A friend told me today about the novel Dust, a 1999 sci-fi thriller by Charles Pellegrino, in which humanity is attacked and threatened with extinction by massive killer hordes of voracious mites.
My friend said that one thing he found notable about the premise is the contrast in behavior between individual mites and the giant swarms they form: Whereas each individual mite is incredibly stupid and dimwitted, when they band together in massive numbers the collective group entity displays a surprising degree of intelligence and inventiveness.
This struck me as very funny, because with people it works in exactly the opposite way.