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King Solomon may have gained some of his famed wisdom from an unlikely source – ants.

According to a Jewish legend, Solomon conversed with a clever ant queen that confronted his pride, making quite an impression on the Israelite king. In the biblical book of Proverbs (6:6-8), Solomon shares this advice with his son: “Look to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise. Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.”

While I can’t claim any familial connection to King Solomon, despite sharing his name, I’ve long admired the wisdom of ants and have spent over 20 years studying their ecology, evolution and behaviors. While the notion that ants may offer lessons for humans has certainly been around for a while, there may be new wisdom to gain from what scientists have learned about their biology.

Ants have evolved highly complex social organizations.

Lessons from ant agriculture

As a researcher, I’m especially intrigued by fungus-growing ants, a group of 248 species that cultivate fungi as their main source of food. They include 79 species of leafcutter ants, which grow their fungal gardens with freshly cut leaves they carry into their enormous underground nests. I’ve excavated hundreds of leafcutter ant nests from Texas to Argentina as part of the scientific effort to understand how these ants coevolved with their fungal crops.

Much like human farmers, each species of fungus-growing ant is very particular about the type of crops they cultivate. Most varieties descend from a type of fungus that the ancestors of fungus-growing ants began growing some 55 million to 65 million years ago. Some of these fungi became domesticated and are now unable to survive on their own without their insect farmers, much like some human crops such as maize.

Ants started farming tens of millions of years before humans.

Ant farmers face many of the same challenges human farmers do, including the threat of pests. A parasite called Escovopsis can devastate ant gardens, causing the ants to starve. Likewise in human agriculture, pest outbreaks have contributed to disasters like the Irish Potato Famine, the 1970 corn blight and the current threat to bananas.

Since the 1950s, human agriculture has become industrialized and relies on monoculture, or growing large amounts of the same variety of crop in a single place. Yet monoculture makes crops more vulnerable to pests because it is easier to destroy an entire field of genetically identical plants than a more diverse one.

Industrial agriculture has looked to chemical pesticides as a partial solution, turning agricultural pest management into a billion-dollar industry. The trouble with this approach is that pests can evolve new ways to get around pesticides faster than researchers can develop more effective chemicals. It’s an arms race – and the pests have the upper hand.

Ants also grow their crops in monoculture and at a similar scale – after all, a leafcutter ant nest can be home to 5 million ants, all of which feed on the fungi in their underground gardens. They, too, use a pesticide to control Escovopsis and other pests.

Yet, their approach to pesticide use differs from humans’ in one important way. Ant pesticides are produced by bacteria they allow to grow in their nests, and in some cases even on their bodies. Keeping bacteria as a living culture allows the microbes to adapt in real time to evolutionary changes in the pests. In the arms race between pests and farmers, farming ants have discovered that live bacteria can serve as pharmaceutical factories that can keep up with ever-changing pests.

Whereas recent developments in agricultural pest management have focused on genetically engineering crop plants to produce their own pesticides, the lesson from 55 million years of ant agriculture is to leverage living microorganisms to make useful products. Researchers are currently experimenting with applying live bacteria to crop plants to determine if they are effective at producing pesticides that can evolve in real time along with pests.

Improving transportation

Ants can also offer practical lessons in the realm of transportation.

Ants are notoriously good at quickly locating food, whether it’s a dead insect on a forest floor or some crumbs in your kitchen. They do this by leaving a trail of pheromones – chemicals with a distinctive smell ants use to guide their nest mates to food. The shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most pheromone because more ants will have traveled back and forth along it in a given amount of time.

In the 1990s, computer scientists developed a class of algorithms modeled after ant behavior that are very effective at finding the shortest path between two or more locations. Like with real ants, the shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most virtual pheromone because more virtual ants will have traveled along it in a given amount of time. Engineers have used this simple but effective approach to design telecommunication networks and map delivery routes.

Not only are ants good at finding the shortest route from their nests to a source of food, thousands of ants are capable of traveling along these routes without causing traffic jams. I recently began collaborating with physicist Oscar Andrey Herrera-Sancho to study how leafcutter ants maintain such a steady flow along their foraging paths without the slowdowns typical of crowded human sidewalks and highways.

We are using cameras to track how each individual ant responds to artificial obstacles placed on their foraging trails. Our hope is that by getting a better understanding of the rules ants use to respond to both obstacles and the movement of other ants, we can develop algorithms that can eventually help program self-driving cars that never get stuck in traffic.

Look to the ant

To be fair, there are plenty of ways ants are far from perfect role models. After all, some ant species are known for indiscriminate killing, and others for enslaving babies.

But the fact is that ants remind us of ourselves – or the way we might like to imagine ourselves – in many ways. They live in complex societies with division of labor. They cooperate to raise their young. And they accomplish remarkable engineering feats – like building structures with air funnels that can house millions – all without blueprints or a leader. Did I mention their societies are run entirely by females?

There is still a lot to learn about ants. For example, researchers still don’t fully understand how an ant larva develops into either a queen – a female with wings that can live for 20 years and lay millions of eggs – or a worker – a wingless, often sterile female that lives for less than a year and performs all the other jobs in the colony. What’s more, scientists are constantly discovering new species – 167 new ant species were described in 2021 alone, bringing the total to more than 15,980.

By considering ants and their many fascinating ways, there’s plenty of wisdom to be gained.

*E.O. Wilson in February 2003. Source: Jim Harrison, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons*

Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

By Doug Tallamy, The Conversation (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I met Edward O. Wilson in 1982, he had already made at least five such contributions to science.

Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies.

Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O.—as he was fondly known—was an academic god for many young scientists like me. This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study.

Big insights from small subjects

In 1982 I cautiously sat down next to the great man during a break at a small conference on social insects. He turned, extended his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” Then we talked until it was time to get back to business.

Three hours later I approached him again, this time without trepidation because surely now we were the best of friends. He turned, extended his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Wilson forgetting me, but remaining kind and interested anyway, showed that beneath his many layers of brilliance was a real person and a compassionate one. I was fresh out of graduate school, and doubt that another person at that conference knew less than I — something I’m sure Wilson discovered as soon as I opened my mouth. Yet he didn’t hesitate to extend himself to me, not once but twice.

Thirty-two years later, in 2014, we met again. I had been invited to speak in a ceremony honoring his receipt of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science. The award honored Wilson’s lifetime achievements in science, but particularly his many efforts to save life on Earth.

My work studying native plants and insects, and how crucial they are to food webs, was inspired by Wilson’s eloquent descriptions of biodiversity and how the myriad interactions among species create the conditions that enable the very existence of such species.

I spent the first decades of my career studying the evolution of insect parental care, and Wilson’s early writings provided a number of testable hypotheses that guided that research. But his 1992 book, “The Diversity of Life,” resonated deeply with me and became the basis for an eventual turn in my career path.

Though I am an entomologist, I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes.

Throughout his career Wilson flatly rejected the notion held by many scholars that natural history—the study of the natural world through observation rather than experimentation—was unimportant. He proudly labeled himself a naturalist, and communicated the urgent need to study and preserve the natural world. Decades before it was in vogue, he recognized that our refusal to acknowledge the Earth’s limits, coupled with the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth, had set humans well on their way to ecological oblivion.

Wilson understood that humans’ reckless treatment of the ecosystems that support us was not only a recipe for our own demise. It was forcing the biodiversity he so cherished into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one caused by an animal: us.

*Upper Guinean Forest change from 1975 to 2013. Source: USGS.*

E.O. Wilson long advocated conserving the world’s biodiversity hot spots—zones with high numbers of native species where habitats are most endangered. This image shows deforestation from 1975 to 2013 in one such area, West Africa’s Upper Guinean Forest. USGS

A broad vision for conservation

And so, to his lifelong fascination with ants, E. O. Wilson added a second passion: guiding humanity toward a more sustainable existence. To do that, he knew he had to reach beyond the towers of academia and write for the public, and that one book would not suffice. Learning requires repeated exposure, and that is what Wilson delivered in “The Diversity of Life,” “Biophilia,” “The Future of Life,” “The Creation” and his final plea in 2016, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”

As Wilson aged, desperation and urgency replaced political correctness in his writings. He boldly exposed ecological destruction caused by fundamentalist religions and unrestricted population growth, and challenged the central dogma of conservation biology, demonstrating that conservation could not succeed if restricted to tiny, isolated habitat patches.

“Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.”
—Edward O. Wilson

In “Half Earth,” he distilled a lifetime of ecological knowledge into one simple tenet: Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

But is this possible? Nearly half of the planet is used for some form of agriculture, and 7.9 billion people and their vast network of infrastructure occupy the other half.

As I see it, the only way to realize E.O.’s lifelong wish is learn to coexist with nature, in the same place, at the same time. It is essential to bury forever the notion that humans are here and nature is someplace else. Providing a blueprint for this radical cultural transformation has been my goal for the last 20 years, and I am honored that it melds with E.O. Wilson’s dream.

There is no time to waste in this effort. Wilson himself once said, “Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.” Whether humans have the wisdom to meet that deadline remains to be seen.

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 103 research publications and has taught insect related courses for 40 years.

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Ants – with their wise farming practices and efficient navigation techniques – could inspire solutions for some human problems