Jon G. Fuller/VWPics/Alamy
Pollution makes many cities unlivable for their human inhabitants, but it also tears ant families and communities apart. Ants recognize each other by sniffing a thin layer of hydrocarbons on the outside of their exoskeletons; each colony has a specific “smell”. But a new study reveals that ozone emissions can change the structure of these hydrocarbons. After ants wander around in relatively typical city air with 100 parts per billion ozone, their nestmates no longer perceive them as allies. Some are attacked by their own families. Others neglect larvae exposed to ozone and let them die.
If you consider that there are approximately 20 quadrillion ants on Earth, that means Homo sapiens have figured out how to produce home invasions on an unimaginable scale.
Sounds terrible, right? That’s because the story I’ve just told you is a case of anthropomorphism, or the projection of human characteristics onto non-human creatures, comparing ant colonies to human families. Although many scientists argue against anthropomorphism as misleading, others are fond of drawing parallels between ants and humans as a way to explain the evolution of everything from altruism to social networks.
Famously, the entomologist EO Wilson used ants as evidence for his theory of “sociobiology”, which suggests that most animal behavior is the result of evolutionary necessity. By observing how biology drove ant behavior, Wilson argued, we could learn a lot about how biology has also shaped human achievement and progress.
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most outspoken critics of Wilson’s idea, calling it “biological determinism” and warning that it could lead to eugenic social policy or worse. The conflict over the role of biology in human society continues to this day in academia, but now sociobiology is generally referred to as evolutionary psychology.
But something fundamental has changed in the way scientists talk about ants. Deborah Gordon, a Stanford University biologist who studies ants, discovered in the early 2000s that ant behavior is algorithmic. She has spent years studying carpenter ants, among other species, and eventually began working with colleagues in computer science to explain the way ants distribute tasks within their colonies using what are effectively distributed signaling networks. If a worker ant discovers a giant pile of sugar, for example, she leaves a pheromone trail for other ants to follow. As she returns to the nest, she encounters other ants who sniff her and discovers that she has found far more food than one individual can carry. By calculating quickly, they will realize that more foragers are required and will drop what they are doing to join the sugar-gathering ant.
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Algorithmic determinism has replaced biological determinism, but the result for ants remains the same
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There is no single leader or group of leaders who orders the ants to switch tasks. They do it simply by communicating with each other, individual by individual, passing the message on to recruit workers until the task is completed. Gordon called this process “tanned”, because it is similar to the way distributed computer networks allocate bandwidth for data transfers. But instead of allocating bandwidth, the ants allocate, well, ants.
Gordon’s work seems to represent a dramatic shift away from Wilson’s – after all, she compares ants to computers rather than humans. And yet we live in a time when AI companies are betting billions that the human mind can be replicated by software algorithms. Algorithmic determinism has replaced biological determinism, but the result for ants remains the same. Humans use them as analogies for the behavior of other animals, but do not often appreciate them for their own unique mire.
Which brings me back to the study of how human-made pollution destroys the ability of ants to recognize each other. Gordon’s internet relies on ants from the same colony meeting up, exchanging information and then calculating whether they need to help their sisters with a task. But when ozone causes the hydrocarbons on the ant’s body to oxidize, colony sisters no longer recognize each other. They cannot coordinate on jobs. This can lead to the death of a colony.
To a human, this doesn’t sound like a big deal. We don’t smell each other’s bodies to determine if we need to gather food or care for babies. We do not operate in large, distributed networks of women who collectively care for each other and their living spaces. But we live on the same planet as wild, wonderful animals that do. And if we don’t limit ozone, we could destroy their society. Maybe it’s time we stop using ants as analogies for ourselves and our machines, and start caring about who they really are.
What I read
HG Wells’s world war, where the Martians are cyber-vampires (no really, they are).
What I’m watching
my life is murder a delightfully banal detective series starring Lucy Lawless.
What I work on
Finding a place to live in a new (to me) city.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic noodle. They are co-hosts of the Hugo-winning podcast Our opinions are correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
