Do Ants Value Life?

            While observing the ants exploring my house (particularly the kitchen) this spring, I started to wonder: do ants value life?

            As general rule, living beings have strong survival instincts. It makes sense – an animal that doesn’t care if it lives or dies is less likely to survive to reproduce, eliminating those characteristics from the DNA chains. Bet what about creatures that are literally born to serve?

            Ants obviously have a high fatality rate. They go out in droves seeking food and many never come back. Confronted with a threat, an ant will struggle to stay alive. Yet, at the same time, an ant that dies on patrol is forgotten (apart from the pheromones it emits to alert the colony of threats).

            What value does a colony place on a lowly worker? They are mass-produced, specifically because of how many of them die. It seems as though ants don’t care about life at all – each of them living only to further the existence of the colony.

            At the same time, ants take extremely good care of their young. Further to that, they usually have duties around the nest when they are younger and aren’t sent out foraging until closer to the end of their life spans. This suggests a certain respect for the outside world and a desire to prolong the lives of the individual ants.

            Yet, this also serves a practical purpose – why send out the young, who still have a lot of work left in them, when the old are available? So, it could simply be survival.

            Which leaves me here, still wondering. What is the value an ant places on life? Perhaps they simply don’t have time to ponder it, with the possible exception of the queens – who seem to be the whole reason why most colonies exist in the first place.

            So, does a queen ant value life? She lives up to thirty years – ten or more times the length of regular ants – so she has plenty of time to ponder. These are her children we’re talking about, living and dying while she watches – generation after generation. Does she mourn the loss of a worker, or are there so many that she simply doesn’t care? Does she, perhaps, value only her own life?

            Now I need to hire a team of scientists to develop a way to talk to ants so we can ask them.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

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If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.