Hello ,

Ants have made quite the uproar in the news in the last week. In case you missed it you can read all about it in the article on the conversation here. The article explains the fact that we share planet earth with around 20 quadrillion (that is 20 followed by 15 zeros if you want to write it down numerically) ants, and this enormous number of ants outweighs wild birds and mammals!

This, however, again opens the controversial question: What is considered a single organism if we look at ants? Can we count each of the 20 quadrillion ants as individuals? Or should we use this number to estimate the number of ant colonies?

An ant cannot survive alone. All extant ant species form part of a colony in one way or another. Most ants will die if they are separated from the colony and most ants are incapable of reproducing on their own, as only the queen in the colony can produce new individuals.

If we look at a mammal, it is quite clear that if we cut of a limb, the limb isn’t an individual, because neither can the limb live on its or can it reproduce on its own, thus it is only a part of the individual. Yet with ants we tend to separate them into individuals because they run around on their own, yet they cannot live nor reproduce on their own. Let us consider hive mind and hive intelligence as discussed in Issue #17, we can clearly see that ants act as a single organism if we look at their intelligence.

Thus, if an ant colony requires all its members to survive, have optimal intelligence, and be able to reproduce, I believe that we should consider single ants as parts of an organism and not as individuals. But do you have any idea in what a taxonomic tough spot we will be in when we decide to start using a colony level taxonomic system and not the current taxonomic system that is mainly based on the worker caste?

A similarly difficult taxonomic shift has been done in fungi. When we realised that fungi have multiple life stages and can present completely different morphologies and physiologies in the various life stages, so it should be possible to move away from worker caste taxonomic system of ants to a colony level taxonomic system. This could potentially sort out many of the challenges in the worker caste taxonomic system that we are currently have.

Think of this, stepping on an ant doesn’t kill it, it only decreases it in size by 1, very much like you falling on your knee and scraping off some skin.

Now the question is, how many colonies does 20 quadrillion ants make?

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