Are the Schistocerca gregaria, Locusta migratoria, Nomadacris succincta, and Anacridium sp grasshoppers/locusts still around? And, can they still become gregarious?
Oddly specific question, I was just thinking about how crazy yellow ants are the only eusocial insects in where we are in the story. But locusts are….weird.
(p.2) Well I guess locusts aren’t really *eusocial* as they don’t have a social hierarchy like ants do, but gregarious behavior still seems like a threat.
On the contrary, the ants view the grasshoppers the least of a threat of all macrovolutes! In the notes for episode 6, you can read a little on how Grasshopper Swarm is regarded as a non-Swarm, because the grasshoppers believe gathering in large numbers is bad luck...because of the locusts, yes! Locusts are certain species of grasshoppers which form devastating swarms during periods of starvation. As macrovolutes, all grasshoppers vow never to form groups that large, under any circumstances. They're anarchists, and don't fully understand how laws work when they are among insects that belong to Swarms.
And there's nothing the ants like better than a big, fat, lonely insect that has a poor grasp on laws. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say the ants view the grasshoppers as sort of free range cattle, for when stocks of isopods and millipedes are low. Or, even when they're not.
In real life, gregarious behavior is not at all uncommon for insects, though true sociality is. You can very often find insects of the same species gathered around a food source (aphids, other true bugs, flies, roaches, etc.), or just clustered together to hibernate (e.g. ladybugs). The ants in HBG do not regard this as a threat, and in fact, the other macrovolutes were pressured to form *some* kind of social structure to convince the ants they were worth dealing with at all!
