Ender's Entomology Fail

I recently watched the Ender's Game, the Hollywood adaptation of the hugely acclaimed novel by Orson Scott Card. The movie, quite a departure from the book, reminded me of 80's anime series Gunbuster (released about 3 years after Card's novel) and the visuals made me think of Dead Space, whilst the aliens seem to have been borrowed from the Babylon 5. Why in a blog about beekeeping I'm talking about a sci-fi film. Well, [spoiler alert] central to the movie is that the aliens are very much like ants and so Earth's entire strategy is based upon the protagonists' understanding of ants.

Ants like bees are part of the order of Hymenoptera. Hymenoptera are basically four winged insects whose fore and aft wings are connected by hooks. The order includes a huge number of insects but ants, bees and wasps have their very own suborder called Apocrita, it has to do with their tiny waists. In common with a lot of bees, ants are social insects, they live in colonies, have queens, drones and sexually immature female workers.

In Card's novel he mentions the aliens have a similarity to bees and ants. In the movie the script writers felt a need to go beyond that and have the relationship between Queen ants and the rest of the colony explained clearly and slowly for the viewer. It's very important the viewer understands this because, as I mentioned, Earth bases it's whole survival strategy on it and for reasons I didn't quite follow they only had one shot at doing their thing. Unfortunately Hollywood then undermines the whole film by getting all it's ant facts completely wrong..

Dynamite fact checking Hollywood.

Mazer, the unconvincing Maori, has our protagonist Ender slowly explain, for the benefit of the audience, that the Queen ant "directs the worker ants." This isn't true. The Queen lays eggs and that's about all, the workers feed her and attend her needs but she doesn't actually direct them. In fact it's more likely to be the other way round. In honey bee colonies it's been observed that workers exert some level of control over the Queen by altering her food intake if they want to slim her down to swarm and dictating what kind of eggs she'll lay through cell construction.

Ender then goes on to tell us "What she thinks they do." No. Ants haven't somehow evolved telepathy, and as I've mentioned she doesn't control the colony anyway. Bearing in mind Queen ants have a very limited sphere of experience if the colony was dependent upon her directing it they would be unable to forage, defend the colony or do any of the other fairly surprising things ants get up to,

In case the viewer still hasn't grasped what some script writer too lazy to spend ten minutes with Wikipedia is trying to get across we then get told "Without her they can't think for themselves." Not true, foraging ants can travel a couple of hundred metres from their nest, encountering and responding to situations a Queen would have no experience of or ability to cope with..
 
And finally we're misinformed if she dies "they die." Wrong again Ender! What actually happens is, just like honey bees, if a Queen is lost the workers will select an egg or grub and raise a new Queen. If there's no viable eggs or grubs then some workers will sexually mature and start laying male eggs to continue the colony's genetic lineage. Oh and just to fully undermine the whole plan many ant colonies have multiple queens anyway which should render the whole exercise of killing the Queen pointless.

So there you have it, a $110,000,000 movie with it's plot resting on some incorrect information a few minutes with a book (or Google) could have cleared up. Despite being a box office failure it's actually a fairly entertaining flick, just better if you ignore the dialogue though.