In Perek Shirah, the ancient Midrash that
lists the philosophical and ethical lessons to be learned
from the natural world, one of the songs reads: "The ant is
saying, `Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider her ways, and
be wise' (Mishlei 6:6)."
All creatures are wonderful, but ants, which comprise about
ten per cent of the entire mass of living things on earth,
are extraordinarily so. There are so many different amazing
aspects of an ant that it's difficult to know where to
begin. The verse of the ant's song first highlights an
obvious feature of the ant -- its constant hard work.
Nobody can fail to be impressed by a convoy of ants, each
carrying its load of up to six times its body weight back to
the nest. If an ant just needed to pick up a snack for
itself, that would be easier. But the ants work hard in
order to fulfill the many different tasks that the nest
requires -- collecting food for the queen and other ants,
excavating new chambers for the nest, collecting material
for construction of the nursery, farming aphids in order to
maintain a food supply, chewing up leaves in order to build
a fungus garden, weeding unwanted species of mold from the
garden, and so on.
In the words of one entomologist: "Life is work and work is
life to leafcutters and other ants. The seven castes of
leafcutters perform twenty-nine different tasks or social
functions, all in assembly-line fashion, everything from
cutting the leaves to cultivating the gardens between the
rows. In each caste, workers handle two or three different
jobs suited to their size and physical ability! If one caste
is removed experimentally, ants from other castes eagerly
take on more work. It is the ideal assembly line when
workers can fill in for each other as needed. Henry Ford
would have hired them on the spot. Those who research
ergonomics -- the study of work, performance, and efficiency
-- in insects as well as other species are impressed by
ants." (Erich Hoyt, The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the
Land of Ants, p. 31).
This hard work is entirely unmitigated; unlike social
mammals, ants never engage in play. This tiny insect is a
lesson for us all: "Go to the ant, you sluggard!"
Ants are the epitome of mutual cooperation, so much so that
the gemora highlights them as a living lesson so
obvious that we would have learned the lesson even without
the Torah to spell it out:
"Rabbi Yochanan said: Had the Torah not been given, we would
have learned modesty from the cat, [the prohibition of]
theft from the ant, [the prohibition of] forbidden
relationships from the dove, and derech eretz from
fowl" (Eruvin 100b).
It isn't only that an ant does not steal food from its
fellow worker. Each ant totally and utterly subjugates
itself to the requirements of its colony. They do this to an
extraordinary degree, so much so that they possess no
individual identity but live solely as part of the colony.
As an entomologist put it: "It would appear that socialism
really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had
the wrong species" (Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the
Ants, 1994).
"The column of army ants is the probing arm of a hungry
organism. When it encounters substantial meat, the colony
harnesses its forces: Larger workers, or soldiers, are
dispatched, and the grasping claws of the colony turn from
functional gathering tools to sharp weapons as their prey is
subdued and killed. Then the probing "arm" transports the
meat to booty caches and from there to the main part of the
colony, the bivouac, which is the portable army ant nest.
The bivouac is often situated beside or beneath a log, and
its walls are made of living ants. Their outstretched
intertwined legs create the walls of a shelter for the queen
and her massive brood. There, the meat is fed to the queen
and the colony's brood and shared among the workers. The
miniature army ant column is not a single ant, not a
thousand, not ten thousand, but it is a superorganism"
(Erich Hoyt, The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land
of Ants, p. 73).
By mutual cooperation rather than selfish grabbing, the ant
colony is able to achieve far more than any individual ant
could ever achieve. This is the concept of malchus,
kingship, taken to the limit. A malchus enables
its members to live beyond themselves and attain a greatness
that they would never attain on their own. "Go to the ant,
you sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise."
The collective intelligence of an ant colony boggles the
mind. The tasks that they -- it -- performs are of a
complexity that one would never expect from so small a
creature.
"There are four things on earth that are small, but they are
exceedingly wise: The ants are not a strong people, yet they
prepare their bread in the summer; The hyraxes are a feeble
folk, yet they make their houses in the rocks; The locusts
have no king, yet they all go forth in bands; The spider
catches with her hands, yet she is in kings' palaces"
(Mishlei 30:24-28).
Ants are indeed exceedingly wise; it only takes a few
examples to see this. Many ant species construct and
maintain farms. They build rooms into which they bring the
eggs of aphids or other insects. The ants carefully raise
and tend to these aphids, bringing them leaves to eat. On a
regular basis, the ants milk the aphids for the nutritious
liquid, called "honeydew," that they produce.
Weaver ants construct their nests by gluing leaves together.
They do this by means of their larva, which exude a sticky
silk secretion. The ants hold their larva between their
jaws, squeezing them gently to produce the silk, and
manipulate them like tubes of glue to attach the leaves.
Ants can assess the viability of waging war against another
colony, apparently by counting the frequency of finding
enemy ants (which indicates how many there are of them), and
assessing how many majors (the largest type of workers)
there are (which would indicate the size of the colony).
Ants can also communicate by means of odors. They possess
some half a dozen scent glands, each of which produces a
"fundamental concept" such as "Alarm! Enemies entering
nest!" or "This track leads to the source of food." They can
combine several odors to make mixtures. In this way they
possess more "words" in their vocabulary than the mere
number of scent glands in their bodies.
The more one studies the complex lives of ants, the more one
stands in awe at the wisdom contained in such a creation.
The song of the amazing ant is, "Go to the ant, you
sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise."
Rabbi Nosson Slifkin teaches at Yeshivas Ohr Somayach in
Jerusalem. He is currently preparing an English elucidation
of Perek Shirah entitled Nature's Song for
publication.
