Superorganism
Simply put, it's a tight-knit collective.
When you find a herd of deer in the wild, perhaps what you've found isn't a 'herd,' but rather a group of individuals who happen to be together.
It will hunt, gather resources, reproduce, and think for itself, but it won't have detailed division of labor or form a social whole.
From this perspective, a superorganism, or truly social organism, possesses these three characteristics:
Reproductive division of labor, overlapping generations, and cooperative care of young.
So, why superorganism formation? What are the benefits?
The answer is resources, which means sustainable development.
The problem lies with the Insects. The group of Insects you see isn't a true swarm; they lack sociality. One could say they are forcibly brought together under artificial influence.
One could even say that Insects are not true insects, nor do they possess sociality. This highly specialized species is unlike any natural species Miki has ever seen.
Their population has no future.
You won't see even a single wild Insects anywhere in the wild.
Their clan's development is deeply tied to their host. The death of a host means the destruction of the swarm.
Every Aburame clan child receives Insects eggs in infancy.
The moment the child successfully extracts Chakra marks the rise of a new swarm.
Chakra causes the eggs to hatch, and adult Insects emerge from them.
This means that these insects are born as adults.
So, the question arises:
Who plays the role of reproduction?
The adult Insects?
No, adult Insects only mate and lay eggs; what happens next is not their concern. This is the result of highly specialized co-evolution.
The host plays the role of the mother, nurturing the insects to adulthood, even though these insects have no larval stage and develop directly into adults within the egg.
The infused Chakra is the nutrient for the larvae's growth.
This also means that once separated from the host, Insects lose the ability to reproduce, and their only outcome is destruction.
Figuratively speaking, Insects are a group of fully unproductive professional warriors. Their daily activities, besides playing, are eating and mating.
They generally don't work, and when they do, it's a hundred percent suicidal endeavor.
Such a species has no future in the natural wild.
This also means that the size of the swarm is actually directly proportional to the size of one's Chakra.
Maintaining them consumes food, or rather, Chakra.
This limits the size of the swarm, which severely restricts the upper limit of the Aburame clan's strength.
If this isn't resolved, Miki knows she has no future.
To support the massive swarm, which far exceeds what is typical for her age, Miki has already ordered the swarm to hunt autonomously.
This is to offset some of the Chakra consumption.
When the consumption becomes truly unbearable, to prevent environmental damage, Miki will have parts of the swarm commit suicide on the spot, and their bodies will be collected as emergency food for the swarm.
But constantly doing this is not a good solution.
Therefore, resources and sustainable development are huge problems.
Furthermore, since acquiring Insects at over four years old, a year and a half of experience has exposed many other issues with them.
One could say that Insects are the laziest beetles Miki has ever seen. Without specific instructions, Insects will just lie around, consuming Miki's Chakra, more parasitic than parasites.
The biggest problem is in execution.
Undoubtedly, Insects can faithfully execute Miki's commands, although there are minor issues in execution.
For example, nest building.
Overly complex commands cannot be perfectly executed; they can only be carried out in a general direction. Not just Miki, but the insects of her clan are all like this.
This is an intelligence issue. Compared to her clan, Miki's advantage lies in her ability to perform real-time micromanagement, controlling the swarm's movements as delicately as her own limbs.
Therefore, she can make the swarm complete extremely complex commands.
And the problem lies right there.
When she first dug the underground lair, Miki was momentarily careless, and large numbers of insects suffocated in the excavated lair due to ventilation problems.
So, once a Insects swarm is allowed to act freely, it goes from having a brain to being brainless.
What it can do is not up to fate, but rather to lie dormant.
Once the current task is over, they don't know what to do, falling into a state of confusion, instinctively idling and lying dormant. If there's food, they lie on it and eat; if there's no food, they only instinctively search for it when they're truly starving.
Forget collective hunting; sometimes, whether they can find food depends on the whims of heaven.
Even mating and egg-laying are carried out under the guidance of the Aburame clan.
To some extent, the Insects have been perfectly trained by the Aburame clan.
They are obedient biological weapons.
But being too obedient means losing autonomy, so everything depends on the Aburame clan. Food has to be fed to them. Autonomous development is simply no development at all.
And Miki can't constantly watch over these insects, telling them how to divide labor, how to farm and raise livestock, or how to reproduce.
And teaching them would be useless; they have no memory.
There are solutions, and superorganism formation is one of them.
For example, ants; their actions and behaviors are encoded in gene expression.
What Miki needs to do is copy this gene from ants and embed it into the Insects's genes.
This is the transcription of a program or behavioral algorithm.
The ant algorithm dictates that every ant is needed from birth. They act according to the genetic algorithm, without needing leaders or meetings to discuss. They perform their duties according to the behavioral algorithm, each fulfilling their role.
Every ant will act according to the best behavioral algorithm, which their ancestors have evolved and trained over hundreds of millions of years of big data.
Therefore, after extensive observation, Miki selected a local ant species that looked very cool.
Miki named it the Allogeneic Giant-headed Leafcutter Ant.
It is the dominant ant colony in the Konoha area.
Its characteristic is a large head. Although called a leafcutter ant, they don't cut leaves but instead cultivate mushrooms. They are a type of army ant, though not strictly so, that marches out from their nest entrance as a base, sweeping through the surrounding areas.
There is a huge difference in body size between individuals; the largest individuals are at least five hundred times larger than the smallest, hence the name 'allogeneic,' meaning all different.
When marching, smaller ants ride on the giant ants, much like combined arms tactics.
The benefit of this is saving energy consumption during marching.
Not only is their combat ability excellent in all aspects,
Most importantly, these ants are not aggressive. Despite being incredibly strong, they are very cautious.
The previously cultivated honey pot insects can be considered a failure, but not a complete failure.
The original intention was to modify an insect capable of autonomously producing and storing Chakra, but in terms of Chakra synthesis, these small insects did not qualify mentally. They could, however, store Chakra, and although the amount was small, it was sufficient as a means to supplement Chakra.
This is a solution for swarm expansion, but the fundamental problem's solution still depends on superorganism formation, which means sustainable development.
Currently, a new queen insect needs to be bred, abandoning the Insects's low egg-laying efficiency and method.
Instead, one fertilization for lifelong use, producing thousands daily.
The task ahead is still a long and massive project.
This is just the beginning. The plunderability and replicability of genes mean that in this Ninja World, Bloodline Limits are also a harvestable resource for Miki.
Miki took down several test tubes, all filled with modified Insects eggs.
Among them, most of the eggs had already died, perishing in the initial stage of genetic recombination due to genetic collapse.
As the master of the swarm, Miki could sense their life, death, and health, which saved her a lot of observational trouble.
And these were not the first batch of experimental subjects, nor would they be the last.
Such a result was to be expected.
Miki did not have the means to autonomously control genes for genetic regulation, nor did she even have equipment like a microscope. She could only perform crude transcription through Chakra, and the rest was left to natural selection.
In other words, it was a roll of the dice.
Therefore, even if the eggs survived the initial stage without collapsing, they couldn't be called successful products. Most of them were deformed, and some that were less deformed were still far from Miki's expectations.
There was only one way: continuous cultivation.
Until success.
And once even a small success was achieved, Miki could record this gene expression template and use it for manufacturing.
Thus, she could continuously cultivate based on this foundation, selecting the best among the best to achieve her ideal expectations.
It was a very time-consuming project.
"They certainly have their own unique characteristics."
Simply put, it involves cross-species gene transplantation, followed by gene aggregation molecular breeding, and then population generational selection breeding.
Some eggs, under the catalysis of Chakra, did not develop into adults. Genetic recombination caused them to lose the Insects's basic ability to quickly mature.
And some that did emerge had their own unique characteristics.
Some deformed individuals with missing limbs were selected and destroyed on the spot. The remaining ones were kept for observation for a period before deciding their fate. At the same time, a new batch of eggs was cultivated.
Miki continued her work.
After repeating this process, the selected experimental subjects were placed into a prepared insect nest ecosystem, allowed to develop on their own.
Their genes would drive their actions.