My mother provided not just encouragement but also financial help when I entered college. Later, as I prepared to enter the Ph.D. program at Harvard, she offered to pay my way through medical school. She wanted to be sure, as she put it, that I had not excluded dreams of a medical career for lack of money. But this more traditional profession held no interest for me. An entomologist I would be, and I was confident that I could make it the rest of the way on my own.
I did support myself from the time of my master of science candidacy at the University of Alabama until I completed the Ph.D. at Harvard five years later. I relied on scholarships and teaching assistantships throughout and never incurred debt. Long-term student loans were scarce to absent at the time. In any case the possibility simply never occurred to me.
In 1950 I transferred to the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, to begin work on the Ph. D., mainly because of the presence there of Arthur Cole, a professor of entomology who specialized in the classification of ants. That year I searched the nearby Chilhowee and Great Smoky mountains for my favored insects, building my personal collection, while studying Cole’s collection from the United States, the Philippines, and India. I finished a comprehensive review of the history and genetic change in the imported fire ant and sent it to the journal Evolution. While serving as Cole’s laboratory teaching assistant, I honed my skills in the anatomy and classification of insects.
The academic challenge was not great at the University of Tennessee, and I grew restive. Out of boredom I also became a bit reckless. I was intrigued by the fact that a statute was still on the books forbidding the teaching of evolution in the state. In 1925 the Tennessee legislature had declared unlawful any doctrine that questioned the divine origin of man. A young high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was brought to trial that same year for presenting the theory of evolution to his biology class. In one of the most celebrated legal proceedings of American history, William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution and Clarence Darrow the defense. Since Scopes was undeniably guilty, he was convicted and fined $100, but not before expert testimony from scientists in favor of evolution and Darrow’s scarifying courtroom examination of Bryan on the Bible sent shock waves through the ranks of the Christian fundamentalists. The state supreme court later acquitted Scopes, but only on the ground that the fine was excessive. The law stayed in place and was still untested in the higher courts when I came to Knoxville.
In the fall of that year, while teaching laboratory sessions in the general biology course at the University of Tennessee, I learned about the extraordinary discovery of the first of the South African man-apes. These erect, small-brained hominids seemed to place the origin of humanity one to two million years ago on the African continent. They were the key missing links between remote apelike ancestors and the most primitive true humans of the genus Homo known at the time of the Scopes trial, the so-called Javan Man and Peking Man—both of which are now placed in the single species Homo erectus.
Here, I thought, was one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century: Eden revealed in Africa by the lights of Darwin! I was intrigued by the prospect of a complete human phylogeny, with its deep significance for the self-image of our species. I also had a mischievous itch to shake things up just to see what would happen. I might get into the same trouble as Scopes, but I would spring out of it immediately—I guessed—because the evidence was so much more solid—I felt sure—and the faculty would support me—I hoped. In any case I could not resist spreading the word about the amazing South African man-apes.
I was granted permission to give a lecture on the subject to the elementary biology class. I told them the matter was settled: we did descend from apes, or a close approximation thereof, and scientists knew when these distant ancestors had lived and even something about how they had lived—they were carnivores, and Eden was no garden. The students, some my own age, were mostly Protestants, and many had been raised in fundamentalist families. Some, I am sure, had been taught that Darwin was the devil’s parson, the spokesman of evil heresy. They scribbled notes; some glanced at the clock as time wore on. Finally the hour ended, and I waited for a reaction. The students filed out, talking among themselves about this and that but not, so far as I could overhear, about evolution, until only one remained, a large blond boy who looked me in the eye and asked, “Will this be on the final exam?” I told him no, please don’t worry. He seemed relieved; one less thing to memorize. Nothing more was heard of my lecture. It was as though I had declaimed for an hour on the life cycle of the fruit fly.
The state legislature, yielding to reason or perhaps just resigned to the inevitable, repealed the anti-evolution law in 1967. The religious movement against the theory of evolution has sputtered on in a few other states, unsuccessfully promoting laws to force the teaching of the biblical account of creationism as an alternative theory. Either way, I learned a lesson of my own in Tennessee: the greater problems of history are not solved; they are merely forgotten.
By early 1951 I had decided to move on to Harvard University. It was my destiny. The largest collection of ants in the world was there, and the tradition of the study of these insects built around the collection was long and deep. To this end I had the support of Aaron J. Sharp, a distinguished botanist and professor at the University of Tennessee, who quietly advised me to apply to Harvard and nominated me for a fellowship there. A second supporter was William L. Brown, then a graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Biology. I had first contacted Brown in 1948, when I was still an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, because I had heard from Marion Smith of his interest in the biology of ants. He turned out to be a fellow fanatic on the subject. Brown also was, and is, one of the warmest and most generous people I have ever known. He fueled my already considerable enthusiasm with a stream of advice and urgings. Equally important, he treated me from the start as an adult and a fellow professional. His attention was focused on the good of the discipline. He rallied others to the cause and urged them to take up significant research topics. What you must do, he wrote me in so many words, is to broaden the scope of your studies. Never mind a survey of the Alabama ants; start on a monograph of an important ant group. Make it continentwide, or even global if circumstances warrant. You and I and others who join us must get myrmecology on the move. Right now, you have the advantage of living in the Deep South, where there are a great many dacetine ants. These are extraordinarily interesting insects, and we still don’t know much about them. There is an opportunity to do some really original research. See what you can come up with, and keep me posted.
I plunged into the dacetine project at once, tracking down species one after another, turning over rocks and tearing apart decaying stumps and logs, dissecting nests, and capturing colonies to be cultured in the laboratory. The dacetines are slender, ornately sculptured little ants with long, thin mandibles. Their body hairs are modified into little clubs, scales, and sinuous whips. In many species a white or yellow spongy collar surrounds their waists. Clean and decorative, they are under the microscope among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects. The workers hunt springtails and other soft-bodied, elusive insects by approaching them with extremely cautious movement, legs lifting and swinging forward as though in slow motion. They open their jaws wide during the stalk, in some species by more than 180 degrees, to reveal rows of needle-sharp teeth. When the huntresses draw very close, they are able to touch the prey with the tips of paired slender hairs that project forward from their mouths. The instant contact is made, they snap the jaws shut like a bear trap, impaling the prey on their teeth. Each dacetine species uses a variation on this technique, mostly in the speed and degree of caution of the stalking approach, and each hunts a particular range of prey species.
Largely because I enjoyed grubbing in dirt and rotting wood on hands and knees, I was very successful in my pursuit of dacetine ants. In two articles, published in 1950 and 1953, I presented detailed accounts of the comparative behavior of the dac
etine ants found in the southern states. In 1959 Brown and I combined our data to prepare a synthesis of dacetine biology. We correlated the food habits of large numbers of species from around the world with their social organization. We discovered that the anatomically most primitive species, which are native to South America and Australia, forage above ground for larger and more various insect prey, such as flies, grasshoppers, and caterpillars. They form large colonies and often have well-differentiated castes, including large-headed “majors” or “soldiers” and small-headed “minors,” each playing a different role in the colony. The majors, for example, are adept at defending the colony against invaders, while the minors are prone to serve as brood nurses and attendants of the queen. As evolution proceeded, its trends evidenced by living species that are anatomically more advanced, the ants came to specialize more on springtails and other very small insects. The body size of the workers correspondingly decreased and became more nearly uniform within each colony, and the division of labor was diminished. Colony populations became smaller, and the nests more subterranean and inconspicuous.
Ours was a novel approach to the study of behavior. So far as I am aware, the dacetine study was the first of its kind on the evolution of social ecology in animals. It preceded the work of John Crook and others in the 1960s on primate socioecology; and in some respects it was more definitive, principally because we had more species and could use experiments on food choice. But despite the fact that we published our findings in the Quarterly Review of Biology, a premier journal with a worldwide distribution, our summary article was cited only rarely thereafter, and principally by fellow entomologists. It had little effect on the later development of behavioral ecology and sociobiology. Part of the reason is that monkeys, birds, and other vertebrates are more nearly human-sized and more familiar than ants, and therefore textbooks and popular accounts treat them as more “important.”
William Brown, Uncle Bill as he was to become affectionately known by younger entomologists in later years, urged me to visit Harvard. I did so in late June 1950, traveling three days and nights on a Greyhound bus from Mobile to Boston. We seemed to stop at every city and town of greater than 50,000 population along the way, and I was exhausted by the time I reached the ant room of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Bill and his wife, Doris, were gracious hosts. They put me up in their Cambridge apartment, where I slept on a sofa next to the crib of their two-year-old daughter Allison. Early the next morning I watched apprehensively as Allison reached through the crib bars for pages of Bill’s newly completed Ph.D. thesis. During the next several days, as Bill made final preparations with Doris to leave for field work in Australia, he took time to guide me through the ant collection. Once again he encouraged me to select large, important projects and to aim for publishable results. Your dacetine and fire ant studies are very promising, he said; but now you should come to Harvard in order to work more effectively with projects of even greater scope. Take a global view; don’t sell yourself short with local studies and limited goals. He introduced me to Frank M. Carpenter, the professor of entomology and great authority on insect fossils and evolution, who was later to serve as my doctoral supervisor. Both men urged me to apply to the Ph.D. program at Harvard. I did so, even though I had already enrolled for the coming academic year of 1950–51 at the University of Tennessee.
The following spring I was admitted to Harvard for the coming fall semester with a scholarship and teaching assistantship that covered all expenses. In late August 1951 I sold my only suit to a secondhand store in Knoxville for ten dollars, packed all my belongings, including my research notebooks, into a single suitcase, and traveled by bus to visit my mother and Harold in Louisville. After taking one look at me, dressed—how shall I say it—in Salvation Army grunge, Harold escorted me to a men’s clothing store and bought me a wardrobe befitting a 1951 Harvard student. I walked out in an Irish tweed jacket, Oxford button-down white shirt, narrow knit tie, chino slacks, and white duck shoes and socks. With a fresh crew cut added, I was ready to pass into a new life.
I arrived in Boston by bus and took the subway to Harvard Square, crossed over to the Harvard Yard entrance next to Massachusetts Hall, and asked the first person I met for directions across campus. He was evidently a student, and he spoke in a cultured English voice. So this, I said to myself, is the famous Harvard accent. Several weeks later the same student, who was indeed a Harvard sophomore, turned up in a laboratory section of beginning biology I was teaching. I learned then that his name was John Harvard Baker; that he was British, having only recently arrived in this country; and that he was a descendant of the uncle of the legendary John Harvard, whose donation founded the university in 1636 (Harvard himself had no children). Our meeting was, I think, a fittingly symbolic introduction to the university where I was to spend the rest of my professional life.
I walked on that day in September to Richards Hall, one of the graduate student dormitories in Harkness Commons, picked up my keys at the manager’s office, and proceeded to my assigned room, number 101. My roommate had already arrived and posted his name on the door: Hezekiah Oluwasanmi. I thought, what kind of a name is that? Polynesian, maybe Samoan? He was Nigerian, and another Ph.D. candidate. We soon became good friends, continuing on through his eventual tenure as vice-chancellor of the University of Ife. Through the fall of 1951, as I sat reading at my desk, I half listened to Hezekiah and his friends, some of whom wore tribal scars on their cheeks, discuss the coming liberation of Nigeria. They were among the first intellectuals to plot such a movement in British Africa. I wondered if perhaps I was getting involved in something illegal just by being in the same room. I could see the headline in the Mobile Press Register.: “Alabamian arrested with African revolutionaries as FBI closes in.” It was all exhilarating, a proper introduction to the expanding and infinitely interesting world I had entered.
chapter nine
ORIZABA
ALMOST ALL MY LIFE I HAVE DREAMED OF THE TROPICS. MY boyhood fantasies drifted far beyond the benign temperate zone of Thoreau and Muir. Nor did I have any interest in arctic glaciers or the high Himalayas. I hungered instead for the frontiers of Frank Buck and Ivan Sanderson, hunters of tropical exotic animals, and William Beebe, naturalist-explorer of the Venezuelan jungle. My favorite novel was Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, which hinted that dinosaurs might yet be found on the flat summit of some unclimbed South American tepui. I was besotted with National Geographic articles on tortoise beetles and butterflies, winged jewels that entomologists—of the kind I hoped to become when I grew up—netted during journeys to remote places with unpronounceable names. The tropics I nurtured in my heart were the untamed centers of Creation.
When I was a boy most of the tropical forests and savannas were indeed still wildernesses in a nineteenth-century sense. They covered vast stretches of land waiting to be explored on foot, and sprinkled through them were unrafted rivers and mysterious mountains. In the farthest reaches of the Amazon-Orinoco basins and New Guinea highlands lived Stone Age peoples never seen by white men. But more compelling than all these wonders, more than white water, talking drums, arrows quivering in tent poles, and virgin peaks awaiting the flags of explorers’ clubs, the fauna and flora of the tropics called to me. They were the gravitational center of my hopes, a vertiginous world of beauty and complexity I longed to enter. When I grew impatient during my late teens, I looked around for some passable equivalent nearer home. The Alabama bay-gum swamps and riverine hardwood forests, I realized, were somewhat like tropical forests writ small. After I entered college I explored the edges of the Mobile-Tensaw delta floodplain with that comparison in mind. I was attracted by the dense shrubby vegetation and meanders of unnavigable shallow mud-bottom creeks. It was a place no field biologist had visited—and was seldom entered by anyone for any reason—and I wondered if it might contain undiscovered species of ants and other insects living in ecological niches new to science. I decided I would conduct a one-man expedition into the interi
or and thus inaugurate my career as a tropical explorer, at least in spirit.
I never made it into the delta. I was too occupied with the demands of college life at the University of Alabama and my ongoing studies of fire ants and other research projects across the state. Then successive transfers to the University of Tennessee and Harvard to continue graduate studies removed me from the region altogether.
In my first year at Harvard I was delayed further. I settled on a sensible thesis project that could be reliably finished in three or four years. Then, I figured, I could go to the tropics. My research would be on the ant genus Lasius, one of the most abundant but poorly understood assemblages of the north temperate insect fauna. The forty or more species are distributed through the cooler habitats of Europe, Asia, and North America. Their colonies excavate a large percentage of the little crater nests that dot cornfields, lawns, golf courses, and sidewalk cracks across the United States and Canada. If you go out and look for small brown chunky ants along the streets of cities such as Philadelphia, Toronto, and Boise, the first ones you are likely to see are foraging workers of a species of Lasius.
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