The Dead Ant Is Not a Dead Ant

But the other ants think it is

For reasons I don’t want to get into, I was researching ant behaviour today. And I came across something that EO Wilson found about ants. First, from this interview, what happens when ants die:

I was doing a lot of the basic work on ant communication. How they smell and taste their way through life. And I asked the question that you just asked. I said, how do they know when an ant is dead? Well, I noticed that occasionally an ant would die in the colony and its body would be ignored. The ant could just go over on its back and be like this, motionless, and the ants wouldn't pay any attention. But after a day or two they began to pick it up and take it out to the ant cemetery. Well, the ant the cemetery is really just a pile like the garbage dump. It's just a kind gentle name they use for the garbage dump.

The bit about the motionless ant ignored by the others makes me think of us. In a surreal fantasy, I can imagine myself collapsing outside the Starbucks I am at. I just lie there. People pass by. No one cares. Everyone leaves it to someone else to dispose of the body — but there is no one else when you have accounted for everyone. So I lie there until the decay gets to the point where I am a nuisance, and poor people are paid to take my body away.

This is a metaphor for our society, isn’t it? And maybe it holds true even if you look inwards and not outwards. What parts of you are dead?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Think about it.

Anyway, Wilson continues:

Anyways, they take her out and just drop her. So how do they know she's dead? And then I started figuring, well maybe there's something in the dead ant that's signaling the others that she's dead. So what I did, I found out-- work done by other scientists-- I found out what substances, what chemicals is in a dead insect. Don't ask me, please, why some chemist worked all that out-- what are all the chemicals are in a dead insect. But it helped me a lot. So what I did, I got all the various chemicals in pure form from chemical suppliers. And I started trying out, one after the other. One was trimethylamine, that's the smell of a decaying fish. And the next was a component of solid waste matter. The kind that repels us considerably.

Why do we do what we do? We humans, we like to think that we make sense of the world. We tell stories about it like this one: Man is dead; take his body away. Wilson believes that ants take away the body they ignored for three days because of some chemical. And he finds it.

But anyway, let me get to the end of the story. I tried one after the other. The ants paid no attention or else they got all alarmed and ran away from it. And finally I came to something that's in corpses. Nobody had ever thought about it. It's called oleic acid. And that's the sort of stuff you get when you let butter decay and that sort of thing. And I put a little daub of oleic acid on a make believe dead ant. And they immediately picked it up and treated it as a corpse. Voilá.

[…] I just put a little daub on a healthy, strong ant and they came up to it. As it tried to protest-- wiggling its arms. Get away. Get away. And they picked it up. They just picked it up dutifully and they went and put the struggling ant and threw it on to the pile. And so it would have to stand there for a while cleaning the oleic acid off. And then see if if it could get back into the colony.

So first they ignore the dead ant. And then, when the chemical is right, they take away the live ant and put it on a garbage heap of a corpses.

All the while, the ant wriggles around. I’m alive! I’m alive! WTF guys, can’t you see that I’m alive?

I want you to consider the notion that we are not the rational animals we think we are. Bring the right chemical to us, trigger a particular instinct, and we will also carry our fellows, and even ourselves, to that garbage heap of corpses.