Seed Media Group: Blog

Monday, January 18, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Anthill realism

In Trailhead, which is an excerpt from biologist and - we are thrilled to see - debut novelist E.O. Wilson’s novel Anthill, Wilson offers us a perspective that few, if any, people in the world could provide in such detail.

Wilson evokes the entirely connected, scent-driven, and beautiful but brutal world of an ant colony. The more you read, the more insights unfold that may very well apply for a species even more familiar to us than ants…

“She had become an extreme specialist: she laid eggs, while the workers performed all the labor necessary to raise her offspring, their sisters. They were the Queen’s hands and feet and jaws, and increasingly they replaced her brain. They functioned together as a well-organized whole, dividing up the tasks without regard to their own welfare. The Trailhead Colony began to resemble a large, diffuse organism. In a word, it became a superorganism…..

“Even as her body began to decay, the pheromones she had manufactured in life persisted in the minds and bodies of her colony. Her visual appearance, her stillness, meant nothing. The Queen could have lain on her back with her legs held rigidly up in the air. She could have turned red, black, metallic gold, or any other hue or shade—it would not have mattered. The Queen had to smell dead in order to be classified as dead.”

Read Trailhead here: