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The evolution of the mealybugs has been shaped by the choices of ants in the same way that goat, sheep and cows have been shaped by the choices of humans.
This isn't just symbiosis. It's animal husbandry.
And it's absurdly effective too! These ants never need to leave their nests to forage.
This is what I mean about ants having achieved the same kind of complex solutions we celebrate in human history...just in their own way.
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When a young ant queen is ready to leave her colony to try to found a new nest she selects a mealybug from the many her sisters are tending in their underground galleries. The mealybugs live on the roots of trees and the ants dig out spaces so they can feed and reproduce. They thrive on the sugars from the mealybugs and cull their herds for protein.
A young queen ant *chooses* which mealybug to take on her flight. They like larger females, ideally pregnant. 3/
It's not like the ants are deciding which aphids will make the best cattle then selecting those for the next generation.
But this more typical and casual form of symbiosis finds a kind of refinement in the ant genus Acropyga.
These hypogaeic ants almost never leave their underground nests due to their ancient and highly refined relationship with several species of mealybugs.
2/
I want to say a bit more about how ants participate in selective breeding. Most people are aware of the symbiotic relationship between ants and aphids. The ants protect the aphids from predators, the aphids process plant sugars for the ants. Over millions of years many species of ants and aphids have come to depend on each other in this way.
But is that *really* "selective breeding" I think most people would say it isn't. 1/
Some of the best portrayals of eusocial insects in all of SF.
As creatures that need to cooperate and coordinate our actions over millions of willful individuals we could learn a lot from ants.
They are anarchists, you quickly discover. Anarchists with excellent communications and foundational shared values that make the fact that two ants may each decide to solve a problem in a different, or even in a conflicting way irrelevant.
In fact, the constant push and pull between individuals is essential to "ant genius"
I mean... kind of. But there were some things about the way that the "hive mind" was portrayed in those books that annoyed me.
The mind of the superorganism is emergent from individual minds. It's not some central clearing house controlled by the queen or the "big brain bug"
There are whole areas of research on such things but I don't think any of them have yielded the magic that they have promised in their more daring moments.
But I think that says more about primate impatience than the potential.
This is about the useful nuts that help you build things and fix things.
I think ants would feel a kind of kinship with the LLM method of solution seeking. They are big fans of brute force. They might even recognize an LLM as a kind of "bad colony" but I'm getting perilously close to talking about "The Book I Can't Talk About Until it is Done" so I'll stop there.
Without knowing what they are in any way that we can recognize.
Ants have achieved the same major technological milestones that we celebrate in humans. They grapple with problems of managing major population centers and information that are similar to the problems humans face.
And the solutions found by ants are much more robust than those found by humans.
They have demonstrated they can stand the test of time and they show no signs of being "done" growing slowly more complex and more important in every ecosystem they enter.
If ants didn't already have agriculture (selective breeding of scale insects, mass production of fungi, shepherding) people would say "how could an ant ever develop agriculture? Crows have bigger brains and THEY don't have agriculture."
If ants didn't build sewer systems, which some do, people would say the same thing. Or if they didn't practice medical amputation.
Ants achieve these things without knowing what they are. In the ant way.
It will be the same for space travel.
Oarfish are so elegant and beautiful. It's like a fish from a fairy kingdom.
Sometimes they have been seen resting in a vertical position. I love them.
Birds are pretty robust. Pigeons have a pretty chaotic record. The dodo? Passenger pigeon? It's such a diverse clade of birds. Very adaptable.
Do you think this was maybe a little mean? I do have a point here.
I was listening to some SF guy going on about "intelligent life on earth" and talking about how if humans can't last for a long time it's kind of over for earth.
But... there are ants.
And the ants of the future? Come on. If we can imagine people of the future with space colonies and amazing technology why not the ants?
They would do it in their own way of course. But they want to fill the stars just as badly.
chronotypicals.