Free Empire of the Ants by Bernard Werber

palpitating, from leg to leg. Nothing escaped the little surgeons. When they started to cut out chunks of the brain, the woodpecker had a final convulsion. The whole city rushed to quarter the monster. The corridors teemed with ants clutching feathers or pieces of down they were keeping as souvenirs.
    The teams of masons had already gone into action to rebuild the dome and damaged tunnels.
    From a distance, it looked as if the anthill was eating a bird. After swallowing it up, it digested it and distributed its flesh and fat, feathers and hide to all parts of the city where they would be of most use.
     
    genesis: How did ant civilization develop? To understand this, it is necessary to go back several hundred million years to the beginning of life on Earth. Among the first to land were the insects.
    They seemed poorly adapted to their world. Small and fragile, they were ideal victims for any predator. To stay alive, some of them, such as the crickets, chose the path of reproduction. They laid so many young that some necessarily survived. Others, such as the wasps and bees, chose venom, providing themselves, as time went by, with poisonous stings that made them formidable adversaries.
    Others, such as the cockroaches, chose to become inedible. A special gland gave their flesh such an unpleasant taste that no-one wanted to eat it.
    Others, such as the preying mantises and moths, chose camouflage. Resembling grass or bark, they went unnoticed by an inhospitable nature.
    However, in this early jungle, plenty of insects had not discovered the 'trick' of survival and seemed condemned to disappear. Among those at a disadvantage were, firstly, the termites. When this wood-devouring species appeared on the Earth's surface nearly a hundred and fifty million years ago, it had no chance of surviving. It had too many predators and too few natural defences. What would become of the termites!
    Many perished but, with their backs to the wall, the survivors managed to work out an original solution in time: 'We won't fight alone any more, we'll band together. It will be more difficult for our predators to attack twenty termites taking a united stand than a single one trying to get away. 'The termites thus opened up one of the royal roads to complexity: social organization. They began to live in small units, at first family ones, all grouped around the egg-laying mother. Then the families became villages and the villages grew into towns. Their cities of sand and cement soon rose over the whole surface of the globe. The termites were the first intelligent masters of our planet and its first society.
    Edmond Wells
    Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
     
    The 327th male could no longer see his two rock-scented killers. He really had lost them. With a bit of luck, they had been killed by falling rocks.
    He must stop dreaming. It would not get him out of the fix he was in. He had no passport scents left at all. If a single warrior crossed his path now, he was as good as dead. The others would automatically consider him a foreign body and would not even allow him to explain. He would be shot down with acid or bitten by mandibles. That was the treatment reserved for anyone who could not emit the passport scents of the Federation.
    It was absurd. How had he come to such a pass? It was all the fault of those two damn rock-scented warriors. What had got into them? They must have been out of their minds. Although it was rare, errors in genetic programming sometimes caused psychological accidents of this kind. Rather like the hysterical ants striking out at everyone during the third phase of the alert.
    His two assailants did not look hysterical or defective, though. In fact, they seemed to know perfectly well what they were doing. It was as if. . . There was only one situation in which cells consciously destroyed other cells belonging to the same organism. The nurses called it cancer. It was as if. . . they were cancer cells.
    In that case,