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Christopher Clark
Professor Thunman
English 112
22 May 2010
Trailhead Queen

Allegory of Human and Ant Lives in Trailhead by E.O. Wilson

E.O. Wilson’s Trailhead is an exquisitely detailed novella from his larger novel Anthill,

which is full of scientific fact and fanciful fiction regarding the daily lives of the ants of the

Trailhead Colony. Wilson anthropomorphizes the trials and tribulations of the ants in order to

create an extended metaphor of the lives of the ants to humans; which allows for the reader to

find common, and even sympathetic, ground with the normally foreign world of insects. “The

ants represent Nokobee, the land in this ecosystem that is being fought over by developers and

environmentalists [in Anthill]. I used them to represent it, and, as a reader, follow through an

epic of one great war after another among the ant colonies.” reflects Wilson, in an interview

with The New Yorker (Treisman) which accompanied the release of the story. This Homerian

epic will be dissected into three sections for the purpose of examination: The birth of the

Monarch and rise of the colony, the death of the Queen and failed attempts at succession, and the

fall of the colony to the invaders from Streamside.

Trailhead begins by inviting us into the microscopic world of the ants with an image of a

dead queen who is still treated as living by her thousands genetically subservient offspring. After

the macabre introduction, the reader is given a more in depth explanation as to how this

autocratic world of the ants came to be. The queen ant, much like the hereditary ruler of a nation

of men is born for the job. She is “full-brained and powerfully muscled” (Wilson) and seeks out

through luck and necessity a suitable place to lay claim to an empire. The Queen then creates, as

a human queen would procure, the first wave of workers for her newly founded fiefdom, “From

the reserves of her own body, the young Queen reared a dozen workers. All were female. They
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were tiny and weak, barely able to perform the work necessary for the little colony to survive.”

(Wilson). Evolution has dictated that she produce weak females, which pose no threat to her

command of the colony, much as human leaders would appoint only less viable underlings as to

curb the possibility of usurpation. As the Trailhead Colony expands from a few buried rooms to

an entire city “the equivalent of two hundred underground stories” (Wilson) the general laborers

have evolved to extremely specialized classes of workers, including the Queen herself. She now

lives a life of largess, moving only to birth eggs every few minutes; she is fed and cleaned by her

servants who she controls via pheromones that she emits regularly. Other classes of workers,

mirroring exactly that of human society, are solders, nurses, sanitation workers, farmers, and

even the construction trades are represented in this underground world. The ants are controlled

by pheromones emitted by the queen and the wiliness of other ants to unquestionably enforce the

status quo “the response to any usurper would have been swift and violent”; this is

fundamentally the same principal as the control over a modern human society enacted by the

ruling class via the media, laws, and financial policy. Wilson goes on to elucidate on the life of a

member of the colony: “the guiding principle of the Trailhead Colony was self-sacrifice. The

dominance of the colony over its individual members was total. A worker’s life story was

programmed to be subordinate to the superorganism’s needs.” This is an exact parallel to

numerous human ideologies from Christianity to Marxism; and even the modern brand of

Corporatism practiced in the USA.

The next evolutionary step in the Trailhead Colony, as with any human society reaching

its peak, is decline. Wilson opens the Trailhead with “The Trailhead Queen was dead”, and now

she is. As with almost any human dictatorship or privately held corporation, the loss of the

founding member is all but impossible to redress. The drones of the Trailhead colony learn of

their monarch’s demise by the eventual lack of her pheromones throughout the hive. This, like
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the power gap left after a human leader’s assassination or untimely death, allows for a successor

to be selected. The solider ants, all female, also have the ability to reproduce, and being the most

powerful living members of the colony they quickly form a replacement hierarchy, self selecting

the new Soldier-Queen leader of the Trailhead colony. This action is not unlike the quick

selection from a pre-existing political or corporate class of replacements for human presidents, or

CEO’s. The undoing of this seemingly eloquent solution to nature’s problem of death is that in

order to ensure her dominance in the colony in life, analogous to a human leaders place, all of

her subordinates were never allowed to mate and therefore incapable of birthing the females

necessary to the survival of the Colony. “The Soldier-Queen had never mated. Her children all

arose from unfertilized eggs and were therefore male drones, contributing nothing to the welfare

of the colony”, just as a dictator must by necessity select inferior subordinates, or inexperienced

offspring, when he passes, they will be incapable of continued rule at the same level of

efficiency.

With this in mind, the new demographics of the Trailhead Colony, and its human

counterparts, must be examined. The infertile Warrior-Queens, try as they might, are not capable

of producing suitable offspring and now, “with each passing day [Trailhead colony] became

more vulnerable. Its territory and even its flesh were coveted by others.”(Wilson). Much as the

vast majority of the human world’s capital is held in by the very few (be they public or private

entities) which assure the masses don’t have the means to survive without laboring endlessly for

the ruling class, the Queen held a similar the monopoly on reproduction. The inevitable result of

this necessary but shortsighted planning is a demographic shift to an ageing, less effective,

population. Just as the human world’s “developed” nation’s demographics are ageing and the

supply of youthful workers is exponentially shrinking, the same fate befalls the ants of the

Trailhead colony; and their younger neighbors have taken notice: “But now the number of able-
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bodied adults had begun to dwindle, and the survivors were growing old. The decline of the

colony was being observed by its closest neighbor, the Streamside Colony, a younger and now

more powerful superorganism.” (Wilson). As a society collapses, unless they live in a vacuum

far from competition, the natural competition over scarce recourses (such as food, water, or oil)

will result in a fight or flight reaction with the members of a competing society. The initial stage

of this confrontation for the Trailhead ants resembles closely that of the “civilized” nations of

men: “Their [the Streamside and Trailhead ants] displays were the equivalent of military parades,

designed to impress the enemy, to persuade her of their numbers and their strength. As the

tournament unfolded, the individual performers made themselves appear as large as possible.”

(Wilson). However, as with human society, there can be but one strongest tribe, and so with

trivial justification, “a Streamside worker…single-handedly began the war” (Wilson) the

Streamside ants begin a successful siege of the now decrepit Trailhead ants territory. Once the

final defenses of their nest had been breached and the Trailhead ants were deprived of their last

remaining productive resources, like any rational human, the few surviving ants fled to the hills

with hopes of surviving on their own. “The only option that remained to them was a burst of

flight to the outside, every ant for herself.” (Wilson)

Over the course of Trailhead, Wilson exposes the reader to the full gambit of human

emotion, all of which is delivered in the minute form of an anthill by the side of a trail. Wilson

clearly uses the ants of these colonies as representatives of the equally complex societies formed

just as naturally by human beings. One need not look far to see the foolish humans carrying on

with the exact same rituals, endless labors, and wars directly above the oft ignored ants of

Wilsons tale. “ … we sense from the beginning that things are not going to end well for the

Trailhead ants…we're left with a feeling of futility that won't stay put: just because the ants…die
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gruesomely, that doesn't make their lives less meaningful than ours. On the contrary: it forces us

to ask after the sources of our own human meanings.” (Unknown, Portico.com)
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Works Cited

Wilson, E.O. "Trailhead." The NewYorker. The NewYorker, 25 jan 2010. Web. 23 May 2010.
http://www.http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/01/25/100125fi_fiction_wilson

Treisman, Deborah "Ants and Anwsers: A Conversation with EO Wilson." The NewYorker. The
NewYorker, 18 Jan 2010. Web. 22 May 2010.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/01/wilson-interview.html

Unknown, "Wilson: Trailhead". Portico.com. 22 May 2010

http://www.portifex.com/ReadingMatter/New%20Yorker%20Story/2010/WilsonTrailhead.htm