I was relieved reading in the NYT of an increase in bee swarms in the United Kingdom. I lived through the age of bee colony collapse disorder. At the time people worried pollinators would be no more. It disturbs me that no single cause was ever found so as to avoid it in the future. Collapse disorder may be from insecticides weakening queens or hives, making them prone to viral, bacterial, and even insect and mite infestation. Bees seem to have as many diseases as humans. I’m delighted to see more bees again.
A bee swarm is when the queen bee departs with her entourage of worker bees and drones. For bees the queen and workers are females which means they are diploid with 32 chromosomes the male drones being haploid, with 16 chromosomes. So the original hive, hot and overcrowded, will now have no queen bee as she has gone with the swarm. No problem. The remaining workers raise one or more new queens with Royal jelly and nurse the prospective queen in her special cell in the hive. If more than one queen matures, the first hatchling queen will eliminate the others. Queening seems just one more instance, where a single element predominates, as long as it is functioning, like the sinus node in the heart, which controls the whole heart from its apex position and the fastest discharging cells. The new virgin queen will have to leave the hive to be fertilized by multiple haploid male drones from separate colonies, ensuring a good and plenty mix up of genes. Then she will return exhausted from all that copulation, and vast supply of sperm from many males to be used much later on. Her new workers will be half sisters, same mom, different dad, not identical clones. She will also lay unfertilized haploid eggs, also non-identical, that will mature into male drones.
That got me to thinking about swarms, common among insects, birds and fish. Swarms interest me because beautifully patterned as they are, swarm mathematics shows them to be self-organized according to simple rules followed by essentially identical individuals. Swallow murmerations, fish schools, Nazi goosesteppers, and my favorite, the People’s Liberation Army, you observe in action, are similar. The individual must follow three rules: avoid collision with your closest neighbor, maintain equidistance, and thirdly, move entirely with adjacent neighbors as a unit. The individual totally melts into the unit. Extra movement precisely timed, can be superimposed, such as wide eyes, and an arm-stiffening simultaneous salute.
Such extreme regimentation, though obviously a show of discipline and order meant to impress others, isn’t necessarily an advantage for an army in the field, as battles are won and lost as much on individual initiative, as by perfect discipline. Perfect Greek Hoplite and British regiments have lost many an encounter, sometimes when individuals break rank prematurely but also when rigid formation succumbs to indomitable force and the whole structure collapses. Yet in battle situations swarms of robots, eschewing individuality, have their specific applications.
Swarms abound in biology. I’m lead to believe animal swarms are triggered by food as with locust plagues, or by sex, as with bees, and bird leks. Leks and bee swarms are a way mixing genes of vigorous advertising males to produce diverse offspring. Surprisingly, even under extraordinary situations, with a lot of males, relatively few males contribute disproportionately to the gene pool as has been found in salmon spawning. Still another swarm trigger is said to be that vast numbers of animals moving uniformly thwart predators, but it seems to me, swarms of tasty creatures are more likely to attract them as with blue whales and krill.
It’s maybe an unfair stereotype that in the East, conformity of the masses is seen as desirable, whereas Westerners root for the individual. I must be an extreme American seeing each sperm as an individual, especially having been informed that every sperm, has a unique set of genes. But so does each soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Is each spermatozoon in competition with his 100 million or so fellows or is it the goal of the whole lot of sperm to fertilize the female, strength in numbers. Is it about competition or cooperation? One hint is that the ejaculatory swarm is from one individual adult male so maybe the little guys are cooperators working for their dad. On the other hand, once a sperm fertilizes the ovum, no other is allowed in. Otherwise there’d be too many chromosomes. But, the process of liberating swimming sperm into fluid might simply be a holdover from the earlier eras of our aquatic animal ancestors. So here is a bit of a conundrum.
Mammals like us fertilize internally. Male mammals are not releasing sperm into a stream or depositing them on eggs. The Fallopian tubes are designed to propel the ovarian follicle hoping to be fertilized, toward the uterus, against the flow of sperm. Thus spermatozoa are made to swim upstream like salmon. The ovum lucky enough to be fertilized will be transported to the uterus for implantation within about a week, enough time to divide into a blastocyst.
Starling Murmuration.