In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (2/26/2009), the same issue in which you’ll find Zadie Smith’s article on Obama about which I recently wrote, Tim Flannery reviews Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson’s The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. I’m a long-ago collector of beautiful small things with gossamer wings and thread-thin legs that I killed in pickle jars lined with carbontetrachloride-soaked cotton balls, carefully putting the butterflies and moths and beetles and most anything else with six to eight legs carefully in one practiced motion into the jar and screwing on the lid to watch them, my nose against the glass, perish.  So I would have preferred reading this book rather than reading about it, but at $55 ($34.65 at Amazon) I’ll wait until I get it from the library. I”m now first on the list.

But even in review the idea is fascinating that we should view ants as superorganisms, each ant being like a cell,  living for a short time, save for the queen that can live for ten years, dividing through bizarre sexuality, and working in concert to build vast villages and even harvest leaves and farm mushrooms.

As for sex, it could hardly be more bizarre, completely female save during brief mating seasons. There are even, if you can believe it, virgin births:

Ant sex seems utterly alien. Except for short periods just before the mating season, when an ant colony is reproducing, it is composed entirely of females, and among some primitive species virgin births are common. All the offspring of such virgin mothers, however, are winged males that almost invariably depart the nest. If a female ant mates, however, all of her fertilized eggs become females. In many ant societies, reproduction is the prerogative of a single individual—the queen. She mates soon after leaving her natal colony, and stores the sperm from that mating (or from multiple matings) all of her life, using it to fertilize (in some cases) millions of eggs over ten or more years.

Some ant species do not have queen ants in the strict sense. Instead, worker ants (which are all female) that have mated with a male ant become the dominant reproductive individuals. These are the gamergates, or “married workers,” and their sex life can be brutal. In one species the gamergates venture outside of the nest to attract a male, engage him in copulation, then carry him into the nest before snipping off his genitals and throwing away the rest of his body. The severed genitals continue to inseminate the gamergate for up to an hour, after which they too are discarded. The fertilized gamergates then vie for dominance, causing disruptive conflict in the nest. Sometimes an oligarchy of gamergates is established, but in other instances a single gamergate triumphs.

You might think that such an established gamergate would watch the colony carefully for signs of emerging rivals, but this is not the case. Instead it’s the worker ants that do so by taking a keen interest in the sexual status of their sisters. If they sense that one is becoming a sexually active gamergate, they will turn on her, either assaulting her or watching carefully until she produces eggs, which they promptly consume. It’s intriguing that the sterile workers play the role of monitoring and regulating the sexual life of the colony. In a stretch of the imagination, I can see parallels between this behavior and the role of policing and censuring the sex lives of the rich and famous that gossip magazines play in our own society.

Flannery suggests that we are, like ants, a superorganism, but in our case we’re “in the process of metamorphosing into the largest, most formidable superorganism of all time.” My question is, are we becoming more like the ants, or are they becoming more like us?