E.O. Wilson has got to be one of my favourite all-time heroes. Or that’s Edward O. Wilson, as he’s more officially known, but given how beloved he is still (he died during the height of the pandemic at the lovely age of 92) the more familiar “E.O.” it usually is especially amongst his admirers, like me. But don’t let that friendly moniker fool you. He’s one of the finest biologists that ever lived. Some call him a modern Charles Darwin.
In a nutshell, E.O.’s on my Top 40 list for two reasons.
One, he’s the first scientist I’ve ever heard articulate something I’ve believed in since I was a kid playing outside in the dirt: That we humans have a duty, an obligation, call it what you will, to protect all life forms on Earth for their own sake, not just because we “value” them for our purposes. The brilliant thing was E.O. could say as much in serious science- or academic-speak as he could in the kind of passionate, poetic language you seldom hear from such experts. He even earned a book cover blurb from Margaret Atwood praising him for same.
The second thing I love about E.O. is he pretty much wrote the book, literally and metaphorically, on ants. Better make that “books,” because in the pantheon of his many works, which won him two Pulitzers along with a lot of scientific awards, he wrote or co-wrote four books on ants and other social insects. My favourite has an honoured spot on my very crowded office bookshelves. Tales from the Ant World is a terrific eye-opener about ants, and an even better intro to E.O. himself, including how he got hooked on studying these tiny, usually overlooked creatures.
To start, if you ever see a photo of him, E.O. always looks like he’s squinting or winking. That’s because when he was seven, the same year his parents divorced, he suffered a fishing accident that blinded him in his right eye so his love of nature ended up zooming in on tiny creatures—like ants!—that he could focus his one good eye on at close range. (Proving, once again, that what first seems like a tragedy just might turn out to be far from it.)
So in this beautiful summer weather when we see those long lines of our friendly neighbourhood ants marching, marching, marching relentlessly through our kitchens and gardens, across our picnics and into our tents, maybe take a second look. Even get down on your hands and knees, preferably with kids since you’ve all left your cellphones at home for the day while you’re taking a nature break, and take a good close look at these little wonders and how they operate. And if you read E.O., you’ll learn how they talk, smell and taste.
Heck, they can probably even offer us a quirky socio-political insight or two as we negotiate these troubled times. “Ants are the most warlike of all animals,” E.O. writes in Tales from the Ant World, “with colony pitted against colony. Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg.” Huh.
ANT-IDOTES TO BOREDOM
These little factoids might keep you from getting antsy (add winking emoji) in many a different setting by piquing your curiosity about these amazing creatures. If you really want to get into it, E.O. suggests rather than shooing away your kitchen (or picnic) ants, have some fun with them.
Put a few pieces of food the size of your thumbnail on the floor or sink, patio table or whatever, then watch and see what happens. According to E.O., house ants like honey, sugar water, chopped nuts and canned tuna! Soon a scout will appear, and then the action really starts. “There will follow social behaviour so alien to human experience it might as well be on some other planet,” he writes. Something there about cooperation versus competition?
The first five tidbits, below, are from Tales from the Ant World. The rest are from The Book of Ant Records: Amazing Facts and Feats by Katja Bargum, a Finnish writer, science journalist and former ant researcher. It was originally published in Swedish, but I bet your favourite library, including Whistler’s, carries the 2024 English version published by Orca Books in Victoria. And I bet they’ve got at least one of Edward O. Wilson’s treasured books, too.
Fun facts in ant-icipation
• More than 15,000 ant species roam the Earth, and about ten thousand trillion ants. We humans currently number about 8.2 billion.
• In 1955, E.O. Wilson identified some 175 different species of ants in one square kilometre in Papua New Guinea. Years later, other scientists collected 355 different ant species at a single location in the Amazon.
• Ants carry no disease, and may help eliminate other insects that do carry disease.
• You’re a million times larger than an ant. We humans inspire fear in ants; they shouldn’t inspire fear in us.
• Using simple graph paper, a scale and a basic system that works for you, like “F” for “foraging food” or “N” for “nest,” you can map the path of ants you follow.
• The best farmers in ant world are leafcutter ants, which live almost entirely on fungus. If the fungus gets diseased, the ants control it by using an antibiotic substance that grows on their own skin.
• Ants eat a lot of different things, including other small animals, plants, seeds and mushrooms.
• The strangest ant sustenance is one Dracula ants prefer. They suck blood from their own larvae—their own babies. But the larvae don’t die. They still develop into totally normal adult ants.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who was fascinated by the long highways of house ants when she lived on the Big Island in Hawaii.
