gold, or any other hue or shade, it would not matter. Instead, the Queen had to smell dead in order to be classified as dead. And not from the blends of substances in corpses repellent to the human nose--not, for example, from the loathsome skatole and indole that distinguish human feces, nor the trimethylamine that rises dramatically from spoiled fish. Such chemicals, when encountered alone, would cause alarm in the ants and repel them. The same was true of other volatile toxic substances. Only oleic acid and its ester, which are decomposition products of fat, were effective messengers of death. They mean little or nothing to the human nose. But they mean dead to an ant. When encountered on the corpse of a nestmate, they caused the ants to pick it up and carry it away for disposal.
Within a week, the constant licking of the royal corpse in the Trailhead Colony started to break it into pieces. One by one the fragments, reeking of the oleic compounds, were carried out of the royal chamber. Unknowingly the ants bade farewell to their mother. No ceremony was performed. Instead the workers bearing the body parts wandered alone through the nest galleries in search of the Trailheader cemetery. This special place was not marked by ceremonial trappings. It had no special shape, nor did it contain any token of remembrance, even for a queen. It was merely a chamber at the periphery of the underground nest. The ants dumped all kinds of debris into it, including discarded cocoons shed by newly emerged adults, inedible parts of prey, and deceased colony members.
When the corpse carriers came close to the refuse chamber, they turned their burdens over to cemetery workers. These specialists were ants who constantly rearranged and added to the refuse piles. They stayed close to their work and were for the most part avoided by their nestmates.
In cemetery work and all other activities, the Trailhead Colony organized its labor by altruistic rules of labor specialization. Everything they did was restrained by some degree of self-sacrificial altruism. Above all, the workers had given up the chance to reproduce, at least so long as the Queen was alive and healthy. They accepted service in foraging, soldiering, and other dangerous occupations that increased their risk, often to the point of certain early death. The dominance of the Trailhead Colony over its individual member ants was total. The welfare of the superorganism was paramount, and a worker's life story was programmed to be subordinate to the superorganism's needs. If a worker died, the loss weakened the colony to some measurable but relatively inconsequential extent. The deficit could be quickly made up by rearing another worker in the nursery. If, on the other hand, a worker behaved in a selfish manner, consuming for a good part of its life more resources than it contributed, it weakened the colony far more than if it just had the decency to desert or die.
The decency of ants was, in disability, to leave and trouble no more. The self-sacrifices that led to the success of the Trailhead Colony were evident in every task performed by all of the worker force in all circumstances. The sick and injured received no care. In fact, they avoided such attention, moving on their own to the outermost nest chambers. The disabled were among the colony's most aggressive fighters. Dying workers often left the nest completely, thereby avoiding the spread of infectious diseases.
Older workers that stayed healthy but were approaching the end of their natural life-span also emigrated to the nest perimeter. From there they were prone to become foragers, leaving the nest to search for food, which exposed them to a much higher risk from enemies. When defending the nest, elders were among the most suicidally aggressive. They were obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies.
The Queen had been the exclusive reproducer of the colony, the mother of the entirety of its inhabitants and the new colonies they were able to produce. All the sacrifices offered by the workers were made to protect her life and to enhance her fertility. Whether the Trailhead Colony would now live or die depended upon its ability to replace the mother Queen. That would require all their skill in retaining their strength until a new Queen was installed.
20
AT THIS POINT the ancient colony seemed doomed. Grow or die was the iron law it must