Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [154]
Crazy ants hijacked this attempt to create an ecological utopia. By the time the project closed down three years later, they were everywhere. According to a contemporary press report, “Swarms of them crawled over everything in sight: thick foliage, damp pathways littered with dead leaves, and even a bearded ecologist in the humid rain forest.”42 To greater effect than intended, the project builders had created a microcosm of the Earth, complete with the human-induced traumas and foibles our planet faces—including the ants that hitch rides with us wherever we go.
Like it or not, ants and humans are in this together.
acknowledgments and a note on content
My fervor for ant watching has increased over years spent in rainforests, savannas, and deserts. In its scientific manifestation this fervor is myrmecology, the study of ants. In 1990, Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson published the encyclopedic The Ants, a technical review of the discipline that won the Pulitzer Prize. Their popular treatment of the subject, Journey to the Ants, published the following year, is highly recommended, as is Ants of North America, a field guide by Brian Fisher and Stefan Cover. (Hölldobler and Wilson have since addressed more specialized matters of social insect evolution in The Superorganism, published in 2008.) The availability of these works has given me the latitude to be pointedly eclectic in my coverage. I take the reader into the field to meet a few extraordinary ants, and I share my passionate interest in them, particularly their foraging and defense behavior, while ignoring many other topics, such as ant guests and reproductive ecology. I try to give a sense of how field scientists think about their subjects, while making no attempt to be comprehensive. My notes and citations concentrate on selected literature published since Hölldobler and Wilson’s magnum opus.
Writing this book involved an unholy amount of correspondence concerning not just ants but also wolves’ inability to recruit assistance to the kill, human walking speeds in cities, the domestication of sheep, problem solving in slime molds, and the history of trade routes between Buenos Aires and the United States. I thank the following people for their patience with my questions, and especially those whose names are in italics, who read whole chapters or more (and I beg the forgiveness of any whose names were lost when a computer crash in Australia’s Daintree Rainforest erased four months of effort): Kirsti Abbott, Ehab Abouheif, Kamariah Abu Salim, John Acorn, Eldridge Adams, Yasmine Akky, Lenoir Alain, John Alcock, Leeanne Alonso, Gary Alpert, Ronald Amundson, Kellar Autumn, Leticia Aviles, Stefanie Berghoff, Samuel Beshers, Luis Bettencourt, Johan Billen, Nico Blüthgen, Chris Boehm, Eric Bonabeau, John Bonner, Paul Bosu, Andrew Bourke, Sean Brady, Michael Breed, Charles Brewer-Carias, Rodney Brooks, Brian V. Brown, Donald E. Brown, Jeff Brown, Mark J.F. Brown, Stephen Brush, Stephen Buchmann, Gordon Burghardt, Austin Burt, Alfred Buschinger, Michael Caplan, James Carey, Robert Carneiro, Deby Cassill, Joel Chadabe, Mark Chappell, Eric Charnov, Jonathan Cole, Ross Cole, Ray Coppinger, Dora L. Costa, Jim Costa, Stefan Cover, John W. Crawford, Ross Crozier, Cameron Currie, Tomer Czaczkes, Wojciech Czechowski, Diane Davidson, Lloyd Davis, Stéphane De Greef, Alain Dejean, Terezinha Della Lucia, Phil DeVries, Mark Deyrup, Tony Dixon, David Donoso, Marco Dorigo, Anna Dornhaus, Knut Drescher, Robert Dudley, Mark Elgar, Mark Elliott, David Emmett, Terry Erwin, Xavier Espadaler, Alejandro Farji-Brener, Donald Feener Jr., Faerthen Felix, Javier Fernández-Busquets, Brian Fisher, Charles Fleming, Henri Joseph Folse, Kevin Foster, Harold Fowler, André Francoeur, Megan Frederickson, Tsukasa Fukushi, Dorian Fuller, David Furth, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Paul Gepts, Rosemary Gillespie, Ronald Glasser, Paul Goldberg, Jeremy Goldbogen, Jane Goodall, William Gotwald Jr., Gunnar Grah, Donato Grasso, Nick Griffin, Wulfila Gronenberg, Alexandra Grutter, David Haig,