Friend & Fellow: Ant Man

Meet biology great Edward O. Wilson

- By Bert Holldobler

A 6-foot-tall, bespectacled professor got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the ground. He had an aspirator in his mouth, sucking up Pheidole workers like an anteater.

My friend and colleague Ed Wilson was on a mission. That night, he needed Pheidole soldiers for his taxonomic work, and he wasn’t having much luck finding them. After spending two weeks or so in the La Selva rainforest of Costa Rica, we had returned to the city of San José. It was the evening before our departure and return to Boston. Ed invited me to a restaurant located behind a little city park close to our hotel.

It was at the entrance to the park that he spotted the trail of the Pheidole ant colony. But all that he seemed to be capturing was workers, not soldiers. So he continued to crawl along the trail all the way to the nest entrance. There, to the absolute bewilderment of park visitors, he approached (quite obliviously) a young couple embracing behind a bush where the Pheidole nest entrance was located.

Alas, the behavior of this fanatic myrmecologist was so suspicious that the police appeared on the scene to inquire about his activities. Needless to say, we never made it to the little restaurant that he had recommended to me with mouthwatering superlatives. But that evening Ed discovered six new Pheidole species in the San José city park.

Shaping a Generation