Insects, like ants and bees, are fascinating to me because their decisions are group oriented. They have a swarm mentality. Their actions are based upon the survival and general welfare of their group. While ants and bees have a different way of communicating, both insects are concerned with the collective mentality. I am not sure whether or not insects are capable of having a "mentality", but they are living creatures with a desire to survive and some would say with a spirit.
Bees engage in a sort of dance to communicate. They move from one location to another in a swarm. The swarm protects the bees because less bees will be harmed if there is an outer layer of bees shielding the others. Each bee has a job. Scout bees find new nesting sites, agree through dance upon their success, and then return to the hive to convince the other bees of their success. A decision is then made quickly by the whole hive whether or not to leave.
Ants communicate through the release of chemical messages called pheromones. One time I observed ants trying to gather popcorn and take it back to the pile. It was interesting. Any time an ant passed another ant it would stop and touch the other ants feelers. In no time there were too many ants to count. The popcorn was gathered in no time. Ants create little cities with waste dumps on the outer edges. They know to put the waste away from them in order to stay healthy. Even humans weren't great at this in the old days. Ants send out chemicals in order to make a collective decision about when to to bite a food source. They secretively swarm and bite their pray all at the same time in a surprise attack.
Engineers have started trying to emulate this swarm mentality when creating robots. They are creating swarm bots which communicate and make decisions as a group. This technology is particularly handy because if robots can communicate they can repair themselves and even make new robots. Well, maybe that is a little scary, but I think that the swarm mentality could be helpful to humans in other ways. If people made decisions that were less selfish and in the best interest of everyone, the world would be a better place.
I'd also like to comment on how insects are so feared by people. They are not nearly as intimidating as some large carnivorous mammals, however, something about them tends to make humans really uncomfortable. I think that it's because they are so different from us. People tend to be afraid of the "other". It's not as easy to personify bugs just as it is not as easy to personify plants. I think that this is why people can so easily kill either organism.
I like this post, this train of thought. Ever since I was little I was always slightly obsessed with insects (and thus nicknamed "bug"). I would sit for hours, or so it seemed in child-lack-of-sense-of-time, in the middle of their path, letting them walk over my arm like a bridge. I felt that ants and caterpillars, roly-polies, and even the worms that we would buy in those Styrofoam containers for fishing, were my friends. I have never really lost this affinity and awe for insects; if anything my respect for them has deepened after learning of some of their amazing adaptive capacities(if we agree post-Mortion that "adaptive" is a plausible descriptor)and behaviors.
ReplyDeleteThere were, however, a couple of instances in my childhood in which insects became the object of horror. One time I was camping with family and my dad decided he wanted to park our trailer next to a creek rather than in an official campground area to have easy access to trout fishing. It turned out to be the season of ladybug mating, and the air was tinted orange with their swarms. The instant you walked outside, you had ladybugs crawling all over your body--ladybugs caught in your hair and clothes, scuttling near your nostrils and in your ears. This was too much even for me. My sister and I wanted to take refuge in the trailer, and even its screen door was covered in ladybugs, an ominous indicator to the apocalypse that awaited outside. My dad of course would not stand for his children to lock themselves in the trailer on a camping trip and banned us from our shelter. My sister and I proceeded to spend the next two days while we were there waging war against the insects and trying to drown them in the creek in mass quantities. But they far outnumbered us; it was a senseless battle.
I think insects are the uncanny of the Ecological Thought. In Lacanian philosophy, insects are like the intrusion of the Real. It is somehow a source of aversion to imagine this uncontrollable Other, rapidly hatching, fornicating, multiplying, and dying like little machines. We don't like the idea that life, the same sort that applies to us, can be so dispensable. It is a threat to our illusion of immortality, superiority. If we want to go there (there being the supposed hierarchy of species), I personally think cockroaches are the far superior species. They have been known to dive-bomb my head when even just the slight thought of eliminating them occurred to me.
Also, check out the chapter "Fecundity" in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for more on insects, and an exploration of our aversion to them in mass quantities.
ReplyDeleteAnother little tidbit: In the book Tropical Nature, there is a chapter on army ants of the tropics. An ant's instinct for the well-being of the colony so overpowers his own individual instinct to survive to the point that if there is at any moment an imbalance in population of one role of ant (worker, soldier, etc.), a chemical message is released and this kind of ant will "turn itself in." The larger and equipped soldier ant will hand itself over to the little workers, and pacifically allow itself to be dismantled limb by limb.
There are humans known to sacrifice themselves to a "higher" cause. In our country these dedicated people are called terrorists. But imagine for a second what actions would be taken by humans if the cause became not only the survival of the species, but the wellbeing of the mesh (is it safe to say the mesh is sick?). I would hope there would be a solution beyond self-elimination.