Why it’s high time we stopped anthropomorphising ants

Pollution is making many cities unlivable for their human inhabitants, but it is also tearing ant families and communities apart. Ants recognise each other by sniffing a thin layer of hydrocarbons on the outside of their exoskeletons; each colony has a specific “smell”. But a new study reveals that ozone emissions can change the structure of these hydrocarbons. After ants wander around in relatively typical urban air with 100 parts per billion of ozone, their nestmates no longer perceive them as allies. Some are attacked by their own families. Others neglect larvae that are exposed to ozone, leaving them to die.

If you consider that there are roughly 20 quadrillion ants on Earth, that means Homo sapiens has figured out how to produce homewrecking at an unimaginable scale.

Sounds horrific, right? That’s because the story I have just told you is a case of anthropomorphism, or projecting human traits onto non-human creatures, comparing ant colonies to human families. Though many scientists rail against anthropomorphism as misleading, others are fond of drawing parallels between ants and humans as a way to explain the evolution of everything from altruism to social networks.

Famously, the entomologist E.O. Wilson used ants as evidence for his theory of “sociobiology,” which suggests that most animal behaviours are the result of evolutionary necessity. By observing how biology drove ant behaviour, Wilson argued, we could learn a lot about how biology has also shaped human achievement and progress.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most outspoken critics of Wilson’s idea, calling it “biological determinism” and warning that it could lead to eugenicist social policies or worse. The conflict over the role of biology in human society continues to this day in academia, though now sociobiology is generally referred to as evolutionary psychology.

But something fundamental has changed in the way scientists talk about ants. Deborah Gordon, a Stanford University biologist who studies ants, discovered in the early 21st century that ant behaviour is algorithmic. She has spent years studying carpenter ants, among other species, and eventually began working with colleagues in computer science to explain the way ants allocate tasks within their colonies by using what are effectively distributed signalling networks. If a worker ant discovers a giant pile of sugar, for example, she leaves a pheromone trail behind for other ants to follow. As she walks back to the nest, she encounters other ants who sniff her and discover that she has found far more food than one individual can carry. Calculating quickly, they will realise that more foragers are required, and will drop what they are doing to join the ant gathering sugar.

There is no single leader or group of managers who are ordering the ants to switch tasks. They are doing it simply by communicating with each other, individual by individual, passing the message along to recruit workers until the task is complete. Gordon nicknamed this process “the anternet“, because it resembles the way distributed computer networks allocate bandwidth for data transfers. But rather than allocating bandwidth, the ants are allocating, well, ants.

Gordon’s work would seem to represent a dramatic shift away from Wilson’s – she is, after all, comparing ants to computers rather than to humans. And yet we live in an era when AI companies are betting billions that the human mind can be replicated by software algorithms. Algorithmic determinism has superseded biological determinism, but the upshot for ants is still the same. Humans use them as analogies for other animals’ behaviour, but don’t often appreciate them for their own, unique ant-ness.

Which brings me back to the study about how human-caused pollution is messing up ants’ ability to recognise each other. Gordon’s anternet depends on ants from the same colony meeting up, exchanging information and then calculating whether they need to help their sisters with a task. But when ozone causes the hydrocarbons on ants’ bodies to oxidise, colony sisters no longer recognise each other. They can’t coordinate on jobs. This could lead to the death of a colony.

To a human, this doesn’t sound like a big deal. We don’t smell each other’s bodies to figure out if we need to gather food or take care of babies. We don’t operate in vast, distributed networks of women who collectively care for each other and their habitats. But we do live on the same planet as wild, amazing animals that do. And if we don’t limit ozone, we could destroy their societies. Maybe it is time we stop using ants as analogies for ourselves and our machines, and start caring about who they really are.

What I’m reading
H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, where the Martians are cyber-vampires (no really, they are).

What I’m watching
My Life Is Murder, a delightfully corny detective series starring Lucy Lawless.

What I’m working on
Finding a place to live in a new (to me) city.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com