What Ants Can Teach Us About Working Together

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not an ant. In fact, it is exceedingly likely that you’re human. Perhaps you’re a construction worker, laying bricks for a new high-rise building downtown. Or maybe you’re a parent, engaged in a near futile struggle to lay your howling baby to rest each night. You could even be an office worker, toiling away each day for the benefit of a faceless corporation while struggling to even find the time to enjoy Marvel’s Ant-Man in theaters. But what if you were an ant? What could social insect living do for you? Every individual worker in an ant colony is part of a collective—a female dominated society with one or more reproductive individuals (usually queens, occasionally egg-laying workers) at the helm. Having mated with a tragically short-lived male, the queen stores up his sperm in a special pouch, a spermatheca, and turns her energy to the business of laying eggs. The first-gen workers survive on further eggs laid by the queen until they’re old enough to forage themselves. From there, the colony goes from strength to strength. Workers are continuously produced in overlapping generations. They divide up the chores of finding food, nest construction, defense, and raising future offspring. Lest this seem a mundane existence, the employment of this cooperative strategy is astonishingly successful. A single colony can contain millions of ants. Globally, there are at least 20 quadrillion individu...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Evergreen freelance Science Source Type: news