Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [1]
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