Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [153]
What most excites me are the unexpected insights that emerge from comparisons between these different levels of organization. In the study of ants, our insights thus far have been limited by the visual prominence of individual workers: imagine trying to grasp the totality of a person and being overwhelmed by the sight of neurons and blood cells. I expect the superorganism metaphor will come to permeate and enrich the biological, social, and information sciences. For this to happen, it will be necessary to first understand the basic functioning of an ant colony in the same way a physician understands a human body: its metabolism and mass, its anatomy and internal integration, its growth and development, its ability to reproduce, its responsiveness to stimuli, its physiological stability and self-repair mechanisms, its capacity to distinguish self from other, and its ability to move and explore, achieve goals, glean nutrients, communicate with others, and adapt to a changing world.
A few months after seeing the Argentine ant battlefield with David Holway in San Diego, Melissa and I decided to pursue a more exotic adventure. In January 2008 we joined a research team on Easter Island led by John Loret, director of the Science Museum of Long Island. John, who at eighty still has the muscular physique of Popeye, first traveled to Easter Island in the 1950s with Thor Heyerdahl, famous for his journeys on the raft Kon-Tiki. He was going back now to explore caves and, with my assistance, to look for invasive ants.
Remote islands seldom harbor native ant species because ants are not skilled at crossing oceans without human help. When Ed Wilson studied the ants of Easter Island in 1973, the only species on record had been brought by commerce, and the Argentine ant was not among those found.41 Thirty-five years later, Argentine ants had swept the island, transforming it into one wide ant hill. Melissa and I collected workers from half a dozen localities and deposited them among their sisters elsewhere, from the sleepy village of Hanga Roa to a stone wall near Mahatua to the giant moai heads of Akahanga. Everywhere the ants mixed blissfully. The entire island proved to be a single supercolony—the product, we assumed, of one introduction by ship from mainland Chile.
Melissa had another reason for traveling with me to Easter Island. With the help of a former governor of the island, the archeologist Sergio Rapu, we had arranged to be married at the edge of the Rano Kao volcano. It was an ancient ceremony, one that had not been conducted on the island for several decades. Rapa Nui tribesmen in loincloths brought us to the precipice, stripped us naked, then clothed and painted us in beaten bark, feathers, and shells. As the winds threatened to tear off these scant garments, we exchanged marital rocks selected from the volcano rim. We took our vows in a ceremony of beating drums and shouted chants that hadn’t changed in centuries. At least one thing had changed, however. I looked down at one point and saw Argentine ants racing across my toes.
Experiencing untouched nature is all but impossible now. From the depths of the oceans to the farthest reaches of the atmosphere, there is no corner of the planet that humans have not explored, no place that has not been altered by our presence. Neither is there any corner of the globe that the ant cannot invade. Consider Biosphere 2, a $200 million, eight-story structure erected in the Sonoran desert of Arizona to demonstrate the power of technology over nature. Sealed off from the surrounding environment in 1991, Biosphere 2 was intended to be a closed ecological system, from which people would learn how to be self-sufficient in outer space. But a colony of Paratrechina longicornis, an invasive species from the Old World known as the crazy ant for its mad zigzag dashes, somehow found a way inside the otherwise impregnable