The next day our thoughts turned entirely to Nothomyrmecia macrops. The idea of the “missing link” ant is about as romantic a concept as is possible for an entomologist. The whole story began on December 7, 1931, when a holiday party set out by truck and horseback from Balladonia, a sheep ranch and beer stop on the cross-Australia highway northeast of Esperance. They traveled leisurely for 175 kilometers southward across the vast, uninhabited eucalyptus scrub forest and sandplain heath. In this first leg they passed close to Mount Ragged, a forbidding treeless granitic hill. Then they stopped for a few days at the abandoned Thomas River station on the coast before turning west to Esperance, where they took rail and automobile transportation back home. The habitat they traversed is botanically one of the richest in the world, harboring large numbers of shrubs and herbaceous plants found nowhere else. A naturalist and artist resident at Balladonia, Mrs. A. E. Crocker, had asked members of the party to collect insects along the way. These they placed in jars of alcohol tied to the saddles of their horses. The specimens, including two large, oddly shaped yellow ants, were turned over to the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. There the ants were described by the entomologist John Clark in 1934 as a new genus and species, Nothomyrmecia macrops.
Our hopes were high as we left Esperance the next day, retracing the 1931 party’s route in reverse. We were accompanied by the Australian naturalist Vincent Serventy and Bob Douglas, an Esperance native who served as camp manager and cook. We rode on the flatbed of a huge hand-cranked truck that had seen service on the Burma Road during the war. On the nearly invisible rutted dirt road to the Thomas River farm, we encountered not a single person. The sun bore down from the blue summer sky, from which bush flies descended in relentless swarms. When we stopped the only sound we heard was the wind whispering through sandheath shrubs.
We found the Thomas River to be a dry bed—an arroyo—in a basin depressed twenty-five to thirty meters below the level of the sandplain. Its floor had once been shaded by tall yate trees and carpeted by grass. Not long after their arrival in the 1890s, the first settlers had thinned the yate forest, and their flocks of sheep had destroyed the grass. Now, a half-century later, the groves were composed of a mix of yate, paperback, and wattle, and the forage had been replaced by patches of succulent salt-tolerant herbs. Huge nests of meat ants, five to ten meters across and seething with hundreds of thousands of big red-and-black workers, dominated the more disturbed swaths of open terrain.
Nothomyrmecia could have been anywhere in such a varied environment. I was excited and tense, knowing that we might find scientific gold with a single glance to the ground. Haskins and I set to work immediately, each hoping to be the lucky discoverer. We searched back and forth through the basin grove, turning logs, scanning the tree trunks, inspecting every moving light-colored ant remotely resembling a Nothomyrmecia, but found nothing. We hiked up onto the sandplain heath and swept the low bushes back and forth with a net to capture foraging ants, again without success. That night, armed with flashlights and net, we walked back out onto the sandplain, and this time lost our way. Rather than risk wandering farther from camp in a dangerous desert-like environment, we settled down to wait for daybreak. To my surprise Caryl found a football-sized rock, pulled and rocked it as though positioning a pillow, lay on his back on the ground, and fell asleep. I was too keyed up to attempt the same feat and spent the rest of the night searching for the ant in the immediate vicinity. How marvelous it would be, I thought, if I could hand Caryl a specimen when he awoke!
But again, no luck. The four days we spent at the Thomas River station, broken by a side trip north to Mount Ragged, were a textbook introduction to wild Australia. Dingoes, the feral dogs of Australia, whined unseen around our camp at night. Kangaroos and emus could be seen moving across the sandplain at a distance during the day. One morning, while absorbed in close inspection of insects on the sandplain, we were startled by the sound of an animal snorting behind us. We turned to find a white stallion standing ten meters away, gazing placidly at us as though waiting to be saddled up. In a few moments he turned and trotted away. Returning to our work, we looked up now and then to locate him again until he passed out of sight in the distant gray-green heath.
Research progress was rapid and satisfying around the Thomas River, at least by ordinary standards of field biology. We discovered new species, in the course of which we also defined an entire ecological guild of sandplain ants specialized for foraging on the low vegetation at night. Large-eyed and light-colored, they represent members of the genera Camponotus, Colobostruma, and Iridomyrmex that have evidently converged in evolution to fill this arid niche. Because Nothomyrmecia is also large-eyed and pale, we reasoned that it was a member of the guild, and so we concentrated our efforts on the sandplain.
We never found Nothomyrmecia, but we made it famous. In the years to follow, other teams of Americans and Australians scoured the area with equal lack of success. The ant acquired a near-legendary status in natural history circles. The break finally came in 1977 when Robert Taylor, a former Ph. D. student of mine at Harvard and at that time chief curator of the Australian National Insect Collection, stumbled upon Nothomyrmecia in eucalyptus scrub forest near the little town of Poochera, in South Australia, a full thousand miles east of the Thomas River. It was a totally unanticipated discovery. Taylor came running into camp shouting (his exact words) in pure Australianese, “The bloody bastard’s here! I’ve got the Notho-bloody-myrmecia!”
A small industry then grew up among ant specialists, who studied every aspect of the ant’s biology. Many visited the Poochera site. The details supported a theory, originally promoted by William Morton Wheeler while professor of entomology at Harvard and furthered by Haskins, that social life in ants began when subordinate daughters remained in the nest to assist their mother in rearing more sisters. At that point in distant geological time, according to this now strengthened scenario, solitary wasps evolved into ants.
Brown River Camp, Papua, March 1955. After taking the train back to Kalgoorlie I flew to Perth, then to Sydney, and on to New Guinea. The great island was to be the “ultimate” tropics and the climax of my odyssey. Immediately after my arrival in Port Moresby in a Qantas DC-3, I contacted Joseph Szent-Ivany, a Hungarian refugee from the postwar communist takeover and the Mandated Territory’s only resident entomologist. We called on G. A. V. Stanley, a longtime resident and planter known as “bush pig” by the natives for his exploits as a civilian scout for the Allied forces during the war. Both men were expert field travelers in New Guinea. After filling me with advice and a couple of good dinners, they accompanied me while I set up a camp near the Brown River, a tributary of the Laloki near Port Moresby. Thanks to their selfless assistance, I was able within five days to commence work in primary rain forest. My little expedition was supported by a native cook, a driver, and a personal assistant. I had no trouble supporting this crew, despite my own impecunious state as a mere postdoctoral fellow far from home. Each man’s salary was thirty-three cents U. S. a day plus rations; this rate was the going standard, and Szent-Ivany and Stanley cautioned me not to exceed it.
Our tents stood in a small clearing ringed by giant trees whose finlike plank buttresses gave their trunks the appearance of rockets poised for flight. More than thirty meters above us, the dense canopy, festooned with lianas and epiphytes, closed out most of the sunlight. Only a few shafts cut to the floor through scattered breaks caused by naturally falling trees and branches.
I was immersed in a pandemonium of life. The racket made by parrots and other birds, frogs, and singing insects beat incessantly upon my ears—a cacophony but one of great eloquence so long as I listened to the separate instruments and not the orchestra all at once. Less congenial were the mosquitoes, gnats, and stingless bees that hummed around my head in merciless attendance. The body fluids paid these pests are the expected tariff for tropical field work. But I was where I most wanted to be in all the world; I had no complaint.
Tree trunks, lianas, and rotting logs teemed with thousands of species of insects. I scurried about continuously through the days and on into the nights, closely followed by my assistant, who rapidly turned into an enthusiastic amateur entomologist. Together we gathered more than fifty species of ants, many of them new to science. During all that time my eyes were fixed on the ground and lower vegetation. Rarely did I look upward, and then only to watch giant birdwing butterflies churning the air, or flocks of parrots rushing back and forth through the canopy, a riot of different species, first one brown in plumage, then another green, then another yellow. I heard a bird of paradise calling once, but stared skyward too late to find it. I never saw one during my four-month visit to New Guinea, although I must have passed close to a variety of species many times. My eyes were locked to the ground, head bent and shoulders hunched in the lifetime posture I had already acquired by my late teens. At dusk we dined on wallaby, wild pigeon, and, for appetizers, nut-flavored grubs of long-horned beetles dug from nearby decaying logs and roasted like marshmallows on sticks over the fire.
In New Guinea I felt like a real explorer. I was an explorer, at least in the world of entomology. Shortly after returning from the Brown River and then a second, week-long trip to the foothills rain forest of the Sogeri Plateau (where I discovered an extraordinary new kind of ant living as a social parasite in the nest of another species), I drove with Joe Szent-Ivany to the Port Moresby airport to meet Linsley Gressitt. The great entomologist was soon to turn Hawaii’s Bishop Museum into a world center for research on Pacific insects. He was rightly to be known as the pioneering expert on insect biodiversity in this region. He arrived on that day for his first visit to New Guinea. I had beaten him there by two weeks, and I think back now with pride on the advice I gave him on local collecting.
The Huon Peninsula, Northeast New Guinea, April 1955. The Huon Peninsula is the horn of New Guinea, a mountainous extension of the northeastern corner of the island that projects into the Solomon Sea. Its spine is the Sarawaget Range, which runs most of the length of the peninsula before dividing eastward into the Rawlinson and Cromwell Mountains. At its tip, below the foothills of these satellite spurs, is the little coastal town of Finschhafen, where I arrived on April 3 to begin the greatest physical adventure of my life.
I had been invited there by Bob Curtis, an Australian patrol officer, to accompany him on a government-sponsored tour into the mountainous interior. His mission was an official visit to villages in the Hube country as far west as the Sarawaget highlands. He would consult with the village chiefs, settle disputes within and between villages, offer advice on agriculture, and if possible capture and return two suspected murderers for trial in Finschhafen. He anticipated no special risks, the murderers notwithstanding, but a great many unknowns did lie ahead. Although messages were carried regularly by natives back and forth between the coast and mountains, the villages of the region were visited by patrol officers at intervals of only one to two years. Some had not been contacted since 1952.
The most remarkable aspect of the patrol may have been Bob Curtis’ age. He was twenty-three, and would turn twenty-four on April 19, near the end of the trip. As he reviewed the itinerary with me, he seemed as self-possessed and competent as a man twice his age. Curtis was blond, powerfully muscled, and possessed of movie-star good looks. I was reminded that a quarter-century earlier, Errol Flynn, up from Tasmania, had also started his career as a New Guinea patrol officer. Prior to his employment on the Huon Peninsula Bob had played semiprofessional rugby in Australia, the distinctive Australian rough-and-tumble kind, and had lost his upper front teeth in the process. He now wore a bridge. Any concern he may have felt about the patrol he kept to himself.
He seemed above all delighted to have my company. I was even happier. I had nothing to do but tag along, collecting and studying ants in a remote mountainous region that had never been visited by an entomologist. Curtis proposed as a bonus that we also climb to 3,600 meters on the central range, where the summits and passes rise in near-freezing cold to a treeless grassland. Natives had died there trying to cross from one side to another, and rumor had it that Japanese soldiers had also perished in the cold after being driven inland from Finschhafen by Australian forces in 1944. Were there mummified bodies still here, we wondered, preserved like the fabled leopard atop Mount Kilimanjaro? I didn’t expect to find any ants so high, but looked forward to the climb with enthusiasm. It would be a difficult and possibly risky trek. Looking back later, I wondered whether Bob and I were bold nineteenth-century adventurers or just a pair of excited kids having fun. Almost certainly, both.
We left Finschhafen at the head of forty-seven bearers, three camp assistants, and a uniformed police boy with rifle. Boy: that is what a native policeman was still called in the days of waning colonial rule. Other men were assigned their various tasks as cook boy, hunt boy, and so on. Aside from Curtis’ platoon-sergeant manner, however, we all treated one another with courtesy, and once on the trail we were effectively close to being equals. Perhaps it would have been dangerous to act otherwise. These people still belonged to a culture whose recent hallmark was war and the collecting of blood debts.
The carriers changed at successive villages along the way, and each man was paid between twenty-five and fifty cents U.S. for a day’s work. On one leg of the trip, when too few adult males were available, Curtis recruited women and children to fill the gap.
The land that we entered, as we pushed north across the Mape River and then westward into Hube country, was sparsely populated. Most of the terrain was covered by rain forest, with little evidence of disturbance except for cultivated fields close to the settlements. The villages were four to seven hours’ walk apart. Each settlement contained several hundred men, women, and children.
Because the villages were invariably set on mountain ridges, we almost never walked on level ground. On a typical day we set out at around nine in the morning on narrow trails that descended tortuously through as much as 1,000 meters of elevation. At the bottom we crossed white-water rivers on a suspension bridge, in some cases no wider than the span of a hand with a bamboo railing added above for balance. From there we zigzagged uphill for a similar distance to the next village. The paths were muddy and slick, often widening into almost impassable traps of deep black mire resembling pig wallows. Their steep, slippery banks were surmounted by dense undergrowth that made off-trail travel nearly impossible. Most of the time we were forced to walk in single file.
These treks were a great deal harder on the bearers than on Curtis and me, or on the native policeman, who was responsible only for his rifle and a few personal belongings. Each man handled twenty kilograms or more of cargo. Most of the neatly packed pieces were supported by a headband and slung over the back or else suspended from a bamboo pole carried in tandem by two of the porters. But the men were almost invariably cheerful. Hard climbing with heavy loads is a part of daily life for mountain Papuans. Even though I was in excellent physical condition at this time, they were far tougher, especially at the higher elevations. I came to suspect that they were also genetically better adapted to the harsh physical conditions in which they lived. I wondered: Would they make good marathoners?
The men were also serenely indifferent to the land leeches that attacked their bare feet and legs during the long walks. At intervals they stopped to pull the engorged worms off with about the same casualness one reties loosened shoe laces. After passing through heavily infested woodland their skin was often streaked with drying rivulets of blood. I never saw evidence that any suffered illness from these attacks.
In researching the trip for this memoir, I pored over the most detailed and updated maps I could find of the region, principally official topographic charts drawn from patrol reports and 1973 stereoscopic aerial photographs. I was able to locate only about half of the villages we visited in 1955, whose names I recorded in my notebooks: Mararuo, Boingbongen, Nanduo (or Nganduo), Yunzain, Homohang, Joangen, Zinzingu, Buru, Gem
eheng, Zengaru, Tumnang, Ebabaang, Wamuki, Sambeang, and Butala. Had some of the settlements already been abandoned? In 1955 I took photographs of some of them for future archives.
The deeper we penetrated into the Hube country, the more excited and pleased the people were to see us. At Zinzingu we were honored by a sing-sing, an intricately choreographed program of dances and songs, lasting a large part of the day. At Gemeheng the luluai (chief) organized an archery contest, with meter-long bamboo arrows fired from black palm bows at banana-stalk targets ten paces away. I took one shot that passed a meter to the side, and braced myself for laughter. Instead, I heard the man next to me grunt, “Him all right,” which probably meant, Not bad for someone who doesn’t have to work for a living.
To the Hube people, Curtis and I were curiosities of the first order. In several of the remotest villages women and children ran and hid until we had settled in the thatched guest house, then quietly filtered back home. Throughout the day crowds of people stood outside our lodging, watching our every move with open curiosity. Curtis remained at ease with all of them, conversing smoothly in pidgin English. Once, at Joangen, we put on the brief equivalent of a magic show, mostly for the children. Standing in front of the house entrance, Curtis pulled out the bridge of his front teeth and held them up. I turned around, put my glasses on the back of my head and pointed backward at the crowd as though I could see them from behind. We were both met with gasps of amazement. One child broke out crying, and I decided not to try the trick again. I felt more like a fraud than an entertainer. And who knows what taboos we broke, or ghosts summoned?
Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition Page 16