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THE WOODLANDER ANTS were like human explorers coming ashore on an uninhabited island. The abandoned Supercolony terrain presented the starving colony with a rich and temporarily boundless food supply. The Woodlanders were free for a while of competition from other ant colonies. But their bonanza could not be harvested easily. The moving, nervous prey that ants hunt are not the same as low-hanging fruit on a bush ripe for the picking. They can only be subdued with skill and swiftness. As Woodlander patrols penetrated the ground cover, their target species met them with protective devices of anatomy and behavior perfected by millions of years of evolution. Such defenses are legion in variety, and some are designed specifically to thwart ants. Many are ingenious even by human military standards. The Woodlander huntresses encountered slow-moving oribatid mites, which resembled a cross between a spider and a turtle. They seemed to be convenient morsels, but were protected by hard shells not easily broken even by the powerful jaws of an ant. Millipedes--thousand-leggers--were prize catches, but they too were armored, in a different way. Their elongated bodies were covered, like those of medieval knights, with hinged plates that gave a measure of flexibility. If those proved insufficient, the thousand-leggers unleashed poisons, including cyanide, on their attackers. Pillbugs, which are land-dwelling crustaceans, had similarly jointed armor and could also roll themselves into an almost impenetrable sphere. Springtails had tiny soft bodies ready for the eating, but were intensely alert and nervous in manner. They were equipped with a spring-loaded lever on their undersides that launched them into the air over a distance equivalent in human terms to the length of a football field, thence out of danger. Nematode roundworms, the most abundant animals on earth, were everywhere in the soil but too small for ants to gather efficiently. Ground beetles, the archrivals of ants in the kinds of food and space they require, proved to be all-purpose fighters. They were not only armored, poisonous, and swift on the ground, but also capable of taking flight if stressed--and, finally, as a last resort, they had jaws sharp and powerful enough to chop an ant in two during insect-to-insect combat.
The Woodlander huntresses did best with the few prey available that were soft, slow, and tasty. When a Woodlander came upon a fallen caterpillar or some other invertebrate that met these exacting standards--in other words, not poisonous, did not strike out with slashing jaws or flee with the equivalent speed of a drag racer, and not least was big enough to be worth the effort--her response was enthusiastic. She reported her find to the colony by laying a chemical odor trail back to the nest and tapping her nestmates with rapid strokes of her forelegs. Out came the alerted workers, and if they found the prey attractive themselves, they attacked. If the prey was so big it could fling a single worker away, it could still be overcome by a swarm of workers rushing it simultaneously.
In one episode that occurred during the exploration of their new territory, a Woodlander force was summoned to the nymph of a mole cricket. While immature, it was still the same size compared to a worker as a cow is to a human. The first dozen workers who arrived proved sufficient for the kill. Several of the attackers were able to pin the still-active cricket nymph by seizing and spreading its legs, while others stung it in vulnerable seams between its chitinous armor plates.
Another target discovered by the Woodlander scouts, the prize of the week, was the grown caterpillar of a cecropia moth, the equivalent in size to the ants as a whale is to humans. Hundreds of workers, accompanied by a score of soldiers this time, were needed to subdue the monster and drag it back to the nest.
The Woodland Colony used the same method to claim and retrieve large, already dead animals before rivals could preempt them. The reward in calories for winning such a bonanza could be enormous. On one occasion a worker force was gathering around the newly discovered corpse of a lizard. It had been led there by one of its most enterprising elite scouts. The prize contained enough food to support the colony for days. Suddenly, however, the bonanza was discovered by a squad of fire ants. The enemy, recruited by their own scouts from a distant colony, did what fire ants do best. They quickly gathered in strength and attacked anything that moved. And they were formidable in combat, especially in groups. A battle was joined, and soon the dead and injured piled up on both sides. The Woodlanders managed to prevail, mainly because their nest was close by and their buildup of fighting forces faster. The presence of soldiers also helped: the members of this larger caste not only stung the fire ants fatally but also used their razor-sharp jaws to clip them into pieces. The fighting Woodlanders were able to clear the lizard's body of fire ants and drag it inch by inch to their own nest.
By this time the Woodland Colony had an adequate military force. Each of its hoplite soldiers was a formidable fighting machine, not only in defense of the colony, but as an escort for workers retrieving food. Its body was thick and muscular. Its head was huge in proportion to the body and was heart-shaped. The swollen posterior lobes were filled with adductor muscles that closed the jaws with enough force to cut through the chitinous exoskeleton and muscle of most kinds of insects. The inner margin of each jaw was lined with a row of eight sharp teeth. The tooth at the tip of the mandible was the longest, serving as a dagger to stab opponents and a hook to seize and hold them while others moved in. The pair of spines extending backward from the upper surface of the middle of the body protected the soldier's thin waist, making it difficult for the ant to be cut in half during combat.
The brain of a soldier was wired for battle. In a gland at the base of each jaw, each carried quantities of alarm pheromones ready to be spritzed into the air when the ant met an enemy. When challenged, the soldier not only produced more of these substances than did an ordinary worker, but was also more sensitive to them. On detecting even a faint trace of the chemicals, the soldier rushed about in search of enemies. Soldiers in combat attracted other soldiers. When they entered a high concentration of the alarm signal at the site of the action, they ran in frenzied loops and threw themselves at any alien object that moved. Deadly threats and overwhelming opposition were of no concern to the soldiers. They were the suicide warriors of the colony.
The Woodland Colony could not afford to raise soldiers while it was small. The investment would have increased the defense capability of the colony and lessened the risk of total destruction by a dangerous enemy. But additions to the worker force were more important for colony growth, and rapid growth was crucial. The colony could gamble that no lethal enemy would appear during its infancy, but it could not gamble with its growth. The larger the population of workers specialized to gather food and feed the young, the faster the colony grew. And the faster its growth, the better chance it had to live another day, and yet another day, until it could afford to convert some of its time and energy into the production of virgin queens and males, thus creating new colonies of its own kind. Soldiers were added along the way, but the number of these military specialists was kept under strict control. Too few, and the colony was at higher risk of destruction by enemies--especially during wars with colonies of the same species. Too many, and the colony grew more slowly. It harvested less food from its territory, and, again, failure was imminent. A colony out of kilter in its military investment could not compete for long with colonies of the same species that kept their investment closer to the optimum for both survival and growth. To reach the right balance between defense and productive labor was a matter of life and death.
The Woodland Colony added its first soldier only when the worker population reached approximately two hundred. The colony grew swiftly during the long hot days of the summer. When the total population reached a thousand, more soldiers were added. The year following the Supercolony disaster, the total Woodlander population approached ten thousand. Of this number, five hundred were soldiers, ready and waiting for any call to action. Their presence made the colony almost invulnerable to invasion by fire ants and other enemies short of armadillos and poison-wielding gods.
This summer the formerly meek Woodlanders were at the height of power for a colony of their species. They found themselves on the edge of an unexplored ant continent left empty by the god-given extinction of Supercolony. As they expanded their territory, in a growing circle foot by foot away from their nest, the colony as a whole grew in overall intelligence. The mental life of the colony was not shared by each worker equally. What any worker knew and thought was only part of what the colony knew and thought. The colony intelligence was distributed among its members, in the same way human intelligence is distributed among the gyri, lobes, and nuclei of the human brain. One cadre of Woodlander workers knew about a particular part of the territory outside the nest, a second cadre knew about another part. Groups of nest-builders remembered their way through various sections of the nest perimeter, and still others were informed about the condition of the brood. Different veteran huntresses had experienced separate conditions of rain, enemy combat, and the nectar-milking of aphids and other sap-suckers. A few scouts knew the way to the expanding frontier of the colony territory.
The Woodland Colony as a whole learned in this manner by calling up pieces of knowledge and putting them together as need demanded, communicated by means of a pheromonal language. Because the superorganism knew much more than any individual ant, it was far smarter.
Enjoying its good fortune, the Woodland Colony also learned the price of prosperity. It was soon cramped in its original hiding place. The workers had been excavating new tunnels and rooms beneath and around the original nest, piece by tiny piece as large as a single ant could carry between her two mandibles. But the meager duff and soil in which the nest was sited was too dry and friable to be ideal for a colony of this species, and the rootlets all around were too thick and tough for the workers to cut. Even worse, the tangled and heavily shaded scrub woodland at the site was poorly suited for foraging.
As scouts explored the Supercolony ghost town, they quickly discovered the large and widely dispersed system of tunnels and chambers left by the former inhabitants. There were many exits, although most were now filled with collapsed earth. Some of the scouts exploring the new terrain began to lay trails from the available exits back to the scrub-woodland mother nest. A few of the nestmates returned along the trails, but their response upon arriving at the Supercolony exits advertised by the scouts was halfhearted. They then either laid weak, fragmented trails of their own, or else returned home without communicating the information to any other nestmate.
Meanwhile, the housing problem at home was becoming severe. The Woodland Colony began a serious search for a better location. By laying and following trails to more and more potential sites and with varying degree of vigor, the colony members voted on the locations presented to them. Some candidate homes received a few votes, others none at all. At first the response failed to build a surge of trail-laying to any of the competing sites, and in time the recruitment died out for most. Then, one mid-August morning, a few scouts hit upon an unusually favorable spot, near the center of what had been the old Trailhead Colony nest. They dug into the plug of soil that closed the original main entrance. As they broke through into the partially empty nestwork below, their enthusiasm grew. At shorter and shorter intervals, some reported back with the good news. Others arriving at the site laid trails of their own. The combined trails grew strong, and some of the more excited scouts began to tap their antennae on the bodies of their nestmates to add emphasis. The message proclaimed urgently, Follow me! Follow me! The voting then swung decisively to the newly favored site. The number of workers running back and forth from the mother nest grew exponentially. The more trail substance laid and the more scouts tapping with their antennae, the more nestmates left the mother nest to inspect the new site. The formicid electorate was soon decided. The communal intelligence said, This is the place! Excavation of the new nest quickly began in earnest. By noon the cleaned-out vertical shaft was three feet deep, and the construction of new lateral galleries and rooms and reopening of old ones was far advanced. The living space came to resemble a snake skeleton, with the central shaft the spine and the lateral galleries the ribs sticking out in all directions.
All through the nest-changing process, from the most aggressive early recruitment to the excavation, elite workers led the way. A tunnel begun by just one such leader caused others close by to help deepen it, or to start tunnels of their own. Elites inspired followers and work generated more work of the same kind until each task was done. The colony depended on the elites to initiate change, and then to keep nestmates on the job.
As shadows of the longleaf pines began to lengthen across the now-teeming center of the Woodlander territory, the underground construction was mostly complete, and the emigration began. The colony had to hurry. If the moving column was caught between the old and new nests after nightfall, when dangerous nocturnal predators emerged, the Woodlanders could easily be wiped out. First came workers carrying nestmates who had been reluctant to undertake the journey. Slackers were a problem for the colony as a whole. Ant colonies may have elites to lead them, but they also have layabouts who need strong encouragement.
Each transport was performed the same way. The recruiter faced the ant to be carried, and pulled gently on her jaws. Quieted by the touch, the ant grew passive, allowing the recruiter to grasp her more firmly on her jaws or another part of her head. The recruited ant next pulled her legs and antennae close to her body, in the same posture she had as a completely immobile pupa. This allowed her to be lifted up and curled over the body of the recruiter. She became an inert package easily carried to the new nest site.
At the peak of the emigration a large majority of the workers were active in the transfer of all the other colony members. Out came the pupae and grublike larvae, held gently in the jaws of a recruiter. Also carefully moved were clusters of eggs laid recently by the Queen and not yet hatched into larvae.
Then out came the Queen herself, sluggish, careful, timid, dragging her abdomen swollen with eggs. A praetorian guard of nurse workers swarmed over and around her, hiding her body from view. Some guided her by gently pulling at her mandibles. She was too large and heavy to be lifted and carried swiftly like a worker, even by a team of nurses. Her painful progress was the critical step in the entire colony emigration. If a bird or lizard saw her and plucked her out as a tidy morsel, or if a force of enemy ants broke through the guard and killed her, the Woodland Colony would be doomed. This time, as in the case of most such rare attempts by colonies of this species, she made it to her new home.
By the time the longleaf pine oasis darkened into twilight, the Queen and almost all of her colony had settled into the new nest. A few individuals still streamed back and forth over the heavily reinforced odor trails, but to no great effect.
The Woodland Colony, having grown into a giant compared to the dying midget of the previous summer, soon reached a size as large as any superorganism of the species other than a supercolony could hope to be. The land given to it by the gods stretched beyond the capacity of the colony to fill its entirety. Woodlander scouts regularly traveled farther from the home nest than those of any other colony at Dead Owl Cove.
So it was inevitable that by early the next spring the boldest of the explorers, one of the Woodlander elites, encountered a scout from another colony. She had never met an individual that belonged to the same species but carried a different colony odor. The two strangers warily examined each other with repeated sweeps of their odor-testing antennae. Then they broke off and hurried away in the direction of their faraway home nests.
In the days that followed, more Woodlanders ran out along the trail laid by the first scout. They too encountered strangers from the foreign nest. The rising incidence of hostile exchanges resulted in more and longer odor trails. The same increase occurred with the aliens. In time a large number of workers from both colonies were patrolling the disputed area.
As in earlier wars at Dead Owl Cove, the scouts tried to intimidate their opponents by pretending to be soldiers. They puffed up their abdomens, straightened their legs to gain height, and posed on top of small pebbles to give the impression of even greater size. Real soldiers also came out to join in the displays. The instinctive pattern of the tournament, with circling, sniffing, and mutual bumping, had been established in this new place. Neither colony would escalate it into outright physical attack. Each waited for signs of weakness in the display of the opposing players.
A territory boundary was drawn, but that was of no great consequence. The Queen of the Woodland Colony was young, the colony's population larger than average for the species, its land rich and productive, and its strength and durability beyond threat.
That summer the Woodlanders also began to produce virgin queens and males. The royals left the nest to mate on schedule. The fecund young queens then flew far beyond the boundaries of their home to distant, unknown lands. The Woodland Colony was reproducing itself. It had won the Darwin game.
The collective mind of the Woodland Colony could only grasp a part of the reason for its outstanding success. Its oldest members could remember the deadly enemies that suddenly disappeared. They had learned about the resources of the vast terrain so abruptly given their colony. They and their younger nestmates had explored and mastered most of it. They held a map of it in their collective heads. If they grasped the existence of the moving-tree gods, they might have surmised how these mysterious forces, no less than storms and lightning-kindled ground fires, had decreed to them such a great good fortune.
Thus ended the Anthill Chronicles. A chain of cycles had been completed. The miniature civilizations of Dead Owl Cove had come full circle. The territory of the original Trailhead Colony witnessed two wars of total destruction, followed by a catastrophe inflicted by the ant gods. The habitat, this little segment of the Nokobee tract, was returned to what it had been at the start. All that was in the past. Now a new mound nest typical of the species stood at the original site. The occupant was fittingly not the Supercolony but a daughter colony of the Trailheaders, the first of the occupants. The resiliency of the ancient longleaf ecosystem had been tested there, and found to hold.
The chain of cycles continued as it had for thousands of years. But now it might change. The tree-trunk gods had arrived and were present all around. They had the power to take everything away, at a whim, and by a single stroke. For the first time in the history of Nokobee, the entirety of all of it, ant, colony, and ecosystem, was at stake.
That winter hard rains soaked the Nokobee pine flats. Three freezes came and went, coating the nest dome of the Woodland Colony with ice, while the inhabitants crouched in dormant sleeping clusters in the deepest chambers. Directly above, unknown to them, gods walked back and forth, measuring, planning, and speaking to one another with their strange sibilant voices.