Welcome to Insects are Fairies, a summer entomology series. Together, we’ll study the mysteries of the wild world and ourselves through the lens of our co-evolutionary history with insects. I’m Roxanne, aka Farmer Rox, and ant culture is one of the wildest topics I have ever researched in all my years of nerding out about nature.
Think of all of the things you love (and hate) about humanity. Those are usually the things we think make us different from other species, for better or for worse. However, those very abilities that qualify us as sentient, intelligent beings are not unique to our species. Anything humans have done, ants have done better - and over a hundred million years in advance:
Complex communication networks spanning miles
Sophisticated problem-solving
Mass-organization into a functioning society
Labor specialization
Agriculture
Curative and preventative medicine
Collective childcare
War
Sanitation practices and varying “customs” for the dead
Use of tools
EVEN AIR CONDITIONING!
I’ll get to examples of these in the ant family, and then we’ll have a hard look at what might happen in a nest of ants if their societies copied that of modern humans, whose native ecological niche overlaps with the ants. We just operate on a (much larger) scale.
First, let’s time-travel back to where Ants began. The little eusocial species of the Formicidae family of Hymenoptera emerged in the lower Cretaceous period, about 140-100 million years ago. Side note, I think we missed the plot calling it the “age of dinosaurs”. We obsess over the extinct reptiles, which, sure, are pretty cool, but we ignore (or hate!) the insects that were there too, that still live among us today. We can watch living fossils in real time, eating, moving, laying eggs, flying, having sex. They were around when the first mammals appeared in the fossil record. Our mammalian ancestor was just a tree-climbing shrew back then:
Anyway, back to ants, a.k.a. "(the species with) a global biomass that exceeds the combined biomass of all wild mammals and birds on Earth”. While it’s a common misbelief that ants rival the total biomass of humans, there are tropical parts of the planet where that very well may be true. A descendent of wasps, you can see the resemblance - in body type and in the queen ants’ temporary wings. They’re a superorganism that builds their own home, like honey bees and paper wasps. Ants, however, have their own ecological niche and story to tell.
Emerging amidst violent climate change to rival anything our species has ever known, ants have been undeniably successful. A near-universal insect, they cover every continent but Antarctica. From the tropics to the North Woods, ants build their nests anywhere they can - in the ground, in old logs, in raised bed gardens, or even in the cracks of a sidewalk.
They are universal characters in our lives, as well. Who doesn’t have a touchstone childhood memory of an ant swarm in the spring, looking like a writhing black specter on the sidewalk from far away, or a curious dance of individuals up close. Turns out, they were probably emerging after being underground for the winter, warming and solarizing their bodies to kill off any mold or fungal disease.
Ants have noticed us, too. They crash our picnics, they squat in our houses, they climb and bite our legs when we garden too close to their front porch. In the past year, we had an ant infestation like I’ve never seen in this house in almost 10 years. They made their scent paths across our countertops, and marched their armies in to seize the butter. They circled the crumbs, drips, and drops. They learned that the traps we set for them were indeed traps, and they routed around them. I deep cleaned the kitchen, emptied the cabinets, tried the borax sugar. Eventually, I started finding little winged wanna-be queen ants in my bed. I squished them, disgusted, and vowed to take back the kitchen from the ants that are apparently doing such a great job raising their brood in our house that they were attempting to start franchising their operation.
I did end up winning the ant battle. Somewhat incidentally, I found a surface cleaner that uses essential oils and had a very strong minty-eucalyptus smell. And it was the smell, I believe, that drove them off for good. Ants use chemical signatures to communicate with each other, detected with their antennae. With repeated daily application, their scent signals were wiped out, and they couldn’t navigate with each other. They lost their foothold, and I haven’t seen hide nor wing of an ant in the house for months (knock on wood!).
The thing is, I don’t hold a grudge for ants. I don’t want them in my kitchen, but they do belong to the world. Ants are a disturbance species, much like our own. They create, interact with, and thrive after an ecological disturbance. These disturbances may include fire, flood, human-made disturbances, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and, as we’ve seen with their history, even cosmic impact. Ants, and humans, create disturbance through their abilities to dig, pick up and move things, hunt, scavenge, and scale up operations with mass-coordination. The only thing we humans have on them is the ability to start a fire.
This all sounds like a recipe for disaster doesn’t it? It’s how our species has created such a mess of the natural world. However, disturbance species actually evolved for a reason, and it’s to play a hugely important ecological role. When a disturbance species, sometimes known as an “ecosystem engineer”, is serving the ecological niche that it evolved for, it can be considered a keystone species. Examples of keystone species include beavers in river country and wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Without them, the ecosystem can’t sustain itself.
Humans are a great example of the two sides of the disturbance species coin. When we look around us, and into human history, we see what happens when we serve our ecological role as a keystone species vs operating outside of it as an invasive species.
Every example of humans as a keystone species can be found in indigenous peoples all over the world, living on their ancestral land, practicing traditional foodways and culture that is informed by the local ecosystem over thousands of years. While it seems like intact indigenous communities are rare in today’s world, the fact is that humans have spent the vast majority of our 300,000 years on this planet as indigenous people. We adapted to a wide variety of climates, but all of us are descended from indigenous people, from somewhere in the world.
One mind-blowing example of keystone-human activity that I love comes from the Amazon rainforest as an anthropomorphic, or human-made, ecosystem. There are enormous deposits of rich, dark, nutrient-dense soil, aka terra preta sprinkled throughout the Amazon that is markedly different than the soil surrounding and beneath it. The rich plant life depends on these fertile soil deposits. They line up on the map with indigenous people’s villages, both historical ones and current ones. From both archeological evidence and indigenous knowledge, the prevailing theory is that the terra preta was created by indigenous people over thousands of years. This, in turn, gave rise to the forest.
How did they do it, and continue to do it today? By piling their trash in the middle of their villages and leaving it to compost. They dump charred bones and wood, plant scraps, broken pottery, poop, and worn-out laundry in a communal pile. Eventually, villages move on, letting the forest take over their carbon-negative footprint. The simple act of disposing of trash in this way resulted in the most biodiverse habitat on Earth. The impact is global, with the rainforest being dubbed “the lungs of the Earth” for their output of oxygen and consumption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Another example would be the Bison-herding Lakota peoples using prescribed burns and bison rotation to manage the Great Prairie, which produced some of the deepest top soils on Earth. Different methods, different environments, same result: richer soil, more biodiversity, more productive food web for people and a vast cadre of other species as a direct result of human action.
The examples of humans as an invasive species are more familiar today. In the last 2,000-4,000 years (depending where you are on the globe), the story that has become more familiar is that of a colonizing population moving in to conquer land and remove and/or exploit indigenous people. Examples of anthropomorphic ecologies also include abandoned parking lots, landfills, nuclear waste storage, and the rubble left after a carpet-bombing. We have been shaping ecology around us since the dawn of our species, but the hungry mouth of imperialism has perverted those same behaviors into a system that is actively causing a mass extinction, mass hunger, and genocide. Our trash, instead of becoming compost, is composed of forever-chemicals and heavy metals. We don’t just move things around in our environment anymore. We transport oil in pipelines and trucks over thousands of miles, import nutrients to make the monocultural agriculture work from around the world, and source our food from almost anywhere but the landbase where we live. We don’t just dig for a foundation of a home, we use explosives to fracture bedrock and inject water laced with chemicals in a process called fracking.
The side-effect of all this activity? Let alone dropping billions of dollars worth of bombs? Pollutants in the air, water, and soil that no species, including our own, has probably ever encountered at such levels. Habitat destruction and climate change are adding species to the extinct list every day. Insects, in particular, are taking massive losses. Entomologists have described the current moment as an “insect apocalypse”.
Here’s the thing. If we caused it, that means we’re capable of un-causing it. A disturbance species goes both ways. Imagine if the millions of tons of plastic garbage we throw away every day was sequestering carbon instead of leaching toxins. Imagine supply chains that are locally-based, or at least, regional. Imagine if we didn’t need to burn all this gas to conduct our daily lives. The ants may provide some inspiration.
Ants, while not considered a classic keystone species, they perform some important ecological functions. Their tunnels bring oxygen underground, increasing the diversity of the soil food web. As hunters, they help control for infestations of other insects. Through foraging, they disperse seeds. They spur the cycle of life and death as decomposers and scavengers.
On the farm, Caleb has shared his observation that ants use the irrigation line as highways. Rather than navigate the weeds and grass, they simply take to the rails. They can harvest droplets of water there as well, sometimes using a leaf or other preferred tool to transport it back to the nest.
Many people know about the ants’ ability to move objects many times heavier than themselves - leaf-cutter ants are a famous example. But the reason why they’re carrying leaves isn’t always to eat. Rather, ants spend a large amount of their energy maintaining a mushroom farm. The fungus is what they eat, and the plants are fodder for the fungus. Often, different-sized ants will assemble in specialized roles to keep the fungus happy. Some remove any signs of mold, while others harvest and tend. This is how they discovered their own form of antibiotics.
Ants provide childcare for their young, which is a unique and classic characteristic among many Hymenoptera insects. The queen, specifically chosen and managed by the workers, lays the eggs. Upon hatching, the nurses feed the larva according to specific diets which determine what kind of ant it will be - a worker, a queen, or male drone.
They also go to war, defending territory from other ants of the same and different species. Some, like the red wood ant, spray its enemy with formic acid after tearing into their exoskeleton. If this interests you, I highly recommend watching David Attenborough narrate an ant war up-close in The Empire of Ants documentary.
Ants pay much attention to hygiene, and when a member of an ant colony dies, they are promptly carried off from the nest by Ant-ian undertakers. Different “customs” are observed by different ant species, some including coving the corpse with soil and litter. Some remove their heads, thought to speed decomposition.
Finally, they are experts at building their homes. Able to source building material both from the environment and combine it with the mortar of their own spit, they build complex labyrinths that are designed for optimal heating, cooling, and humidity. By building nests that are somewhat underground and somewhat above ground, they can moderate temperature by moving down for cooling and up for warming. In the heat, they can open pathways above that are designed to draw in air, like a network of chimneys. They have also been shown to generate air currents themselves, using coordinated wing fanning. This form of air-conditioning achieves a drop in the internal temperature of the nest by several degrees.
How are ants able to accomplish all of this without cannibalizing themselves and the ecosystem they need to survive? What has made them so successful at sustaining massive populations and societies for over a hundred million years, while most human empires crumble at around the 250 year mark?
My theory, after reading and observing all of this, is a metaphor that has already written itself. Remember how we labeled the egg-laying matriarchs as “queens”. However, the differences between ant queens and human royalty are telling. No ant queen would ever hoard all the food in the nest for herself, leaving her larva to starve while the workers go on strike. No ant queen would dare to think she could operate without her workers, replacing them with some convoluted invention. In fact, the queens are ultimately chosen by and beholden to the workers. As a larva, they are fed on a queen diet. And when the next generation is ready to lead, the old queen is removed, whether she’s ready to retire or not. They do not cling to power for the sake of power, to the detriment of the entire nest.
Workers of a nest don’t exhibit behaviors of warfare with each other, the way that people do these days - there are no mass-killings or violent attacks of one’s own nest, reminiscent of the mass shootings or hate crimes that happen almost every day in America. There are no jails, no concentration camps. They work in concert with their neighbors and co-workers, communicating fluently, operating efficiently. Their shared goal is always to increase the yield and protect the brood.
What we have in American society today are rulers are ruled by their delusions of the past, who hoard every last dollar and ounce of power they can squeeze out of the working class, and who stuff their faces while children in cages are fed moldy bread in ICE detention centers. Worse, they drop bombs (or pay others to) on children in Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuela, and the list goes on. The people who protect the land and its people are their enemy, because they are predators in human skin, preying on the brood of the world and their own, too.
Ants wouldn’t stand for this. They would take that diseased queen out back real quick. They would compost the body and keep the cycle of evolution going, by ushering in the new generation of leadership. They would not keep working in disease-infested conditions with no food. They would run to defend and protect the brood at all costs.
May the revolution live up to the example the ants give. May we all do our part to ensure a better world to come, through indigenous leadership, and by re-establishing ourselves as the keystone species we were for hundreds of thousands of years before yesterday.
RESOURCES NOT ALREADY LINKED:
EXTRAORDINARY INSECTS by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
David Attenborough and the Empire of Ants
https://blog.myrmecologicalnews.org/2023/03/30/ant-abundance-biomass-and-distribution/
https://insecthive.com/the-insect-undertakers-ants-that-bury-their-dead-to-protect-the-colony-1-11286/
Tool Selection for foraging in two species of funnel ants
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotttravers/2025/12/17/meet-the-ants-that-practice-medicine-hint-they-discovered-their-own-form-of-antibiotics/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966420
Wow, I Iearned a lot! Very well-written and researched article. And when you apply this to current problems facing this world today, very insightful.
BRILLIANT!