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Saving Rich Part 3 – Or, What is the 26th Ant?
So in Part 2, I had just managed to save my husband Rich from an post-operative MRSA infection after the doctors had given up on him.
Long story short, I put live kefir on his skin. (Not the wound itself, mind! I wasn’t that brave.) But everywhere else on his skin.
This worked to resolve the superbug infection that was drilling its way through his wound down towards his vital organs.
It worked because Rich’s skin – just like your skin – is a biome. A biome is a living system. Living systems are made up of nodes (the individual elements in the system) and edges (the connections between the nodes). The intelligent behaviours of a living system are not dictated from the top down, by a boss node. The intelligence emerges from the bottom up, through the connections between the nodes.
In our case, antibiotics had killed off all the beneficial bacteria in Rich’s skin biome, leaving the pathogens a clear field to take over and reproduce. When I put the live beneficial bacteria on his skin, it restored the skin biome to working order, and the good bacteria were able once again to contain the pathogens.
Lesson: You can’t kill your way to the solution inside a living system.
Killing off part of the system ultimately only makes the entire system brittle, and more liable to collapse.
What works is restoring connections, so that the systems’ emergent intelligence can begin to work again.
To get a clear picture of how this works, imagine an ant farm. You used to be able to order them online. (Field note: maybe you still can? Dunno. Let me know…)
Anyhow, there’s a principle involved here that I call the 26th Ant. And it goes like this:
If you only have 25 ants in an ant farm, they don’t do much. They wander around. Bit random. More like isolated individuals than a functioning superorganism.
But the 26th Ant arrives – and bam! Shizzle starts to happen. The ant farm organises. They begin to make food lines. Build nurseries. Make burial sites for their dead. (Field note: the exact number of ants needed to achieve this varies according to species, etc. 26 is a metaphor. But you take my point.)
In some species, ant activities get elaborately crazy. Army ants link their bodies to form temporary bridges over gaps — and then dynamically adjust the bridge size depending on traffic flow. Fire ants interlock themselves into waterproof floating rafts during floods. The structure redistributes weight and self-heals if damaged.
Weaver ants pull leaves together and use larvae as “silk dispensers” to stitch the nest shut.
No blueprint exists anywhere. And there is no boss ant. No top-down controller. The 26th Ant isn’t telling everyone what to do. In fact, even the queen isn’t telling everyone what to do. The queen’s function is purely reproductive.
So what is going on?
Systems theory tells us this: An ant hill is a living system – just like your skin biome. Or your gut biome. Or a forest. Or a coral reef. Or a city. Or your family. Or the planetary ecosystem. And all living systems work according to the same principles.
All living systems are made up of nodes and edges. Kill off the nodes and destroy enough of the edges between them, and the living system will power down. There just isn’t enough information passing between the nodes for the system to continue to function. But add enough nodes and enough connections back into a living system, and things get interesting.
Turns out living systems must reach a “quorum” or tipping point, to start doing their thing. Once there are enough nodes, and enough connections between them, the system lights up and comes online. Behaviour becomes emergent. That is to say – the entire living system does cool stuff that no single node is dictating. And that no one node could accomplish on its own.
And that’s how I accidentally saved Rich. I stewarded the living system of his skin biome. Putting the live kefir onto his skin added living nodes back into the system, until there were enough nodes and connections that the system itself came back online, and began to exhibit emergent behaviour. Which, in this case, was to resolve the infection that was threatening to take his entire body down. (Field note: at the time, I had no bl&&^* idea that this was what I was doing. I was operating on sheer instinct and terror, using tools I happened to have on hand. Back then, I only knew that it had worked. It took me ten more years to figure out why.)
So – in your own living system –
Who’s the 26th Ant? The one whose arrival tips the entire system into intelligence?
It could be you.
To be continued…
Hugs,
Shann.x
Shann Jones MBE
Founder/Director Chuckling Goat
The Innovative Entrepreneur Redefining Success in 2025 (The Enterprise World)
ps…And of course your gut biome is being constantly depleted by aging, stress and life – and needs those nodes adding back in! Wondering what your 26th Ant might be? Kefir? Prebiotic? Microbiome test? Our Nutritional Therapists are standing by on live chat 8 am to 8 pm weekdays, ready to help you work out what your own living system might need next. No boss ants. No bots. Just lovely trained humans!
