Adventures among Ants. Mark W. Moffett
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and worked it up again
and skidded back again
travelling over the great and luminous Sahara lit by clouds.
ADAPTED FROM ROLF JACOBSEN, “COUNTRY ROADS,”
TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY
My first memory is of ants.
I was down in the dirt in my backyard, watching a miniature metropolis. A hundred ants were enraptured with the bread crumbs I had given them, and they enraptured me as they ebbed and flowed, a blur of interactions. I marveled at how they sped into action when an entrance cone collapsed, or when one found a crumb or wrestled and killed an enemy worker. I could see that ants addressed problems through a social interplay, just as people did.
Years later, I met a group of Inuit children who had been brought by a special program to Washington, D.C., from a remote village in Alaska. Expecting the kids to be awed by the wonders of modern civilization, the welcoming committee was taken aback when the children fell to their knees to gape at a gathering of pavement ants, Tetramorium caespitum, pouring from a crack in the sidewalk. Alaska teems with charismatic megafauna like bears, whales, wolves, and caribou, but these children had never seen an ant. The awestruck boys and girls shrieked with delight as the ants circled and swarmed at their feet.
Ants are Earth’s most ubiquitous creatures. They throng in the millions of billions, outnumbering humans by a factor of a million. Globally, ants weigh as much as all human beings. A single hectare in the Amazon basin contains more ants than the entire human population of New York City, and that’s just counting the ants on the ground—twice as many live in the treetops.1
It’s a part of our psyche, the need to care passionately about something to give one’s life meaning: team sports, a just cause, wealth, religion, our children. Ants and I were destined for each other. As a junior high student back in 1973 I was enticed to join a science book club by the offer of three books for a dollar. One of my choices was The Insect Societies, and it riveted me from the moment I cracked its cover. Even today, its musty, yellowed pages bring a rush of memories of steamy summer days in the small Wisconsin town where I spent my childhood climbing maple trees and snaring crawfish and frogs. The book used a thicket of technical terms like polydomy, dulosis, and pleometrosis to describe ants, bees, wasps, and termites and featured exotica on every page. To me, the activities of these insects were every bit as mysterious as those of the long-lost peoples depicted in ancient petroglyphs. It would be twenty years before I experienced an approximation of that early, tingling thrill, when, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, I scrambled over shattered rocks in the newly unsealed tomb of Ramses I, carrying a torch so I might find and photograph scarab-beetle hieroglyphs.
The dust jacket of The Insect Societies showed the author, Edward O. Wilson, in a natty dark suit standing in a laboratory at Harvard University, where he was a professor of zoology. “Mr. Wilson,” the jacket said, “has published more than 100 articles on evolution, classification, physiology, and behavior—especially of social insects and particularly of ants.”
I was a practicing biologist long before I acquired that book, however. My parents remember me in diapers watching ants and insist that I called each one by an individual name. When a little older, I cultured protozoa from water samples from Turtle Creek. I bred Jackson’s chameleons—Kenyan lizards with three horns, like a triceratops—and wrote about the experience for the newsletter of the Wisconsin Herpetological Society. One school night during the dinner hour I received a call from a zookeeper in South Africa. Having read my work, he wanted my advice on chameleon husbandry. Mom’s casserole got cold as my family stared at me, a socially insecure fourteen-year-old, explaining over the intercontinental telephone line how to maintain a safe feeding area for newborn lizards.
When I was in my second year as an undergraduate at Beloit College in Wisconsin, Max Allen Nickerson—a scientist at the Milwaukee Public Museum whom I knew from the Wisconsin Herpetological Society—invited me to join him on a monthlong expedition to Costa Rica. I was in heaven, about to live the dream of a boy who grew up on stories of early tropical naturalists. Finally the gear I had gathered over the years could be put to use in the pursuit of science: magnifiers, nets, bug containers, plastic bags for frogs, cloth sacks for snakes and lizards, boots thick enough to stop a snake bite. Over the next two months I helped to catch everything from a Central American caiman to a deadly coral snake.
One day as I wandered alone in the rainforest, lizards squirming in the sack hooked over my belt, I heard a barely audible sound that was subtly different from that made by any creature I had met so far. For me, that sound would prove as portentous as the rumble of a herd of elephants: it was the noise of thousands of tiny feet on the move across the tropical litter. Looking around, I spied a flow across the ground in front of me—a thick column of quickly moving orange-red ants carrying pieces of scorpions and centipedes, flanked by pale-headed soldiers equipped with recurved black mandibles that were almost impossible to remove after a bite. These were workers of the New World’s most famous army ant, Eciton burchellii. Later that same day, I would be awestruck by an even more massive highway of ants, several inches wide, formed by the New World’s most proficient vegetarians—leafcutter ants hauling foliage home like a long parade of flag-bearers.
In the two years that followed I went on treks to study butterflies in Costa Rica and beetles across a wide swath of the Andes, where I spent six months marching over plateaus of treeless páramo habitat and scaling rocky cliffs at 15,500 feet. I began to get a taste for the life of the seasoned explorer.
But I wanted more. I wanted to study the ant.
On returning from the Andes, I steeled myself to write a letter to Edward O. Wilson, whose Insect Societies was still my bible. I got back a warm, handwritten note encouraging me to drop by to see him on my way to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, where I was about to take a course in animal behavior.
Beloit is a small college. Its atmosphere is progressive and informal, and the students know their professors by their first names. So when Professor Wilson opened his office door, I greeted him with “Hi, Ed!” and gave him a hearty, two-fisted handshake. If my presumptuously casual attitude offended him, he didn’t show it. Within minutes, this world-famous authority and recipient of dozens of top science prizes (he had already won the first of his two Pulitzers) was spreading pictures of ants across his desk and floor and exchanging stories with me as if we were boys. We talked for an hour, and I left with my head full of ideas for fresh adventures.
When I was a child, my heart was with the early explorer-naturalists. I studied the adventures of the insightful Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce, the brilliant Alexander von Humboldt, the groundbreaking Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, the wildly eccentric Charles Waterton, and the incomparable Mary Kingsley. I admired these brave field scientists for their appetite for adventure, and I envied them their era. In the nineteenth century, entire regions were still uncharted. Most of Borneo, New Guinea, the Congo, and the Amazon were still labeled unknown. By the time I started exploring, in contrast, most of the Earth had been mapped and claimed, although since then I have managed to set foot in a few places where no outsider—and in the case of Venezuelan tepui mountaintops, no person—had ever walked before.
But I also read the books of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, George Schaller, and other living field scientists. I had lunch at Beloit with Margaret Mead, who banged her cane for emphasis as she recounted her experiences with exotic tribes. I recognized in these scientists a sense of adventure grounded, like that of the early naturalists, in a desire to know the unknown—but not by conquering it, as some early naturalists had, but rather by understanding it. Their fervor was infectious. John Steinbeck captured the attitude perfectly in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a chronicle of his adventures in the Gulf of California with his longtime friend the biologist Ed Ricketts: “We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world—temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy.”
That’s what I wanted to be.
When I arrived at Harvard in 1981 to begin graduate school under Professor Wilson,