for breakfast at his hotel, Bengaluru, the finest in the city. By then, I had been living in rural villages so long that the hotel gave me culture shock. The corn flakes and coffee, though everyday American foods, were pricy by Indian standards, costing more than I spent in a week in Sullia.
Rick told me my photographs had gone to Mary Smith at “the magazine,” who wanted to support my efforts, maybe even have me write a story for the magazine. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mary is legendary for her work with such iconic scientists as the paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, and the ape experts Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. Why did she want to work with me? “She likes what you are discovering,” Rick told me. “She also has no idea how you are making the ants look so glamorous.”
I had no idea either. Up to that time the only photos of mine I’d seen were test shots I had taken of dead specimens back in Massachusetts, and they weren’t anything to crow about. So a month later, when I arrived in Singapore, where Mary had sent the developed slide images, I was stunned. The ants that had been half visible to me through my camera in dim light were clear and crisp on film. Here were marauders confronting furry Meranoplus, sleek Leptogenys hunting termites, eagle-eyed Harpegnathos seizing crickets in mid-jump. Two years later, after my return to the States, when I met Mary, she compared my images to the visuals in the film The Terminator. “For you ants are huge, so they become huge for the rest of us,” she told me. The photographs became part of my first article for National Geographic magazine.1
THE PLAN OF ATTACK
In Singapore, I splurged on flash attachments that did not shock me. To take in the mass-foraging pattern, I stepped back each day to observe the raids as a whole. But like a physiologist who examines muscle fibers to find out how humans move their fingers, I also came in close with my camera “microscope” to record the individual ants in action and learn the details of how they made their kills and harvested the victims.
These observations came as a welcome relief after months at Harvard measuring ants in museum drawers and categorizing them as minor, media, or major based
