On Earth, the most famous social insects were naturally ants and bees. Besides them, certain wasps and termites were also social.
Many people assumed termites were just another kind of ant, only differently colored, like black ants and red ants?
But in fact, termites belonged to the insect order Blattodea, while ants belonged to Hymenoptera. The difference between them was enormous. By that logic, termites were actually more closely related to cockroaches than to ants.
Earth's environment was uniquely blessed. No matter how strange a creature was elsewhere in the universe, it could find a similar "relative" on Earth. The Zerg were no exception.
Of course, there were subtle differences. For example, Earth's social insects possessed three major traits.
The first was flexibility. A colony could adapt to constantly changing conditions.
Those changes might come from the outside, such as flash floods, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and the like. Or they might come from within, such as the sudden death of a queen ant or an ecological crisis within the nest.
But a mature, complete colony would always find a way to deal with such situations. Their social nature compensated for the weakness of individuals, allowing them to survive environmental shifts that would be catastrophic for most insects.
The second was the colony's resilience. Even if individuals failed, the colony as a whole would still complete its task.
Take ants again. Sometimes, they hunted larger insects for food, things like scorpions. A single ant was insignificant to a scorpion, which could casually kill scores of them.
But when thousands upon thousands of ants surged forward without regard for death, the scorpion would eventually have its shell bitten through at the weak joints, and finally die of formic acid poisoning.
Perhaps some people had seen ants crossing a river. They gathered into