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Introduction
Mark W. Moffett and Simon Garnier
Ants live in colonies. These colonies, for certain ant species or for ants in general, have been variously likened to human societies (Moffett 2019), organisms (Hölldobler and Wilson 2011; Moffett 2010), armies (Moffett 2011), agriculturalists (Hölldobler and Wilson 2011), slaveholders (Topoff 1990), and highway builders (Dussutour et al. 2004). Such comparisons have been academically fruitful because, while there’s obviously much of interest in comparing similar things (in biology, for example, species sharing a recent common ancestor like chimpanzees and humans), unexpected ideas often arise from finding points of likeness between entities typically thought of as different (Moffett 2020). Furthermore, anthropomorphism, approached critically, has been invaluable since our hunter-gatherer days, being pivotal to the emergence of science while remaining important to how scholars come up with new ideas today (Burghardt 1997; Liebenberg 2012).
In comparisons of ants to people, one pattern of sociality that comes up repeatedly is the potential for complexity to grow as groups increase in size (Garnier et al. 2007). For this reason, army ants and leafcutter ants with colonies in the millions have exceptionally intricate social attributes (e.g., complex division of labor, elaborate supply chains). Generally, a large labor pool can support more complexity than a small one, although this pattern of amplified complexity with size isn’t universal—the Argentine ant, whose “supercolonies” can be billions strong, has a simpler social structure befitting a opportunistic lifestyle where the colony labor force is spread out widely across the landscape, sometimes across hundreds of kilometers—a single, socially unified colony that’s expanded over time from what had originally been one nest (Moffett 2012).
One productive analogy for ant colonies has been that of the factory within a fortress, where each colony is viewed as a well-protected enterprise for producing the next generation of colonies (Oster and Wilson 1978). Our article gives precedence to larger, and generally more structurally complex, ant colonies, focusing on the factory part of this equation; all the same it should be understood that defending the factory from the competition is a major line item in the time/energy budget of these insects, where the brood is the capital each colony invests in for its growth and reproduction. We bring up the comparisons to human organizations we...