Angels and Insects (16 page)
Read Angels and Insects Online
Authors: A. S. Byatt
Matty Crompton gave a name, at least a first name, to the child he thought of as his beetle-sprite, whom she recruited to keep an eye on the nest of the Blood-red Ants, on her afternoons off. Her name, it turned out, was Amy, and Miss Crompton asserted that it would do her good to get a bit of fresh air, having no family and nowhere to go, and to earn a few extra pennies. She sat with the gardener’s boy, who had to be dissuaded from dropping stag beetles down her neck, but was observant. It was these two who alerted William and Miss Crompton to the change in the activities of the slave-makers. Tom said he had noticed several of the red ants, as he put it, ‘
prowling around
like’, near the Stonewall Nest, and one day, sent by Tom, Amy came running across the lawn crying, ‘Come quick, come quick, Tom says the Bloody Ants are coming up in a fizzing great army, he says, he says, come quick something is up, he says. I saw them mysen, they are like gravy boiling, do come.’ She was still a thin, bowed, pinched little thing, but the project, and Tom,
had put some colour into her cheeks, and she was developing a bird-like prettiness of which she was wholly unconscious.
William and Matty sallied forth, armed with camp-stools and notebooks, and were there in time to observe the slave-makers’ forces, after a great deal of excited waving of antennae and legs and apparently inane running-about, suddenly get out, purposefully, led by an advance guard of particularly excited scouts, across the thirty yards or more that separated their smaller mounds from the Elm Tree Bole. They poured out in various regiments, accompanied, as William duly noticed, by a sizeable force of Wood Ant slaves, whose behaviour appeared to be identical to that of their masters.
William wrote up what they observed, and read it aloud later to Matty Crompton and the rest of the inhabitants of the schoolroom.
The great Slaving Raid took place on a hot June day, when the temperature had been rising steadily for some time, and with it the activities of the Blood-red Ants, as reported to our historians by our spies and pickets. We were led to speculate whether slave-raids, like other large exoduses and population changes, are instigated by the heat of the Sun. Ants do not move in cool weather, and sleep at night, even in the balmiest Summer days; they are cold-blooded, and need external warmth to get their desires and designs in motion. Be that as it may, the approach of Midsummer roused the Blood-red citizens to an increasing hum of conversation and activity. Messages came in more and more speedily and frequently. More and more scouts could be seen spying on the peaceful foraging of the Wood Ants, or busily trampling out trails between their nest and that of their unsuspecting victims.
Finally, at some signal, awaited eagerly by the gossiping and seething crowds who had rushed in readiness to the
agora
on their hill-top, the red armies divided into four parties, which set out in direct lines across the terrain—following well-mapped routes, used, we suspected, on previous raids. When the four
regiments had taken up their positions around the Elm Tree Bole Nest, the leaders of all four could be observed like little Napoleons rushing excitedly along the ranks, stirring up valour and determination with strokes of their antennae and agitated bodily movements. Suddenly the 1st Sanguine Troopers moved into concerted action, storming their way towards the entrances—so carefully barricaded at night, now gaping open to the incitatory sunlight. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th Regiments patrolled the positions they had taken up, with increasing forcefulness and ferocity.
The Wood Ants sallied forth bravely to beat off the thieves and kidnappers. Waving their antennae, hurrying furiously, they bit at the legs and heads and feelers of the busy Bloody Ants, attempting, often with success, to grasp the invaders and sting them to death. We observed that the Sanguine Ants did not retaliate unless they were wholly impeded from progress. They had one purpose only—to snatch the unhatched infants from the Nursery, and to bear them back, in their fine jaws, to their own fortress. Whilst the martial Wood Ants battled to delay them, the tenders of the helpless young snatched up their infant sisters and tried to bear them away to safety. Most strange was to see Wood Ants, identical in appearance to the inhabitants of Elm Tree Bole, rushing forwards into the corridors of the castle, seizing cocoons and bearing them, not to safety, but out again to the ramparts and the waiting, protective corps of
sanguinea
who would be the rearguard for their safe passage back to the Red Fort. We were sufficient in numbers, as observers, to make quite sure, from repeated trackings of individual
sanguinea
and Wood Ants, that the residents of Elm Tree Bole did not distinguish between the ruddy foreigners, and their slaves of their own race, attacking both impartially.
It was all over remarkably quickly. There were very few casualties. The Blood-red Ants had not come to slaughter, and had moved so swiftly, so single-mindedly, that the Wood Ant defenders—retaliating as they would to aggressive territorial invasions by their own kind—had been baffled and bewildered, and had allowed their attackers to make their limited assault
without very effective opposition. Back streamed the victorious invaders, carefully bearing the captured nestlings whose fate was to live and die as
sanguinea
, not as true Wood Ants, to feed and nourish little
sanguinea
, to respond to the Summer sun by massing to attack their forgotten parents and sisters. They do not appear to have depleted the nursery inhabitants so severely as to disrupt the way of life of the Elm Tree Bole, which resumed, after the excitement, much as it had been. They did not, as human soldiers do, rape and pillage, loot and destroy. They came, and saw, and conquered, and achieved their object, and left again. It is believed that slave-making raids are made not more than once a year, so we were lucky to have—as the Red Ants themselves did—good spies to alert us to this interesting event.
The English slave-makers are not so specialised as certain other larger slave-makers are. These are known as the Amazons, though they do not originate in the Amazon basin but are commonly found in Europe and North America. The Amazona—for example
Polyergus rufescens
—never excavate nests nor care for their young. Their name is probably bestowed because like the classical Amazon warriors, who were all women, led by a fierce queen, they have substituted belligerence for the delicate domestic virtues associated with the female sex. Unlike the Blood-red Ants, the Amazons have developed such powerful tools and weapons of fighting and thieving that they are unable to perform any other function, and depend entirely on their slaves to feed them and polish their ruddy armour. Their jaws cannot seize prey; they have to beg their slaves for food; but they can kill, and they can carry. It might be argued that Natural Selection has perfected these creatures as fighting machines, but in the process has rendered them irrevocably dependent and parasitic. We may ask if there are not lessons to be learned by ourselves from this curious and extreme social state.
‘Nature does indeed teach us,’ said Miss Mead. ‘A terrible war is being waged at present across the Atlantic, to secure not only the
liberation of the unfortunate slaves, but the moral salvation of those whose leisure and enrichment are sustained by their cruel labours.’
‘And we are urged’, said Matty Crompton, ‘to fight on the side of the slave-makers, to preserve the work, that is the daily bread, of our own cotton-mill workers. And our own philanthropists, in turn, seek to rescue those
machine-slaves
from their specialised labour. I do not know quite where these thoughts may lead us.’
‘Analogy is a slippery tool,’ said William. ‘Men are not ants.’
Nevertheless, in the hot days just after Midsummer, when they increased their vigilance in order to observe, if possible, the nuptial flight of the Queens and their suitors, he was hard put to it not to see his own life in terms of a diminishing analogy with the tiny creatures. He had worked so hard, watching, counting, dissecting, tracking, that his dreams were prickling with twitching antennae, advancing armies, gnashing mandibles and dark, inscrutable complex eyes. His vision of his own biological processes—his frenzied, delicious mating, so abruptly terminated, his consumption of the regular meals prepared by the darkly quiet forces behind the baize doors, the very regularity of his watching, dictated by the regularity of the rhythms of the nest, brought him insensibly to see himself as a kind of complex sum of his nerve-cells and instinctive desires, his automatic social responses of deference or required kindness or paternal affection.
One
ant in an anthill was neither here nor there, was dispensable, was nothing. This was intensified, despite his recognition of the grimly comic aspect of his reaction, by the recording of the fate of the male ants. This passage he did not read aloud to the whole team of researchers; he showed it in the Winter, after several rewritings, to his chief collaborator, Matty Crompton.
We were fortunate also, in 1862, to be able to observe the spectacle of the wedding dance of the thousands of winged Queens and aspiring suitors, who swarmed on the Osborne Nest
and the Elm Tree Bole as if at a given signal, a trumpet-sound, or the resonant hum of a gong. Vigilant young eyes had observed young males attempting to leave the nest some days earlier, and being held back by determined guardians until the appointed time. We had had some idea when that might be, for we had noted the exact date of the nuptial ceremonies during the previous Summer, when the whirling couples had plummeted, like so many Icaruses or falling angels, to a creamy suffocation, or death by drowning in a steaming cauldron of fragrant Mysore in the midst of our own strawberry picnic. The appointed day in 1862 was the 27th June, and the ball-guests emerged in clouds of gauze and took to the air in fragile spires. Many ants consummate their unions in flight, embracing each other high above the earth. The Wood Ants appear to mate in fact on the earth—the males of this species are nearer in size to the Queens than in many others, where the Queen may exceed her consort by twenty times or more in bulk, and can easily transport her lover through the empyrean. We were unable on this occasion to observe whether the Wood Ant Queen practises polyandry, though other species of ants are known to do so—we hope to be able to observe more closely next year. We did observe heaps of fiercely struggling and battling black bodies, wrapped in their diaphanous veiling, each Queen fought for by ten or twenty determined suitors, who will hang fiercely on to each other’s legs, to get a purchase anywhere at all—more like a battle in Rugby Football than the elegant minuet for which their silky robes might seem fitted. The little workers stand by and observe, occasionally pulling at one or other of the actors in this passionate drama. We might imagine them feeling a certain complacency at their immunity from the terrible desire, both murderous and suicidal as well as amorous, which drives the winged sexual creatures. They appear also to feel a certain organising interest in things going well, and will give a pull or a push or a tweak to one or other of the embracing combatants—we could not ascertain the purpose of these interventions, though in other breeds of more primitive ant, where mating takes place in
the nest, the workers are known to control the access of the males to the Queens, choosing which shall be admitted to their presence and which shall be kept at bay with jaws and sting.
How busy, how festive, how happy the dancing seemed! How tragic its outcome for almost all of the participants! The nuptial flight of the Wood Ants offers a supremely moving example of the inexorable secret work of Natural Selection, so that anyone observing it must be struck by how completely Mr Darwin’s ideas might seem to explain it. The males struggle mightily to possess the winged Queens; they must prove their strength of flight, their combative skills, their powers of attracting and gaining the trust of the wary female, spoiled as she is by choice of an almost infinite number of pressing lovers. And the Queens themselves, who emerge in their hundreds of hundreds, must possess strength and skill and cunning and tenacity to survive more than a very few moments after successful fecundation, let alone to start a nest. The time in the blue sky, the dizzy whirling in the gauzy finery lasts only a few hours. Then they must snap off their wings, like a young girl stepping out of her wedding veils, and scurry away to find a safe place to found a new nest-colony. Most fall prey to birds, other insects, frogs and toads, hedgehogs and trampling humans. Few indeed manage to make their way again underground, where they will lay their first eggs, nourish their first brood of daughters—miserable dwarfs, fragile and slow, these early children—and in due course, as the workers take over the running of the nursery and the provision of food, they will forget that they ever saw the sun, or thought for themselves, or chose a path to run on, or flew in the Midsummer blue. They become egg-laying machines, gross and glistening, endlessly licked, caressed, soothed and smoothed—veritable Prisoners of Love.
This
is the true nature of the Venus under the Mountain, in this miniature world a creature immobilised by her function of breeding, by the blind violence of her passions.
And what of the males? Their fate, even more poignantly, exemplifies the remorseless random purposefulness of Dame Nature,
of Natural Selection. It is believed that early males of primitive ants were also in some sense workers, members of the community. But as the Societies of insects became more complex, more truly interdependent, the sexual forms of the creatures involved became more and more specialised. It is not generally known that worker-ants can and do, upon occasion, lay eggs, from which, it appears, only male children will emerge. But they appear to do this only if the Queen is ailing, or the nest is threatened. In general the Queens mother the whole society, and have changed in body to be able to do so, swollen with eggs, enough eggs fertilised from this one matrimonial encounter for a whole generation. Changes in bodily form according to function exist throughout the insect societies. There are ants whose heads exactly fit to plug the holes in the stems of plants where they live, which when not plugged are entrances and exits. There are ants known as Repletes, hung up in cellars like living wineskins, bloated with stored nectar. And the males, too, have become specialised, as factory-hands are specialised
hands
for the making of pin-heads or brackets. Their whole existence is directed
only
to the nuptial dance and the fertilisation of the Queens. Their eyes are huge and keen. Their sexual organs, as the fatal day approaches, occupy almost the whole of their body. They are flying amorous projectiles, truly no more than the burning arrows of the winged and blindfold god of Love. And after their day of glory, they are unnecessary and unwanted. They run hither and thither, aimlessly, draggle-winged. They are beaten back for the most part from the doors of their home nests, and driven away to mope and die in the cooling evenings of late Summer and early Autumn. Like the drones of the beehive they toil not, neither do they spin, though like the drones too, they are pampered in the early stages of their lives, tolerated pretty parasites, who dirty and disturb the calm workings of the nest, who must be fed on honey-dew and cleaned up after in the corridors. The drones, too, as Autumn approaches, meet with a terrible fate. One morning in the hive a mysterious Authority arms and alerts the worker-sisters, who descend on the sleeping
hordes of velvet slugabeds, and proceed to tear them limb from limb, to pierce, to sever, to blind, to bundle bleeding out of doors, and remorselessly to refuse readmission. How profligate is Nature of her seeds, of her sons, making thousands that
one
may pass on his inheritance to sons and daughters.