For both the termite and the Argentine ant, the stigmergic mechanism shows the physiology of the organism to extend well beyond the individual insect's body. It enables the composite animal, in which organism, communication, and environment are inseperable. In the case of the termite, the physical form of the termitary grows upward in towers and arches (Marais called termites “the first architects”); and although it is constantly regenerating itself, a termitary is a static (or at least it's very, very slow – like a city) object.
The Argentine ant, however, is at home in movement. Rather than build mounds or elaborate, tunneled nests, it usually inhabits found spaces: underneath buildings, along sidewalks, amongst boards, or in potted-plant soil. When the nest becomes undesirable because of rain or a food shortage, it will be abandoned – or, rather, the nest will relocate. Often a single queen with several workers will move meters away, budding off to create a new nest; sometimes, they will simply find another, already-existing nest to join.
To describe this more precisely, let's consider the terms - ant, nest, and colony – in relation to the 6,000 kilometer, southern European supercolony, which is reportedly comprised of millions of nests and billions of ants. Individual ants are not bound to the particular nest into which they were born; instead, they occupy multiple nests, a condition known as polydomy. This means that any ant in this colony could potentially join any nest without being attacked as an outsider. Nests move and ants (workers and queens both) move between nests. In some cases, nests are visibly networked by pathways through a food source; but often, they are discontinuous. The colony is a fluid, discontinuous reticulation of ants, capable of limitless expansion, in which dispersed, mobile nesting places act as the site of reproduction, excretion, and handling of the dead.
How is it then that the ants have developed such a self-identity that they cooperate so willingly within the colony, but aggressively destroy outsiders? The currently accepted theory says that the introduction event (that is, the events that introduced the Argentine ant to Europe, Africa, Japan, America, and Oceania) creates a genetic bottleneck resulting in a small, similar founding population. As the colony grows, with nests budding off nests, the genetic variation within the colony remains negligible, to the point that ants on opposite ends of the European supercolony, for example, will be practically identical genetically. Consequently, introduced ant colonies are both more militant and more successful than the native ant colonies of South America (recalling Arjun Appadurai's observation that deterritorialization is at the root of many instances of fundamentalism, which are often motivated by exaggerated or invented ideas of the “homeland”i).
The mobility of the Argentine ant, while enabled by its polydomous condition and stigmergic mechanisms, is sustained and amplified by human mobility. In fact, dispersal is very limited if people do not facilitate it. One sees this most clearly in the circumstances surrounding the various introduction events – a shipment of coffee from Brazil to New Orleans before 1891; fodder imported to Cape Town from Argentina during the Anglo-Boer war around 1908. With the growth of colonial networks of maritime trade, the ants have been able to establish their own colonies in at least 15 countries on six continents. Effortlessly moving from network to network, they've spread across the land on shipments of construction materials, rubbish, and produce.
We can say without misgiving that the Argentine ant colony is human-like. Global networks are a part of its physiology, much as they are ours (or as the termitary is a part of the termite's). But before asking how it is that humans might be ant-like, let's first look more generally at the organism as a group of self-organizing parts.
