There are some insects that are better than others, I think. Like the honey bee, has to be at the top of the list. Dragonflies are pretty neat. And I have to give a shout-out to fireflies or lightning bugs, whatever you choose to call them. I mean, either way, their butts flicker off and on like little Christmas tree lights. That’s quite a talent.
But, perhaps my favorite is the ant.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again. If you were to take all the ants on the planet Earth and weigh them, it would be the same weight as if all the humans were being weighed on that same scale. Given our size differentials, those ants really outnumber us. I mean, really outnumber us. Let’s hope they don’t get organized because there would be hell to pay.
Yet, if you watch ants for any time at all, you will find that they are really quite incredible. I love those rare occasions when I get a glimpse of something “moving” on the ground near my feet. On closer inspection, I frequently find that it is some ant, or little group of ants, carrying some gargantuan object, like a piece of food, or a dead bug, 50 times their size.
Oh if I could only zoom in and see their little ant faces, or hear their little ant words. Are they singing, like, “OH-EE-OH. EEEE-OH, OH. OH-EE-OH. EEEE-OH, OH?” Or could it be some little rendition of “Whistle While You Work?”
I guess the guy to ask would have been a fellow named, E.O. Wilson. Wilson was recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants, and I mention him today, on his birthday, June 10, 1929.
He was an American biologist and knew all there was to know about ants. Not only that, but he was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology. Sociobiology is the study of the genetic “reasoning” of the social behavior of all animals, including humans. In other words, how our social behavior is affected by our genetics.
I won’t go into all his credentials, because they are as long as my arm. He earned his doctorate from Harvard, though. I think Harvard doctors have the best sweatshirts.
Anyway, he started out being very interested in birds. But as a kid, he suffered some kind of an eye injury and was partially deaf. So those two factors kept him from pursuing his interest in ornithological fieldwork.
Instead, Wilson could easily observe insects without straining his damaged senses. I won’t go into all his discoveries about ants either. But he figured out a myriad of facts about ants, and how they behaved with one another. Like, how two species, closely related, met each other — and — instead of warring, they underwent evolutionary changes, that minimized the differences between them. And then they were one big happy family together, stronger and more efficient.
He also discovered that ants communicate primarily through the transmission of chemical substances known as pheromones. Good old pheromones. I’m not sure how they shoot them out, but they smell other ant pheromones with their tiny little antennae. Like little “high fives” with their heads.
I wonder if he ever consulted on any bug movies. Because some bug movies are definitely better than others. Like, “A Bug’s Life” is WAY better than “Antz.” Maybe it is because I don’t like Woody Allen and he is the voice of the main character in “Antz.” I think “Ant Bully” was pretty good too, as I recall. But the “Bee Movie” was for rotten tomatoes.
Sorry. Distracted me.
Wilson produced a lot of “works” concerning the social behavior of ants, then animals, then humans. He won at least two Pulitzer Prizes — one for “On Human Nature” (1978), where he discussed the application of sociobiology to human aggression and ethics. And one for “The Ants” (1990), which was a massive summary of his knowledge of those insects.
If he were still alive, I might send him a letter to thank him for his ant work. But, he died on December 26, 2021, in Burlington, Massachusetts. I bet there were ants attending his burial site. I surely bet you.
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Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.
— Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
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The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
— Frank Herbert
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Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
— James Joyce
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