Collected thoughts on “pirate” ants and “leistic” behavior.

     I first encountered Joan Herbers’ proposed terminology for the ant behavior that most of us know as slave-making or dulosis while reading a manuscript by one of her former students. This lead to a conversation between Joan and myself about the origins, use and impact of these terms. I then sent around her essay, reprinted above, to a number of myrmecologists to get their reactions. I here coalesce their ideas (anonymously) with a few thoughts of my own (these mostly in the second half).
      Most respondents state in one way or another that no one but a few dozen myrmecologists even know of, much less care about this terminology. Accompanying this is an expression of doubt that myrmecological terminology has any more than a miniscule effect (if that) on social attitudes. While this is perhaps true, as I read it, Joan’s point is more about how insensitive social attitudes (even if they be unconscious) come out in our terminology (even if not many are affected by it).
      Another view expressed is that biology in general, and myrmecology in particular already has a rather turgid and synonym-laden vocabulary, so generation of still more synonyms should be avoided. A related point is that the proposed term “leistic” behavior is in essence preoccupied, though with a slight different spelling, in the term “lestobiotic”, so that coining new terms based on the same Greek root is potentially confusing.
      Some argue that the addition of yet another commonly recognized anthropomorphic term, “pirate”, reverses recent attempts to de-anthropomorphize biological terminology. Furthermore, the piracy analogy is deemed inappropriate because it is even more removed from the ant behavior than is the slavery analogy. More than one goes on to point out that piracy is hardly free from its own “psychosocial baggage”. The recent romanticizing of pirates in the film industry cannot alter the fact of the blatant violence and sheer, frightful meanness of pirates. Joan argues elsewhere that it is unlikely that pirates will object to this new terminology, but their victims and anyone sympathetic to them certainly might, putting it on a par with “slave-making”.
      A point touched on in several responses that I find important is that even if the slavery terminology is indeed insensitive or offensive or might even put off descendents of slaves from entering the field of behavioral biology, changing to the piracy analogy does nothing to effect real change. The fact that large groups of humans are under-represented in science has far more to do with antiscientific attitudes and poor educational institutions and practices at the grade school level than with virtually unknown, if insensitive scientific terminology. Summarizing: Okay -- Avoid, maybe even change loaded scientific terminology, but far more important is to strive for improvements in science education at all levels.
      I did a little research on the Greek-derived words dulosis and dulotic. These words do not exist in Greek, except perhaps among Greek myrmecologists. The classical Greek words for slave and slavery are, respectively, doulos and douleia, and the myrmecological terms might fall on the classical Greek ear as something along the lines of “slave-osis” and “slave-otic” with the meaning about as unclear (but perhaps referring to a disease). With due respect to Joan’s rhetorician colleague, I think it must be admitted that the terms dulosis and dulotic are entirely inoffensive to all but a tiny number of people. I think most of us could accommodate easily to avoiding the clearly loaded terms slave, slavery and slave-making, and to using only the virtually unrecognizable dulosis, and dulotic, parasite, host, brood thief, etc., when discussing these ants and behaviors.
      On the other hand, one person’s comment refers to dulosis as “little better than a euphemism”. And this brings me to a point that still has me thinking. Myrmecology is a field peopled largely (as is most of science) by those of our respective societies’ dominant ethnicity, by people with professional-class social status and by those with an extraordinary level of education. I venture to say that our state of social privilege is so ingrained and automatic as to go virtually unrecognized by us. It would behoove us to consider that it takes work on our parts to relate to the history and sensibilities of those who don’t share our inherent state of privilege. We could well be more sensitive to the impact of our terminology on others.
      Finally, since most, maybe all, seem to agree that “pirate” and “leistic” are unacceptable, and that “dulosis” is not really accurate (even if virtually neutral), I have a suggestion I like a little better than any of the several serious -- and some silly -- terminological proposals I received; We could call this behavior cleptergy (adjective cleptergic). The noun has the literal meaning, “theft of work”, or the looser translation, “theft of workers” (ergates). I think most will agree that either meaning is suitable for the behaviors in question and that the word cleptergy itself seems to lack sociological connotations. Further, these terms appear to satisfy Dr. Herbers’ goal of the creation of sociologically neutral but accurate language for talking about these amazing ant behaviors.

James Trager