Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [25]
A few weeks later, I left Sullia and traveled to Bangalore, where I was to meet the writer, Rick Gore, for breakfast at his hotel, Bengaluru, the finest in the city. By then, I had been living in rural villages so long that the hotel gave me culture shock. The corn flakes and coffee, though everyday American foods, were pricy by Indian standards, costing more than I spent in a week in Sullia.
Rick told me my photographs had gone to Mary Smith at “the magazine,” who wanted to support my efforts, maybe even have me write a story for the magazine. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mary is legendary for her work with such iconic scientists as the paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, and the ape experts Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. Why did she want to work with me? “She likes what you are discovering,” Rick told me. “She also has no idea how you are making the ants look so glamorous.”
I had no idea either. Up to that time the only photos of mine I’d seen were test shots I had taken of dead specimens back in Massachusetts, and they weren’t anything to crow about. So a month later, when I arrived in Singapore, where Mary had sent the developed slide images, I was stunned. The ants that had been half visible to me through my camera in dim light were clear and crisp on film. Here were marauders confronting furry Meranoplus, sleek Leptogenys hunting termites, eagle-eyed Harpegnathos seizing crickets in mid-jump. Two years later, after my return to the States, when I met Mary, she compared my images to the visuals in the film The Terminator. “For you ants are huge, so they become huge for the rest of us,” she told me. The photographs became part of my first article for National Geographic magazine.1
THE PLAN OF ATTACK
In Singapore, I splurged on flash attachments that did not shock me. To take in the mass-foraging pattern, I stepped back each day to observe the raids as a whole. But like a physiologist who examines muscle fibers to find out how humans move their fingers, I also came in close with my camera “microscope” to record the individual ants in action and learn the details of how they made their kills and harvested the victims.
These observations came as a welcome relief after months at Harvard measuring ants in museum drawers and categorizing them as minor, media, or major based on their frequency and size.2 What I discovered in the field was that the slender minor workers form 98 to 99 percent of the population. Tiny, with heads about 0.6 millimeter wide, they are distinct. There are no intermediates between them and the other ants, which range widely and continuously in size. Within this continuum, there is a distinct peak in the numbers of ants at just over 2 millimeters’ head width, and so these I called “media workers,” and another peak at just over 3 millimeters’ head width, for the majors. A few of the majors are substantially larger, with heads 5 millimeters wide or more—the size category I informally called the giants. The queen, who ordinarily stayed in the nest, had a smaller head than a giant, but a much larger body: she could be about 2 centimeters long.
Among different kinds of ants, I learned, work is divided up in two ways. In some species the workers are similar in appearance but flexible in their job skills, temporarily taking on any tasks as they arise, but the colonies of other species can also develop workers of different sizes to do different jobs on a more permanent basis. The former method allows colonies to adjust more rapidly to changing conditions, but it has its limitations: since the workers are identical and interchangeable, duties that require a specialized