Consider Ants Poem by gershon hepner

Consider ants, so Solomon advised,
not realizing that it lives in super-
organisms, some so specialized
that they shift dirt and dung without a scooper,
while specialized mortician ants remove
the ones who’ve died, as eager as a hasid
to bury all the dead––it seems they prove
each death by testing for oleic acid.
They do this all, of course, to help their queen,
provider of the gonads of the team,
on her they all appear to be mores keen
than we for presidents of our regime,
for none of them have an ambition to
replace their leader with themselves as we
so often have, because they simply love to do
the things they do. Like us, they all feel free
Some even sing while working, and when trapped,
will stridulate to make sure that their fellows
will come to help them. No one yet has mapped
within their nests the churches and bordellos
that human superorganisms show
great interest in. I’m quite sure some ant entre-
preneurs would like to copy us, although
some might oppose this with a vote that’s contra.
In their superorganism ants
are probably not less divided than
the human one, where though some are bacchantes,
a lot still study Bible and Quran.
It takes a king like Solomon to figure
how ants behave, and even he, I think, could not,
find method in a madness that is bigger,
the human superorganism plot.

Inspired by an article by Tim Flannery in the NYR, February 26,2009, reviewing The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson (“The Superior Civilization”) :
Ants are so much a part of our everyday lives that unless we discover them in our sugar bowl we rarely give them a second thought. Yet those minuscule bodies voyaging across the kitchen counter merit a closer look, for as entomologists Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson tell us in their latest book, they are part of a superorganism. Superorganisms such as some ant, bee, and termite colonies represent a level of organization intermediate between single organisms and the ecosystem: you can think of them as comprised of individuals whose coordination and integration have reached such a sophisticated level that they function with some of the seamlessness of a human body. The superorganism whose 'hand' reaches into your sugar bowl is probably around the size of a large octopus or a garden shrub, and it will have positioned itself so that its vital parts are hidden and sheltered from climatic extremes, while it still has easy access to food and water. The term 'superorganism' was first coined in 1928 by the great American ant expert William Morton Wheeler.….However, ants clearly are fundamentally different from us. A whimsical example concerns the work of ant morticians, which recognize ant corpses purely on the basis of the presence of a product of decomposition called oleic acid. When researchers daub live ants with the acid, they are promptly carried off to the ant cemetery by the undertakers, despite the fact that they are alive and kicking. Indeed, unless they clean themselves very thoroughly they are repeatedly dragged to the mortuary, despite showing every other sign of life… You may not believe it, but like the sailors of old the leafcutter ants 'sing' as they work. Leaf-cutting is every bit as strenuous for the ants as hauling an anchor is for human beings, and their singing, which takes the form of stridulation (a sound created by the rubbing together of body parts) , assists the ants in their work by imparting vibrations to the mandible that is cutting the leaf, enhancing its action in a manner akin to the way an electric knife helps us cut roasts. The leafcutters also use stridulation to cry for help, for example when workers are trapped in an underground cave-in. These cries for help soon prompt other ants to rush in and begin digging until they've reached their trapped sisters.

2/15/09