Ants

MARK W. MOFFETT: Ants. Everyone’s favorite insects. I wish! What’s wrong with us? Ants are extraordinarily cool.

PETER KUPER: Dr. Mark Moffett is a biologist, nature writer, and photographer who has been called "the Indiana Jones of entomology." His fascination with ants began in childhood, and he’s been studying them professionally for over 40 years.

MOFFETT: We don’t think of ants as interesting, but they’re fascinating things. They do all the things that humans do. They build infrastructure, highways, and homes. They have warfare. Ants have traffic rules. They’re very humanlike.

KUPER: And societies of ants are decidedly matriarchal.

MOFFETT: They’re totally female-oriented. All the ants you see are females—they’re a sisterhood. The queen is the mother. And all the sisters get along, and fight, and get food, and so on, basically for her benefit. The males don’t do anything other than, well, have sex and die. That’s the sum total of their life story.

KUPER: Though ants within a species might look the same to us, a single colony is actually made up of individuals with widely ranging temperaments.

MOFFETT: Most people think of ants as little robots. It turns out that ants do have personalities. And they’re quite varied. There can be a very hardworking ant, but there are also quite lazy ants. The Aesop’s Fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper therefore isn’t quite true because not all ants are hardworking.

Not everybody has to keep busy for the society to be effective. There can be a whole bunch of ants that are back in the nest doing nothing—which makes no sense until there’s suddenly a battle, and suddenly the ants have this reserve battle force that can come out and save the colony.

Lazy ants are sort of like the fat cells in the human body. They don’t seem to do much for a while until you really need them. And then you might really, really need them.