Anthill

by Edward Osborne Wilson

  The Nokobee tract harbored in full array the signature animal species of the longleaf pine savanna. There were the bobwhite quail, beloved of hunters with retrievers and shotguns. Their numbers were declining, ironically not from overkill but by the assault of increasing numbers of coyotes and other predators that flourish around human populations. Also on the list were spadefoot toads, nocturnal cat-eyed ambushers of ground-dwelling insects. They gathered in rain pools to breed during a short season, summoning one another with wailing calls that sounded like a chorus of the damned. Gopher tortoises dug long burrows that were miniature ecosystems all on their own, and were the preferred home of indigo snakes, gopher frogs, and strange creatures such as a kind of ant that feeds on the eggs of subterranean spiders.

  Among the inhabitants of the Nokobee tract were species that were rare, even endangered. The most famous was the red-cockaded woodpecker, which built its nests within cavities high in large longleaf pines. The most impressive in size and appearance, aside from the occasional bear that might wander through, was the heavily muscled indigo snake, its length reaching seven feet, its body blackish gunmetal blue. The indigos emerged from the tortoise burrows and consumed a variety of prey that included smaller members of their own species. At the opposite extreme among the reptiles in size and appearance was the mole skink, a subterranean lizard with vestigial legs, reaching a maximum length of six inches, and resembling an armored earthworm. So secretive was the species that it was almost never seen except by expert naturalists.

  To this distinctive part of the longleaf pine fauna can be added three kinds of ants: the spider-egg eater of the tortoise burrows; a species that lived in pine trunks and canopy and served as a major source of food for the red-cockaded woodpeckers; and finally, the mound-building ants, whose colonies lived on the shores of Lake Nokobee.

  The exquisitely beautiful and biologically rich pine flatland at Lake Nokobee was only a tiny remnant of what was once the dominant habitat of the Gulf of Mexico coastal region. For thousands of years it covered sixty percent of the plain from the Carolinas to Texas. Its rolling expanse was interrupted only by hardwood forest strongholds, principally the tributary ravines of rivers, streams, steepheads cut deep in sand by outbreaks of groundwater, and the cypress-dominated floodplains of the principal watercourses. There were also the countless domes growing in and around moist depressions that filled with rainwater in the winter and dried out by late spring. Stumpholes, the last decaying remnants of fallen pines, were homes to a small fauna all of their own.

  For Indian tribes the longleaf pine savanna was a source of life. They could hunt the buffalo and white-tailed deer that teemed within it. For the first Spanish explorers it was a highway through the Florida Panhandle along which they thrust their way with horse and armor into unknown lands north and west. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the flatland yielded much of its space to the early English and American farmers. Then, following the Civil War and on through the next half century, the magnificent tree species that formed its centerpiece and helped sustain its integrity was almost all cut down. Longleaf pine has the misfortune of being both easily harvested and ranked with redwood, cypress, and white pine as one of the finest of North American timber species. Great fortunes were made by land and mill owners from its destruction. The timber barons enriched investors in both the Southern and the Northern cities. They built plantation-style mansions and helped lift the South from its deep poverty. When they were done, however, they left behind a wasteland of stumps overgrown by weedy stands of slash and loblolly pine, among which grew up an often impenetrable hardwood brush. Such was the secondary growth that surrounded the pristine longleaf pine area at Dead Owl Cove and most of the eastern perimeter of Lake Nokobee. But to the west of the lake on the Nokobee tract and into the Ziebach National Forest for almost two miles, the longleaf pine grassland remained close to its original state.

  Odd as it may seem, fire was and remains the friend of the ancient longleaf savanna. Without human interference, lightning strikes set off fires at frequent intervals, which then spread slowly through the surface detritus. The richly diverse natural ground vegetation not only survived the low-intensity burn-offs, it needed them every several years to sustain growth and a dominant presence. This was the phenomenon that I and Alicia, my wife--and an experienced ecologist herself--studied for so many years on the Nokobee tract. We were able to confirm with detailed records that when natural fires are suppressed, the invading trees and shrubs set seed and start to overgrow the original flatland ground vegetation. Within a decade, the dense scrub takes over, dominated by slash and loblolly pine, water and laurel oak, sweetgum, and a host of other shrub and small tree species. The new woodland builds up a thick litter of fallen leaves and tree branches. Much of the layer is suspended high enough off the ground to be well aerated and easily dried out. It becomes superb tinder, so that when a fire is started it can flare into a wildfire, raging outward, clawing up to the canopies of the smaller trees, and leaping roads and streams to bring biological destruction to a vast area.

  The longleaf pine savanna, renewed almost continuously by lightning-sparked ground fires, has existed as an ecosystem for thousands, possibly millions of years. Its stability and equitable conditions have allowed the evolution of an abundance of ground flora and animals closely adapted to it. Once the cycle of ground fires and regrowth is broken, however, it is lost and cannot be easily restored. It is fragile, and the last of it might easily be wiped away.

  12

  THE BONDING OF Raphael Semmes Cody to the Nokobee tract began when as a small child he came to Dead Owl Cove with his parents for their weekend picnics. There at the water's edge Ainesley and Marcia would sit and talk, smoke cigarettes, and occasionally fish for bream and large-mouth bass. Little Raff was turned loose to wander about on his own. His mother let him go, but each time with the same sensible command.

  "Stay in sight. And you come right back when you're called, you hear? Keep away from the water and don't go in the bushes. Watch out for snakes! Come running if you see a snake!"

  Raff, as best he could without getting caught, disobeyed all of these injunctions, as he later admitted to me and Alicia. He undertook what small children do when stripped of mechanical toys and playmates and placed in a natural environment. They explore. They become hunter-gatherers. If they are fearless, and Raff was innocently fearless, they discover a multitude of creatures of kinds they have never seen in a zoo or picture book or on television, and for which there is no name. Each kind of plant and animal, because of the immediacy and its novelty and strangeness, is for a small child an entity of boundless possibility.

  Raff began a rich self-education in natural history by happenstance at Nokobee. While still little more than a toddler, he spotted a velvet ant running swiftly in a straight line over dead leaves at the woodland edge. The insect was the size of a hornet and wore a thick red and yellow coat of hair. Unknown to him, it was not an ant. It was a wingless parasitic wasp, a female searching for beetle grubs to serve as hosts for its own larvae. Raff dashed to this prize, bent over, and grabbed it with his hand. And was instantly shocked by the velvet ant's quarter-inch-long stinger. He dropped the wasp, which continued on its way as though nothing had happened. His stung hand felt on fire. He sat down and cried from the pain--but softly, so he could not be heard. When he rejoined his parents an hour later, the hand still throbbed, but he said nothing. He knew that if he did tell the story, his parents would make him stay put with them on future visits.

  The velvet ant taught Raff an elemental principle of natural history: don't mess with colorful creatures who show no fear of you. On a later occasion, the Cody family terrier learned the same lesson from a self-confident skunk that passed through their yard clad in a loudly striped pelage of black and white. These rabbit-sized animals snuffle along the ground in daylight, searching for food in grass and fallen leaves. They move very calmly for a wild animal, as though oblivious to enemies. If a dog t
ries to seize one, the skunk doesn't stab it with sharp canine teeth, nor does it rip the dog's skin with razorlike claws. Instead it lifts its long tail and sprays the dog with a musky mercaptan from its anal glands. The stench lasts for days. Some dog owners say it can be removed by washing the dog's fur with tomato juice. I don't know. Never owned a dog, and I always stayed a good distance from skunks.

  One summer day when he was a little older, as both families sat in a circle of chairs for lunch, Raff asked me an interesting question about the velvet ant.

  "Uncle Fred, if pretty colors tell you an insect has a sting and you should stay away, why don't butterflies have a sting?"

  It was a strain to come up quickly with an answer for that one.

  "Butterflies can fly away when you get too close," was the best I could manage. "Velvet ants can't fly; all they can do is sting you and teach you a lesson. Birds can catch butterflies, but then they learn the lesson a different way. Some kinds of butterflies taste terrible, they're even poisonous, so the birds learn which ones to stay away from. Some of the prettiest butterflies you see flying around here at Dead Owl Cove are like that."

  Later in the summer of the velvet ant, Raff was startled when a red-shouldered hawk flew low over his head carrying a dead field mouse in the talons of one foot. The next week he came upon a water snake swallowing a frog. The lesson he learned was that animals die in nature, and some die in order for others to live.

  Raff discovered that when he turned over small rotting logs, he was rewarded with the sight of hundreds of insects and other tiny creatures that hide there. When exposed, some froze in place. Others leapt away or ran off to hide in the surrounding leaf litter. Woodlice, the little crustaceans often called pill bugs, and millipedes, also known as thousand-leggers, rolled themselves into armored spheres. Centipedes, or hundred-leggers, as they are often called, slithered to safety like miniature snakes, halting at the first object that covered their bodies. None of the tiny animals attacked Raff; all were afraid of him.

  Raff never succumbed to the "icky factor," by turning away from anything, even the slime-dripping slugs. On the contrary, he never tired of grubbing under logs and other debris like this, over and over. Every excursion yielded something new. He learned that most animals in nature are very small and live underground. He put spiders in jars and watched them spin webs. The most common denizens of the subterranean byways, he noticed, are ants, which come in several sizes and colors. He put some in a jar of soil and watched them dig tunnels.

  Nature works, Raphael learned, because it has order, and from order, it has beauty. Little birds sing in the morning. Cicadas shrill in the afternoon, and katydids rasp at night. Crickets come forth at twilight to chirp in the grass. And lantern flies write dots and dashes with their on-and-off luminescent abdomens through the black air of evening, flashing brighter than the stars in a moonless sky. Each creature, Raff came to understand, has a clock. Every passing hour retires some of the players and brings forth others.

  In one important sense, Raff's learning process was ordinary. It was also primeval. For two hundred thousand years or more of their prehistory, human beings had to learn a great deal the way Raff did in order to survive. Stone Age parents could speak of what they knew, but they could not leave an enduring written record. Their mathematical prowess was limited to counting, perhaps to "one, two, many"--if that far. Travel beyond the tribal boundary rarely occurred and was undertaken at great risk. Geographic knowledge stopped at a river's edge, a mountain ridge, or strip of gallery forest. Beyond lived people who spoke and dressed differently. They were deceivers, the locals could tell you, and poisoners, and cannibals. They were ruled by demon-gods.

  Such ignorance did not extend, however, to the living world. The tribe had to have near-encyclopedic knowledge of all of the important plants and animals within their home range in order to survive. To keep everything straight, hundreds, even thousands of species had to be given names. If an ordinary person could not master all that knowledge, elders and shamans could be called on to serve as the tribe's walking archives.

  Although spirits and mythic histories were imputed to many of the plant and animal species, practical information about them remained exact. It was regularly retested by experience. A single fragment of misinformation could result in disaster. Every child knew answers to the kinds of questions never asked a modern child. Where do camouflaged vipers wait for prey? Which of the many kinds of mushrooms are edible, and which are deadly? Where can you find the deep-growing tubers that carry us through in times of drought? And where do you dig for water? Such was the proto-science acquired by children through talk and imitation, and picked up still more by cautious individual exploration on their own.

  That was the quality of Raff's Nokobee self-education, which his parents mistook for frivolous child's play. It was enjoyable, and thereby true to the way the brain is constructed. It was ordained by genes to which modern classrooms and textbooks are ill-fitted.

  Raff's learning was kinesthetic, by which is meant it employed action that engaged all the senses, and it was channeled by instinct. As Uncle Fred Norville, his mentor, I could ask him, What is the best way to learn a frog? And say, Not by reading. Not by seeing a picture or even by holding one in your hand. To learn a frog in a full and lasting manner, you must find one where it lives in nature, watch it, listen to it if it is calling. Study its habitat, Raff, take note of where it has chosen to sit, stalk it, capture it, put it in a jar, and keep it a little while. Study it there, release it next to the edge of the water where you found it, watch it kick away and submerge out of sight. The concept of frog will be with you forever if you follow this kind of education. You can pick up additional information from science and literature and myth, and all those things you have at school, but you will be wiser for being rooted in the full reality of frog. You will care about frog too, like nobody else.

  It was predictable that Raphael Semmes Cody should seek the company of those who saw the world as he did, and for which I offered him encouragement. On the earliest possible date, his twelfth birthday, he joined the Boy Scouts of America.

  Both parents were pleased with the decision, and I added affirmation.

  "It'll teach you how to get along with other people," Ainesley said to Raff. "You spend too much time by yourself. You'll learn how to do some grown-up things. Come graduation from high school, it'll help you get into West Point or someplace like that, in case you thought about going into the military."

  Marcia wasn't keen on the military aspect, but otherwise was happy to see this sign of ambition in her son, and the status it might give him early on.

  As a former Boy Scout myself, who stayed into my late teens and achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, I could not have been more pleased.

  "You've got to understand," I said to Ainesley and Marcia when we met again at Nokobee, "this organization was made for Raff. You know he's a boy who just loves the outdoors, and he's already learned an amazing amount of natural history for a kid his age. He'll fit right in, and I may be wrong, but I'll bet he's going to do wonderfully well."

  I can't say I score very high on predicting human behavior, but this time I turned out to be right. The Boy Scouts of America don't run a boot camp, which would have repelled Raphael Semmes Cody. They don't sit you down for scheduled tests, which boys naturally detest. They don't discriminate or try to classify you by intelligence, or talent, or anything but your own personal effort. Effort and achievement move you through the ranks, and at your own speed. From Tenderfoot (nobody wants to stay a Tenderfoot) to Second Class (nobody likes the sound of that either), then First Class, Star, Life, and finally to Eagle Scout. Tests are self-paced. If you fail at first, no problem. Work at it some more with one of the scout leaders, and try again.

  Raff was able to move quickly upward by himself or in small groups, reporting his progress in each rank to the scoutmaster. The merit badges, forming the main steps to the advanced ranks, rewarded achievement in a manner suited
to the orderly development of the adolescent mind. To Raff's delight they included the outdoor activities for which his talents and passions were best suited. Swimming, lifesaving, hiking, campcraft, pioneering, first aid, zoology, botany, and entomology, each was mastered and its badge added to the growing rows on his uniform's sash.

  The Boy Scouts did something else that was important as well. They legitimized the life for which Raff had been unconsciously preparing himself. They bestowed a spiritual and a social blessing upon the wildness of Lake Nokobee.

  13

  RAPHAEL SEMMES CODY was a citizen, I said to his parents one summer day, if any member of the human race can be called that, of the Lake Nokobee wildland. He came to know it better than the neighborhood of his home five miles away, better than the classrooms and playing fields of the schools he attended. He loved this tract of land as though it were his own, and he knew deep in some seldom-visited part of his reflective mind that if he ever failed in the venues of ordinary life, he could return to the solace of his life membership in the Nokobee wildland.

  As Raff matured, inevitably he became a naturalist explorer, and a scientist. He came to know when the wild azaleas bloomed; which flowers were favored by the dogface sulphur, Gulf fritillary, and other butterflies; which salamanders came to the vernal pools, and when. He knew the habits of the strange creatures hiding in the deep sandy burrows of tortoises. He was privy to secrets of the toad-eating hognose snakes, which are dead ringers for poisonous pit vipers but in reality as harmless for people as a stick of dead wood. Red-tailed skinks and all other lizards were harmless too, he found. You'd never touch one anyway, because they ran from you like the wind to their retreats in piles of fallen tree limbs. Up in the longleaf pine canopies red-cockaded woodpeckers feasted mostly on ants nesting there in the millions. The minnows that schooled in the shallows of the lake had a name and a place in the food chain two links down from the five alligators that patrolled the shores.