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By Root 575 0

of a general assessing the movements of troops from a hilltop, where they were more pawns in a game than people engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Now, seen close-up through my camera lens, a marauder minor worker stood tall and solid before me, antennae moving as if to sniff me out. Her forebody was raised, forelimbs almost lifted from the ground, mandibles open. She was ready to pounce. Suddenly I saw the silvery blur of some creature, through my lens the size and shape of a tank, and the worker was yanked from her spot. I recognized the beast as a roly-poly, or pill bug, a quarter-inch multilegged crustacean presumably flushed at the raid’s front lines.

My worker had seized one of the pill bug’s furiously moving legs. Though knocked about violently, she managed to hold on. Two other minors, and then three more, grabbed the pill bug by other legs or the edge of its carapace. One whose head somehow got smashed released her grip and fell away. The others were strong enough to bring the pill bug to a halt. It tried to roll into a ball—a ploy that gives the bug its common name—but the tightly anchored workers prevented it from protecting itself. From the left, a media worker lumbered into view. She used her antennae to survey the scrimmage. Then she opened her club-shaped mandibles wide and struck. The pill bug’s pale underbody went limp. Watching this skirmish conclude, I couldn’t help but think about how groups of early humans brought down woolly mammoths using nothing but guts and some simple stone tools.

When I left Boston for Asia in 1981, I had a premonition that I would discover amazing things about the marauder ant—so amazing that my thesis committee might suspect I had concocted stories while smoking an illegal substance with an Indian guru. Knowing I had to come home with indisputable documentation, before I left for Asia I bought a how-to book on photographing supermodels, Cosmopolitan-style. With $230 in equipment that included a used Canon SLR, a macro lens, and three $15 flash attachments that gave me electric shocks, I miniaturized the glamor studio the book described by affixing the flashes to the front of the lens with a pipe clamp. By adjusting the strength of my lights, I adopted the concepts of “fill” and “hair light” to accentuate the gleaming exoskeletons of my minuscule models, defining each limb and chiseling every fiber on film.

During my travels in Asia, I used my camera to observe ants, triggering it whenever something happened that I wanted to examine later. In India, trying my equipment for the first time outside, I was stunned to see that through my lens, ants towered. Soon I was stalking them through the viewfinder with all the thrill nineteenth-century hunters must have felt tracking lions. With both quarries, the trick is to go unnoticed, to catch everyday behavior without being bitten—admittedly a more high-stakes proposition with a lion. Still, when tracking an ant in this way, I would forget her size, and she gained all the grandeur of the king of the jungle.

A minor worker stands a couple of millimeters tall. Photographing such a tiny insect requires concentrated effort and lots of illumination. When I focused the camera on my leg, my cheap flashes gave such an intense pulse of heat and light that smoke rose from my jeans. Fortunately, reducing the setting to one-quarter power solved the problem while providing sufficient exposure, but even then, the part of the picture in focus was often only a fraction of a millimeter deep—the length of a paramecium. With the flashes toned down, most ants ignored my “light cannon,” especially when struggling with prey. Like a lion, an ant is easiest to approach and photograph when it is preoccupied.

In my six months in India, my photography budget was tight, but I took an occasional picture of marauders swarming, collecting seeds, and being harassed by hairy Meranoplus workers. Before I flew to Singapore to continue my work in Southeast Asia, I wrote the Committee of Research and Exploration at the National Geographic Society, which had given