Why We Need Historians for Social Insects
Social creatures like us find ways to share tasks that perpetuate their communities. Cockroaches are not social even though they live together because they can scatter to the four winds and as long as they find mates they will survive. In a social community each member makes some sort of sacrifice for the sake of the community. Among modern humans the most common form of sacrifice for the community is the payment of taxes, which represent a percentage of the value of our labor.
Scientists speak of other social species as being eusocial, which in general terms is defined as including cooperative care of young, overlapping generations within communities of adults, and a division of labor between breeding and non-breeding members of the population. Humans don’t match the third criterion but we compare ourselves to eusocial creatures in many ways. There are other species among mammals, including chimpanzees, baboons, and wolves (as examples), that nearly match the eusocial archetype.
Most eusocial species fall into the insect orders of the Hymenoptera and Isoptera: ants, bees, and wasps in the first order and termites in the second order. What might surprise you is that these creatures have displayed characteristics of what we humans call “culture”. Culture is comprised of the artifacts and skills that are produced as a result of reasoning. Most people would not believe that insects are capable of reasoning but research has shown that ants make rational decisions and learn from experience. The question remains of whether they are thinking their ways to decisions or following some innate mechanical process for making choices.
Like ants, bees can make complex decisions at the group level based upon experience. The bees’ decision-making process has been described as “democratic” and not rational but the division between instinctive-yet-mechanical choices and rational/reasoned choices has not been defined. If social insects can learn from their experiences and change their behaviors, and if they can pass on these new behaviors to future generations, then they meet the outward appearance of having “culture”.
This is a very important step in our understanding of insects because they clearly are not very much like us. They build cities, wage wars, herd other animals, and even farm to sustain themselves but they are not human. So while insects are like us in some ways they are unlike us in many other ways. If we can learn to interpret their behavior with greater precision we may take a huge step forward in deciphering the behaviors of truly alien species, creatures from other worlds.
In other words, expanding our understanding of social creatures like insects is the best practice available to us for training our science to decipher and understand an alien civilization. If we ever meet creatures from other worlds orbiting other stars, we’ll need to have some reliable methods for figuring out how those civilizations evolved and what to expect from them. And this is where the need for social insect historians arises.
We don’t know much about the histories of social insects. We have studied them scientifically for less than 200 years. Under the right circumstances ants build massive supercolonies and refrain from attacking nearby rivals of the same species, and yet they can be very aggressive invaders nonetheless. If there were true historians among the social insects, how far back could their histories extend? We know that these creatures have been around for at least 100 million years.
Since there are no historians among the insects it would behoove to become historians for them. By studying the spread of insect species as they displace long-established ant species, and as they fight ancient diseases, we can learn a great deal about how other (Earthly) intelligences deal with war, disease, and even climate change. The now-famous “zombie ant fungus” looks like it should have swept the world millions of years ago, but scientists have learned that another parasite short-circuits the zombie parasite.
Social insects don’t just wage war against each other within their own species; they also fight other species. The most common inter-species wars have been observed between wasps and bees, but ants have also been known to attack wasps. Some ants even enslave other ants, and the enslaved ants may rebel against their masters. These activities happen on an immense scale across the world — a scale well beyond our ability to document what is happening or to observe its effects on the environment.
But just as human history has changed the environment we can be sure that insect history changes the environment, too. What we want to know is how much do insects alter the environment; how much do they regulate it; and how much do the social insects do these things compared to other insects. By studying the true history of social species, even in as little scope as we are able, we will learn something about how life competes within a shared environment and in a newly discovered environment.
We may also be able to develop models to project probable outcomes of future events including epidemics, wars, and climate change. And perhaps someday, when we meet creatures from another world, we’ll have an idea of what risks we are taking, and what we should expect to happen.