每当我们想到动物界的智能成员时，头脑中立刻出现的会是猿和猴子。事实上，在昆虫界，某些成员社会生活的复杂程度显示出了相当程度的智能。其中蚂蚁世界就在最近成了主要的观察对象。蚂蚁显示出一定认知力的观点也得到了研究人员的肯定。

When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.

蚂蚁储存食物，反击外敌，在攻击时用化学信号互相联系。此类化学信号交流可与人类使用视觉和听觉逾径(如圣歌、广告形象、铃声、政治标语以及军乐)来激发情绪和传递理念的行为相媲美。生物学家 Lewis Thomas写道：“蚂蚁和人类是如此的相似，都让我们觉得自愧不如。它们培育真菌，把蚜虫作为家畜来饲养，调配军队作战，用化学气雾发出警告和述惑敌人，俘虏奴隶，忙于育婴，不停地交流信息。除了不看电视它们什么都做。” 然而，蚂蚁的世界里没有文化的传播——所有的技能都必须存储在基因里——而人类的情况却恰恰相反。人类新生儿的基因里只有基本的本能，其他技能则是在成长过程中从社会其他成员身上学习所得。看起来这种文化传承使我们与蚂蚁相比具有巨大的优势。它们从未掌握用火技术，也不知发展为何物。它们培育真菌、饲养蚜虫的技术和五千年前的人类农耕技术相比还算成熟，但却被人类现代的综合农业远远超越。

那么蚂蚁真的被人类超越了么?蚂蚁的农耕方式至少是可持续性的。它们不会破坏环境，也不需要使用大量能源。而且，最近的证据表明，蚂蚁的农耕方式可能比过去我们所认为的还要成熟和灵活。

Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising images and jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, 'Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids* as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.' However, in ants there is no cultural transmission everything must be encoded in the genes - whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.

蚂蚁早于人类5000万年就已成为农夫。它们不能消化叶子中的纤维素，但是某些真菌可以。因此蚂蚁在巢穴里培育这些真菌，让它们以叶子为食，而真菌则成为蚂蚁的食物来源。蚂蚁农夫们分泌抗生素去控制其他可能成为“杂草”的真菌，还会播撒废料来给作物施肥。

曾经有观点认为蚂蚁培育的真菌只是它们繁殖的单一品种，长久以来都没有本质的改变。其实不然。马里兰州的Ulrich Mucller和他的同事们就从蚂蚁巢穴中从基因方面筛选出了862种不同种类的真菌。这些真菌品种多样——看来蚂蚁在不断培育新的真菌品种。让人更加印象深刻的是，对真菌的DNA分折表明，蚂蚁通过频繁地和周边蚂蚁群体的交换和共享来改进或更新菌种。

Or have they? The farming methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.

史前人类没有机会接触城市化的生活方式——这一孕育智能的温床。而证据表明，蚂蚁已经在城市环境中生存了将近一亿年了，建造并维持着由特殊的洞穴和隧道构成的地下城市。

当我们考察墨西哥城、东京和洛杉矶时，都会惊叹人类的伟大成就。然而，Hoelldobler和Wilson在为蚂蚁爱好者创作的巨著《蚂蚁》中，描述了日本北海道石狩湾的石狩红蚁所建造的超级蚁群。据称，在这个包含了4500个纵横交错的巢穴、幅员达2．7平方公里的“巨大城市”中，生活着3．6亿只工蚁和100万只蚁后。

Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can't digest the cellulose in leaves - but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as 'weeds', and spread waste to fertilise the crop.

如此坚固、复杂的网状技术成就远远超越了我们的远古祖先所取得的任何成就。人们在法国南部或者其他地方欣赏那些两万年前的岩画杰作的时候对祖先的成就肃然起敬。而蚂蚁的社会形态早在7000多万年前就已经和现在相差无几。此外，史前人类的技术看上去很原始。那么，和当时的蚂蚁社会相比，这还能算是另外一种形式的智能吗?

在牛津大学、苏赛克斯大学以及苏黎世大学所作的研究表明，沙漠蚁在觅食归巢途中， 会结合它们脑中不断更新的方向和距离资料来做导向。它们会将可见的地标与记忆库中的区域方向结合来分门别类储存，并不断地使用和更新。因此蚂蚁也具备学习能力。

It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants' nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.

在12年研究过程中，Ryabko和Reznikova找到了证据，证明蚂蚁能够传递非常复杂的信息。侦察蚁在迷宫中找到食物后返回去通知觅食队伍。研究人员干涉了蚂蚁交流的过程，在最后把侦察蚁弄走，看蚂蚁团队会有什么反应。通常觅食队伍会还是能够继续行进到迷宫中食物的确切位置。而在此之前，研究人员已经做了精密的预防措施，防止蚁群通过气味来传递信息。现在讨论的焦点是，蚂蚁在迷宫中行进路线的传递是通过一连串的左转、右转信息还是通过指南针式的方向和距离引导来完成的。

在这次全而的研究过程中，Reznikova全身心地投入到她实验室的蚂蚁身上，她感觉自己认识每一只蚂蚁——即使它们身上没有记号。无怪乎Edward Wilson在他的论文《与蚂蚁相伴》中，建议那些询问如何处理厨房中蚂蚁的读者：“注意脚下，珍惜小生命。”

Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles - the forcing house of intelligence - the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.

When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldobler and Wilson's magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants, describes a supercolony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This 'megalopolis' was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.

Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind?

Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zürich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn too.

And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in a maze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a 'left-right' sequence of turns or as a 'compass bearing and distance' message.

During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals - even without the paint spots used to mark them. It's no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, 'In the company of ants', advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: 'Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.'

*aphids:small insects of a different species from ants