Wilson and his wonderful ants

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural science, naturalists, memoirs, ants, myrmecology

This is the most troublesome ant in the world. The 47 known species of leaf-cutter ants can form immense nests with millions of members, move tons of earth doing so, and strip entire trees of leaves overnight. In Tales From the Ant World, Edward O. Wilson, my favorite naturalist and nature writer, saves these ants for his last chapter. I don't have his patience.

Of all the social insects, leaf-cutter ants best deserve the moniker "superorganism". There are several distinct castes, and this photo (cropped from a much larger image) shows two of them. The workers that cuts the leaves and carry them are accompanied by smaller "minors", which ride along when the leaf bits are carried to the nest. They aren't freeloading. They keep away parasitic flies that would otherwise lay eggs on the workers. They are bodyguards.

Dr. Wilson, who studied at Harvard, taught there for 41 years, and is still affiliated as a Professor Emeritus, has been there for more than seventy years. From his many books we find that he didn't always spend much time there. Collecting and studying ants has taken him almost everywhere on Earth where ants live; effectively, everywhere except the polar ice caps and a few islands (ants are poor at crossing oceans).

When asked, "What do I do about ants in my kitchen?", he will typically reply,

"Watch your step, be careful of little lives, consider becoming an amateur myrmecologist, and contribute to scientific study. … They carry no disease, and may help eliminate other insects that do carry disease." —from the Introduction, p. 10.

If we all followed that advice, a lot more would be learned about ants in short order, and some pesticide companies would go broke.

The short chapters of Dr. Wilson's book are like adventure tales. We read of ants that sting worse than any wasp, ants that farm insects such as aphids for their honeydew, some that are ranchers (keeping "domesticated" insects to eat), and the many ants that enslave other ant species. Slavery has been around for 100 million years or more; humans didn't invent it.

This image, from a pest control company, shows some common ants to be found in temperate areas, such as most of the US. On my screen they are shown about 3x natural size. That would make the smallest, the "Crazy Ant", about 3mm (1/8") long, which is about right. Taken together, the ants in a typical yard weigh as much as one of the occupants of the house, perhaps more. Worldwide, the ants weigh more than all the billions of humans.

One chapter describes a few species of trap-jawed ants, such as the one shown here. They pull back their jaws past a cocking point. When they release the jaws they slam shut in a couple of milliseconds.

Such ants prey on insects such as springtails, which are much too fast to chase down or can jump (springtails also have a cocking mechanism and a lever to launch themselves). These ants move very slowly, to maneuver close enough to snap the jaws on their prey.

There are more than 15,000 species of ants so far described. Some are well known, but for others a physical description is all that is known besides where they were found. Sometimes, even knowing where a species was first found isn't much help if you don't take account of when. The author writes about searching in vain for some rare ants, only to learn later that they are only active in cold weather, and he'd had the misfortune to try to find them in the summertime.

Live and learn. He has a few chapters on his own path to becoming a naturalist, bolstered by a childhood in neighborhoods with a lot of natural places nearby, and parents who didn't mind him raising sundry critters or nests of insects in his bedroom. Yet after a working life that spans seven decades, he is still learning, and loving the learning. His books have the same goal, to share that love of learning from nature that has been his delight. His writing is happy writing because he is happy. Reading him makes me happy.