Ants

This interview on Fresh Air is horrifying:

First some general questions about ants. You refer to them throughout the book, and when you're talking about an individual ant, as she. Why?

Well, ants are a sisterhood. They guys really don't do too much. They're kind of kicked out of the society pretty soon after they're born. They have a single function, that is to have sex okay, two functions, to have sex and die. And they don't participate in the social life.

...Well, the army ants, which do much the same thing as the marauder ants, they can catch lizards, snakes. They can even kill infants in cribs and cattle, if they're tied up. So their capacity for destruction is immense. That's why you do not tie up your cattle in Africa.

But in all these cases, it depends on a immediate presence of a huge force, and you pour on well, it turns out the front lines of these raids have these little minor workers, which are the cheap labor, and this is the way the Romans conducted their attacks.

...they have very powerful mandibles. Much of their mass is the muscles for their jaws. They often don't actually kill the prey, though. They will chop off its legs and carry it back, and once took a cricket from the ants that was being carried to the nest, and I put it in a little dish, and I looked at it the next day, and it was still alive. It just didn't have any legs or anything. They'd removed all its moving parts.

So I had this nightmare the next night of having all my legs removed and being dragged into the underground chambers of the ant to be eaten at their convenience.

Ants are quite willing to die for their colony. So what they want to do for their colony is much more than we'd want to do for our society, usually, and that includes killing themselves in warfare, including if you come along; and it also includes, if you're dying of old age, they do not have health insurance. They don't argue about such things. They wander off and die if they're diseased or hurt, or they serve what final duties they can, and that includes, as you say, guarding the trail.

So along the borders of the trail are all these old ants, crippled ants, staggering and unable to stand up but yet reaching up with their jaws, feebly trying to keep the enemy at bay.

Terrorism doesn't stop an ant colony. If you come along and smash a quarter of the population, you can never slow the colony down. It has to grow back, but you can never get a nerve center.

Ants disperse all this information amongst themselves, and they move efficiently and do the right thing without anyone telling them what to do.

This is a single nationality with a single scent. So you can carry an individual ant from San Francisco with you all the way down to Mexico, if youre so inclined, and drop it off and it will merge seamlessly with the society there. You carry that same ant a quarter inch across the border to the next society in Escondido and it's dead within a minute. And these huge colonies have borders that are miles long, and millions of ants are dying each month right in people's backyards out of view at the base of the grasses. And it's basically the largest battle ever waged. And it doesnt seem like much because, heck, what are they doing?