Tschinkel - Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests

1. ix

If you wanted to be an explorer ferreting out the undiscovered wonders of North America, you would be way too late. Sure, there might be small patches left to discover, but even these are laid out for all to see on Google Earth, identifiable by their precise latitude and longitude so that your GPS can lead you directly to them. But there is a way in which even today it is possible to be an explorer. It is not geographic exploration, but its intellectual analoguescientific exploration of the natural world, and it is this exploration that is the story of this book. It has been my fortune to have lived a scientific career of rambling exploration, a career I seem to have been destined for. My attraction to the natural world (and food) was already obvious by the time I was two years olda photograph shows me with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a piece of cake in the other. By the time I was six, I was telling people who asked that I was going to be a biologist (whatever I thought that meant). Still, the road to my eventual career was not entirely linear, nor was it a carpeted path. I endured an abysmal biology course in high school, most of which consisted of copying definitions out of the textbook and listening to the teacher denounce evolution as devil talk that contradicted the Bible. My chemistry course was even worse, taught by a part-time cotton farmer and part-time holy roller preacher who practiced his sermons on the class. He knew precious little about chemistry. Somehow, my friend BB and I wheedled permission to work in the stockroom while the sermons were going on. We were interested mostly in making dangerous and explosive stuff, and once we almost succeeded in blowing up the stockroom. Another high point was when we ignited a batch of thermite, creating a cascade of white-hot molten iron that burned a permanent star shape on the wooden floor.

After high school, I attended a small mens college (for small men, we joked), where I was finally able to give free rein to a wide range of biological pursuits and to find like-minded students who shared my interests. At that time, the great and exciting strides in biology were being made in cell physiology and biochemistry. Thus I applied to the graduate program in the Biochemistry Department at the University of California, Berkeley, only to be turned down. When, a week later, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship that paid full tuition, I called up the Biochemistry Department and asked whether they would admit me now that I had money. Sure, they said, we would love to have you. So I said forget it and applied to the Bacteriology Department, which admitted me right away.

Biochemistry and bacteriology are pretty similar, and once I got into the practical, laboratory part of the discipline, I gradually realized that, for me, something was missing. Where were the critters that had seduced me into biology in the first place? Where were the beautiful living things with wings, legs, leaves, colors, and forms? Could I really spend the rest of my life looking at flocculent white precipitates in a test tube? There would be a huge piece missing from my life if I continued in this field. I needed to find my way back to what had charmed me about the natural worldthe creatures I could see, touch, feel, and handle, whose construction and function were beautiful.

Looking back, I can see that I was trying to decide at what scale biology held the most charm for me. At the time, I saw it only as what kind of objects I wanted to deal with, and where I wanted to do it. Flocculent precipitates had convinced me that my preferred scale wasnt the molecular or biochemical. This was a world of white debris, gelatinous slime, blurred bands on gels, or clear solutions that absorbed ultraviolet light. There was nothing to grasp, no form to appreciate, no movement, no behavior, not even color unless you worked on hemoglobin or vitamin B12. No one could actually see an enzyme violently clutch a substrate and wrench it and twist it until it changed chemically. The exciting things that went on in this world were constructs of the mind, built from elaborate physical and chemical measurements.

My friendship with John Doyen, a graduate student in entomology, showed me a way to return to working with living creatures, not just cell-free extracts of them. Johns specialty was tenebrionid beetles, a family of mostly black beetles (from tenebrous, meaning dark) with many species in the western United States. Particularly appealing was that most species produced a noxious defensive secretion that stained your fingers brown, and some of them could even spray it for distances of up to a meter, and one of them (the mealworm beetle) had even been shown to secrete a sex pheromone. Here, then, was a way to roam the western countryside to collect black beetles from under stones, collect their stinky secretion, and analyze it with the latest fancy, expensive techniquesgas chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared spectrometry, and ultraviolet absorption. I had found a way to apply my background in organic chemistry and biochemistry, and in addition, I got to watch the defensive behavior of the beetles and dissect hundreds of them to study and draw the structure of their beautiful glands. With respect to the sex pheromone of the mealworm beetle, I figured out how to make males copulate with glass rods treated with female pheromone. What could be more fun?