    15

    a

    construction crews if it would make good mortar, or to the garbage

    heap kept just outside the nest.)36

    Viewed from the human perspective, the activities of the

    individual ants seemed to matter far less than the behavior of the

    colony as a whole.  In fact, the colony acted as if it were an

    independent creature, feeding itself, expelling its wastes, defending

    itself, and looking out for its future.  Wheeler was the man who

    dubbed a group of individuals collectively acting like one beast a

    superorganism.37

    The term superorganism slid into obscurity until it was revived

    by Sloan Kettering head Lewis Thomas in his influential 1974 book

    Lives Of A Cell.38  Superorganisms exist even on the very lowest rungs

    of the evolutionary ladder.  Slime mold are seemingly independent

    amoeba, microscopic living blobs who race about on the moist surface

    of a decaying tree or rotting leaf cheerfully oblivious to each other

    when times are good.  They feast gaily for days on bacteria and other

    delicacies, attending to nothing but their own selfish appetites.  But

    when the food runs out, famine descends upon the slime mold world.

    Suddenly the formerly flippant amoeba lose their sense of boisterous

    individualism.  They rush toward each other as if in a panic, sticking

    together for all they're worth.

    Gradually, the clump of huddled microbeasts grows to some-

    thing you can see quite clearly with the naked eye.  It looks like a slimy

    plant.  And that plant--a tightly-packed mass of former

    freedom-lovers--executes an emergency public works project.  Like

    half-time marchers forming a pattern, some of the amoeba line up to

    form a stalk that pokes itself high into the passing currents of air.  Then

    the creatures at the head cooperate to manufacture spores.  And those

    seeds of life drift off into the breeze.

    If  the  spores  land  on  a    heap  of  rotting  grass  or  slab  of

    decomposing bark, they quickly multiply, filling the slippery refuge

    with a horde of newly-birthed amoeba.  Like their parents, the little

      prized morsel, to the nursery if it is ordinary nourishment, to the

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