According to Wikipedia (I think that's where I took these notes from), ants dominate most ecosystems, and form 15–20% of the terrestrial animal biomass. That's an amazing proportion, even given the fact that there are more than ten thousand species of the little pendejos. Their success has been attributed to their social organization and their ability to modify their habitats, tap resources and defend themselves. Reminds me of another successful species...
Humans? If humans became more ant-like we could dominate the world too! Unless by "other species" you mean roaches or something.
If you mean humans, please be aware that ants don't pollute and destroy their own environment nor do they electively attack and kill other ants of their own species! Or even other species for that matter, unless that species interferes with their lives. Nope, Fraggle, humans are totally bad, ants are nice guys. Baron Max
Yep, they're pretty amazing. Now look up the biomass of Insects Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Oh please.. /spits
Sure they do. Routinely. The ecologists are just now studying a remarkable example of ants not attacking conspecific hills, but instead forming large mutually tolerant complexes: it's a feature of the fire ant invasion in the southern US, and the explanations of this oddity are of great interest. Apparently it has something to do with them being related to just a couple of original invading populations. It's possible something like that is at the root of the remarkable capacity of humans for kindness and cooperation and mutual aid, even involving strangers and aliens, and visible in even very young children. Some ant expert, may even have been the biophilia guy at Harvard, once commented that if ants ever invent nuclear weapons the world will be a radioactive wasteland in about three weeks.
What are you trying to say here???? I read that as agreeing with what I said, yet you've disagreed with me by saying "Sure they do. Routinely." What's the deal here??? Baron Max
Humans are a pack-social species like most of the other apes as well as many other species such as wolves/dogs. Harmony and cooperation among pack-mates makes life easier for all, and in hard times it can mean the difference between survival and extinction. So naturally we have the instinct to help, protect and care for our pack-mates, as do most of those other pack-social species. However, we are undergoing a transition to a herd-social species, living in harmony and cooperation with anonymous strangers like cattle and pigeons. While this new harmony and cooperation requires overriding our instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior, something we can do because of our uniquely massive forebrains, I see plenty of evidence that our instincts may be slowly evolving to adapt to the civilized herd we have created for ourselves. This is not remarkable, since this has clearly happened to dogs over roughly the same timespan, the 15,000 years since they began living with us and forming a multi-species community. Dogs and wolves, a single species, have considerably different social instincts. Dogs are indeed in many ways becoming herd-social instead of pack-social, tolerating and even welcoming the company of strangers, even strangers of other species. Humans, in the 10,000 years since we invented agriculture and were required to live in larger communities, seem to be on the same path as dogs. As I pointed out in another thread, Americans wept for Neda, a member of a distant "pack" that we've all been taught to hate by propaganda and a few unfortunate events. Could this have happened five thousand years ago? Ten thousand?
There aren't many pack-social species in which all the adults breed, and unrelated children can take food from dominant males and females. There's bonobos, and us. By the evidence, sure - we haven't changed that much since the Bible stories were composed, or the pyramids built - and the residents of Australis or the Americas or the Polynesian Islands, tens of thousands of years separate from the rest of us, are not known to be less empathetic - or to have been less empathetic, from first contact accounts. Travelers to the Amazon rain forest and similar places often throw in observations, unremarked and normal, of the local children keeping and caring for pet animals.
