By Maria Popova
Alongside people, leafcutter ants type a few of nature’s vastest, most subtle societies — a single mature colony can comprise as many ants as there are folks on Earth, dwelling with a terrific deal extra social concord and consonance of function than we do.
They’re additionally considered one of our planet’s most dazzling testaments to evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world”: For 50 million years, leafcutter ants have been training a type of agriculture of their mutualist relationship with a fungus they domesticate as a meals supply, rising it in fungus gardens and feeding it plant matter, which the fungus converts into vitamins the ants can feed on in flip.
Actually, leafcutter ants developed their sharp mandibles and deft prehensile legs exactly with a purpose to lower and manipulate leaf fragments, which they then carry to their fungal backyard. A single ant can carry twenty occasions its body weight — the equal of me carrying three grand pianos. In lower than a day, a colony can clear whole timber. Emblems of emergence, they do all this as complexity theory incarnate, not a single particular person conscious of the big-picture aim of the labor.
In her mesmerizing movie Antworks, artist Catherine Chalmers captures the unusual fantastic thing about this communal consciousness as a leafcutter ant colony dismantles a kaleidoscopic plant within the jungles of Costa Rica, then carries the fragments — “tiny Summary Expressionist work” she calls them — to their secret backyard.
Complement with the poetic science of the ghost pipe — one other of Earth’s most enchanting mutualisms — then dive into the wonders of different non-human minds with The Soul of an Octopus.
HT Kottke
