"Tales from the Ant World," Edward O. Wilson

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.wtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Tales from the Ant World,” Edward O. Wilson

October 27, 2020

 

“The love of nature is a form of religion, and naturalists serve as its clergy.”

                                                                                                                                Edward O. Wilson (1929-)

                                                                                                                                Tales from the Ant World, 2020

 

Wandering along paths through the fields and woods where we live, I am more of a flaneur than a naturalist. I agree with Henry David Thoreau: “All nature is doing her best each moment to make us well – she exists for no other end.” My mind wanders in sync with my feet. I witness a bird and its nest, watch a turtle eyeing me, gaze at a tree in full bloom, look down at an ant hustling along with purpose. 

 

Edward O. Wilson, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929, is professor emeritus at Harvard where he specialized in myrmecology for the past sixty-eight years. This is his thirty-fifth book, two of which have won Pulitzer prizes, four of which I have read. 

 

Professor Wilson concludes this one at the beginning. “Where did ants originate? When? And perhaps even, why?” He says they emerged from wasp ancestors during the Cretaceous period, approximately ninety million years ago. But this story begins in Alabama where, as a teenager in Decatur, along the Tennessee River, Wilson decided upon a life as a naturalist, with a specialty in ants. His family moved often, which he admits was tough on an adolescent: “Where I found it difficult to make new friends…I turned instead to natural habitats to find a reliably familiar environment.”

 

There are over 15,000 species of ants, with perhaps as many yet undiscovered. They exist almost everywhere, from the top of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington to deep into caves in Trinidad. “…ants are as mean as they have to be in order to protect their home. No more, no less.” They are eusocial, meaning they live in a society “formed by means of altruism and advanced degrees of cooperation.”  Ants are matriarchal, as male ants have one purpose – to inseminate the queen. Armies, workers, food-scavengers and scouts are all females. Ants are practical, assigning the most dangerous jobs to the oldest. The fastest ones are found in open, hot plains of eastern and southern Africa; the slowest in tropical forests in Central and South America. They are prolific. The colonies of attine leafcutters are immense, “in fact among the largest known in the whole world of social insects.” Professor Wilson adds: “The mother queen, when inseminated by several males during the nuptial flight, receives 200 to 300 million sperm cells…She pays out sperm cells one by one…during her lifetime of ten to fifteen years. In this time, she gives birth to as many as 150 million to 200 million workers…”

 

One wonders – Does nature have a master plan? Does each species have a specific role to play? It seems so. In writing about leafcutter ants and of the environmental blessings they bring to Brazil’s rainforests and savannahs, Professor Wilson notes: “…they create unique ecosystems and increase biodiversity for habitats as a whole.” His advice when you see ants in your kitchen: “Watch where you step.”

 

At 91, Edward O. Wilson has not stopped. He plans to travel to Mozambique to find a live Melissotarsus, one of the “physically strangest ants in the world.” In his thirst for knowledge, Professor Wilson is an inspiration to us all. And his book is both educational and good fun.