Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [87]
I believe the Neanderthals would have been more distinct from us than they seem now from the structure of their bones. They were not inferior. Their apparently more simple lifestyle was probably, given the 200 millennia or more in which it was tested, sustainable and in tune with their environment. In perhaps another century or less we may find out if we can do as well. We will learn if it is possible to live happily and be healthy in mind, body, and spirit surrounded by a devastated fauna, as a perpetual summer species in the north, sustained there by food and energy imported from distant continents.
19
Ant Wars
WHY DO PEOPLE WAX ELOQUENT ABOUT THE simple life, especially one spent during the summer in a hut at a lakeshore? Yearning for the simple life in the winter might be less inviting, although if there were a way to induce hibernation—perhaps by injecting the chemical that is produced naturally in bears and woodchucks that hibernate—then it might at least be an attractive option for some obligate summer-lovers. But even in summer, the main problem, if it can be called such, is entertainment or lack thereof, although there is a solution that beats a lawn mower, a lawn chair, or a television set with 100 channels, by a mile: watching ants and other critters.
EVERY SUMMER I SPEND SOME TIME TRYING TO LEARN something new about animals. I spent the summer of 1981 in the Maine woods, living in and out of an old, dilapidated one-room tar-paper shack with my wife then, a great horned owl, and two crows. Maggie and I were studying the behavior of insects commonly known as ant lions because they are slow-moving predators that catch fast ants. They do this by making pits in loose, dry sand. The pits serve as traps; the ant lions hide buried in sand at the bottom of the traps with only their sharp tonglike pincers exposed; and with these pincers they grab any ant that wanders in. If an ant then starts to scramble up the steep, slippery slope of dry sand, they throw up loose sand that starts a sandslide and brings it back down and into reach. We caught ants to feed them as part of our experiments. There were always surprises, sometimes distracting me from our work. One day near the fire pit by our shack I saw red ants running and carrying black ones, and as a break from my task of attending the ant lions I stopped to watch these ants’ puzzling goings-on. I knew even less about ants than about ant lions, and the more I watched the more confused I got. I took notes, hoping someday to understand.
Fig. 36. An ant carrying an apparently very willing one from another species, who remains totally motionless.
Next to our fire pit was a black ant mound that was then a shallow pile of loose soil, balsam fir needles, and other debris. Hairy-cap moss grew on and around the old ant heap, and wild blueberries grew next to it. The colony was, I thought, being invaded by a column of big red ants that were taking out the black ants and lugging them off over the glacier-grooved granite ledge of our doorstep and through a low-bush blueberry patch. I traced them to a nest mound at the edge of the pine forest nearly 100 feet to the north. I assumed that it was a slave raid. Ant “slaves” result from immatures (generally larvae or pupae) that are taken from another nest, and that then acquire the odor of the colony into which they are brought. After aquiring the colony odor, they are accepted as colony members. But I was puzzled to see no fuss and fighting among the adult ants; each “slave” curled itself up into a little ball to be easily carried. I wondered why they went so willingly.
I WAS TO COME BACK FOR A FEW MORE SUMMERS. DURING the next summer, 1982, the same colony of red ants “raided” two more black ant nests, one of which was in another clearing at an impressive distance: 250 feet. To reach this nest the reds had to traverse a shady spruce-fir thicket. I speculated that what I was seeing was a regular occurrence, because there were twenty-one empty ant mounds well within range of the big mound of the red raiders. I