Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – Learning from Ants: Intelligent Swarms in Many Settings
Our question is: How many pioneer missionary teams do we need to serve the unreached of the world, to help find and raise up the local evangelists who can complete the task? If we assume any given missionary team can mentor a local church planting movement that will impact at least 100,000 people over the space of a decade, then we arrive at a simple number: forty-three thousand teams. (To see how we came to this number, click here.)
So, then, how can we recruit and send that many teams? In July, we talked about skyscrapers. In August, we talked about pyramids. This month, we are going to talk about ants.
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Ants are one of the most successful groups of insects in the animal kingdom. |
An Overview of Ants
In Southeast Asia where we live, we have a whole little ecosystem around our house: birds, spiders, lizards, cockroaches and a bat. We even have the occasional frog and snail. But most interesting to me are the ants. I have seen three basic varieties: tiny and swift; medium and clever; and big and strong. They are pretty amazing creatures.
A few months ago something killed a lizard, a medium-sized gecko, in our driveway. We saw the small corpse in the morning, but left it there while we went out to run errands. By the time we got home, the ants were already swarming. Fascinated, I decided to leave the lizard and see what the ants did. By early evening, those tiny, tiny ants completely stripped the lizard clean. Only the bones were left.
More recently, we discovered a mouse in our house. I have been trying to catch it with a mouse trap. I put the trap outside with some cheese on it. A few hours later, I noticed the medium and big-size ants had begun to swarm the trap and were carrying off little bits of cheese. When I checked the trap that night before going to bed, the cheese was gone. The ants had carried it off, one tiny piece at a time.
Ants are one of the most successful groups of insects in the animal kingdom. They are highly social and form very organized colonies and nests. Sometimes, these colonies can have up to one million individual ants. They have colonized almost every landmass on earth and make up nearly fifteen percent of the total animal weight of any given tropical rainforest. Scientists have estimated the weight of all ants exceeds the weight of all humans. Each individual ant is born from an egg. If the egg is fertilized, the ant is a female; if not, it will be male. (Worker ants are always females.) Ants pass through larval and pupal stages before they become adults. A female might be a worker or a queen. A new worker spends its first few days caring for the queen and young ants. After that, it moves up to digging and nest work, and finally to foraging and the defense of the nest.
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