Mark W. Moffett - Adventures among Ants

ADVENTURES AMONG ANTS

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General

Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2010 by Mark W. Moffett

Title page: A Bornean carpenter ant, Camponotus schmitzi, traveling along the spiral base of a pitcher plant. The ant fishes prey out of the liquid-filled pitcher of this carnivorous plant (see photograph on page 142).

Ogden Nashs The Ant 1935 by Ogden Nash is reprinted with permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Design and composition: Jody Hanson

Text: 9.5/14 Scala

Display: Grotesque Condensed

Indexing: Victoria Baker

Printed through: Asia Pacific Offset, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moffett, Mark W.

Adventures among ants : a global safari with a cast of trillions / Mark W. Moffett.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26199-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. AntsBehavior. 2. Ant communities. 3. AntsEcology. I. Title.

QL568.F7M64 2010

595.79'615dc22

2009040610

Manufactured in China

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)

This book celebrates a triumvirate of extraordinary human beings:

Edward O. Wilson, and his elemental joy in the naturalists life;

Mary G. Smith, and her success at giving the field sciences their grandeur;

and Melissa W. Wells, and our partnership in this life of adventures

Contents

introduction travels with my ants

A pale morning in June 4 AM

the country roads still greyish and moist

tunnelling endlessly through pines

a car had passed by on the dusty road

where an ant was out with her pine needle working

she was wandering around in the huge F of Firestone

that had been pressed into the sandy earth

for a hundred and twenty kilometers.

Fir needles are heavy.

Time after time she slipped back with her badly balanced

load

and worked it up again

and skidded back again

travelling over the great and luminous Sahara lit by clouds.

ADAPTED FROM ROLF JACOBSEN, COUNTRY ROADS,
TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY

My first memory is of ants.

I was down in the dirt in my backyard, watching a miniature metropolis. A hundred ants were enraptured with the bread crumbs I had given them, and they enraptured me as they ebbed and flowed, a blur of interactions. I marveled at how they sped into action when an entrance cone collapsed, or when one found a crumb or wrestled and killed an enemy worker. I could see that ants addressed problems through a social interplay, just as people did.

Years later, I met a group of Inuit children who had been brought by a special program to Washington, D.C., from a remote village in Alaska. Expecting the kids to be awed by the wonders of modern civilization, the welcoming committee was taken aback when the children fell to their knees to gape at a gathering of pavement ants, Tetramorium caespitum, pouring from a crack in the sidewalk. Alaska teems with charismatic megafauna like bears, whales, wolves, and caribou, but these children had never seen an ant. The awestruck boys and girls shrieked with delight as the ants circled and swarmed at their feet.

Ants are Earths most ubiquitous creatures. They throng in the millions of billions, outnumbering humans by a factor of a million. Globally, ants weigh as much as all human beings. A single hectare in the Amazon basin contains more ants than the entire human population of New York City, and thats just counting the ants on the groundtwice as many live in the treetops.

Its a part of our psyche, the need to care passionately about something to give ones life meaning: team sports, a just cause, wealth, religion, our children. Ants and I were destined for each other. As a junior high student back in 1973 I was enticed to join a science book club by the offer of three books for a dollar. One of my choices was The Insect Societies, and it riveted me from the moment I cracked its cover. Even today, its musty, yellowed pages bring a rush of memories of steamy summer days in the small Wisconsin town where I spent my childhood climbing maple trees and snaring crawfish and frogs. The book used a thicket of technical terms like polydomy, dulosis, and pleometrosis to describe ants, bees, wasps, and termites and featured exotica on every page. To me, the activities of these insects were every bit as mysterious as those of the long-lost peoples depicted in ancient petroglyphs. It would be twenty years before I experienced an approximation of that early, tingling thrill, when, in Egypts Valley of the Kings, I scrambled over shattered rocks in the newly unsealed tomb of Ramses I, carrying a torch so I might find and photograph scarab-beetle hieroglyphs.

The dust jacket of The Insect Societies showed the author, Edward O. Wilson, in a natty dark suit standing in a laboratory at Harvard University, where he was a professor of zoology. Mr. Wilson, the jacket said, has published more than 100 articles on evolution, classification, physiology, and behaviorespecially of social insects and particularly of ants.

I was a practicing biologist long before I acquired that book, however. My parents remember me in diapers watching ants and insist that I called each one by an individual name. When a little older, I cultured protozoa from water samples from Turtle Creek. I bred Jacksons chameleonsKenyan lizards with three horns, like a triceratopsand wrote about the experience for the newsletter of the Wisconsin Herpetological Society. One school night during the dinner hour I received a call from a zookeeper in South Africa. Having read my work, he wanted my advice on chameleon husbandry. Moms casserole got cold as my family stared at me, a socially insecure fourteen-year-old, explaining over the intercontinental telephone line how to maintain a safe feeding area for newborn lizards.

When I was in my second year as an undergraduate at Beloit College in Wisconsin, Max Allen Nickersona scientist at the Milwaukee Public Museum whom I knew from the Wisconsin Herpetological Societyinvited me to join him on a monthlong expedition to Costa Rica. I was in heaven, about to live the dream of a boy who grew up on stories of early tropical naturalists. Finally the gear I had gathered over the years could be put to use in the pursuit of science: magnifiers, nets, bug containers, plastic bags for frogs, cloth sacks for snakes and lizards, boots thick enough to stop a snake bite. Over the next two months I helped to catch everything from a Central American caiman to a deadly coral snake.

One day as I wandered alone in the rainforest, lizards squirming in the sack hooked over my belt, I heard a barely audible sound that was subtly different from that made by any creature I had met so far. For me, that sound would prove as portentous as the rumble of a herd of elephants: it was the noise of thousands of tiny feet on the move across the tropical litter. Looking around, I spied a flow across the ground in front of mea thick column of quickly moving orange-red ants carrying pieces of scorpions and centipedes, flanked by pale-headed soldiers equipped with recurved black mandibles that were almost impossible to remove after a bite. These were workers of the New Worlds most famous army ant,