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Quote by Alfred Espinas

“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forget fulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”

Quote by Alfred Espinas

Book:Des Sociétés Animales (2e Éd.) (Éd.1878) (Sciences Sociales)
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Des Sociétés Animales (2e Éd.) (Éd.1878) (Sciences Sociales)

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Alfred Espinas

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“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forgetfulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”

NatureFreedomInsectsAntsAerialTerrestrial
Book:Des sociétés animales
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“Squatting in the coppery mud of the drainage ditch behind my cousin’s house, we searched for fish, saw none. We found a speckled frog instead, unspooling a long, gelatinous thread of black eggs in the water. Then fire ants— my feet a blaze of pain, a fumbling dance, and fact and memory begin to stutter. What happened next? What curses did I utter? And how did I ever get back over the fence? I remember having a kind of reverence for the whole affair: the pity I got, each bite growing large and lustrous as a pearl, my tight and swollen toes. I must have liked the pain. What else would make me prod again, again? A whole week hobbling barefoot on the lawn, and still I missed the welts when they were gone.”

PoetryAnts
Author:Chelsea Rathburn
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“Because the farming ants have practiced the mutual co-adaptation model during millions of years of relentless natural selection on joint performance, they often surpass us in specific efficiency targets. Not only did ants in general evolve sperm banks at ambient temperature that last a queen’s potential life span of two to three decades (Den Boer et al. 2009), but they also somehow prevented the evolution of resistance by specialized Escovopsis garden pathogens against biocontrol compounds obtained from Actinobacteria that they rear on their cuticles (De Man et al. 2016; Holmes et al. 2016; Heine et al. 2018) (chapter 11, this volume). Recent work has further indicated that the fungus-growing termites are equally efficient in keeping their colonies as free from pathogens as the leaf-cutting ants appear to be (Otani et al. 2019; see also figure 5.1C, D, E). Relative to the extreme specialization of social insect farmers, human farmers are jacks of all trades in their interactions with domesticated crops, and we remain extremely vulnerable to endemic and epidemic diseases of our cultivars.”

AntsCo Adaptation
Book:The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects
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“It occurred to Nelson, in a terrible reverie, that he had greatly underestimated these ants. That there could be dimensions to what was happening that were beyond him and that he couldn't possibly anticipate. That perhaps the ants were possessors of some kind of true intellect, capable of laying plans and responding to surprises in ways that were far more than instinctual. He drew his sidearm and whispered, almost to himself. "Run.”

HorrorScience FictionAntsMilitary Science Fiction
Book:Sapience
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