For Love of Insects

Science fiction writers in need of an alien or two have only to peruse this book for inspiration. There's the bombardier beetle, for instance, which is capable of discharging with great accuracy jets of boiling acid from its butt.

Yes, boiling.

Spraying is only one way to deliver a toxic substance. Some millipedes, for example, ooze cyanide from glandular pores. Others creatures, lacking defensive glands, are reflex bleeders – their toxic bodily fluids leak out from easily ruptured cuticle. Additional delivery methods include defensive vomiting and defecating. Yowza!

Larvae of the leaf beetle protect themselves by extruding fecal matter in long strands, which they then attach to themselves until they are completely hidden from view, creating the appearance of a tiny haystack.

Some insects practice seminal gift giving. In one species of moth, males lose 10% of their mass when mating. They transfer not just sperm to females, but also nutrients and protective alkaloids. Copulation takes upward of 9 hours.

Butterflies engage in a strange behaviour called puddling. They drink and expel prodigious amounts of water (eg 600 times their body mass) in order to acquire sodium, which is then transferred to females during mating.

Bolas spiders, which do not make webs, bring down their prey bola-style, using a thread with a drop of glue at the end.

These are only a few of the creatures you'll meet in this wonderful book, which is packed with brilliant colour photos that illustrate the bizarre goings-on of insects and arthropods.

The author, Thomas Eisner, is one of the fathers of chemical ecology. He tells us that probably far less than half of all insect species have been discovered, leaving unknown a vast reservoir of chemical compounds. "Chemical prospecting in the world of insects can still bring real rewards," he writes.

He passed away earlier this year.

Consider Her Ways

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways," says the Bible, and Frederick Philip Grove takes the advice to heart, travelling to Venezuela to study leaf-cutter ants and making telepathic contact with Wawa-quee, leader of a great journey of exploration undertaken at the behest of Queen Orrha-wee. The book is the record of that journey.

The expedition heads north, crossing the Panama canal and the Mississippi River before arriving in New York City. The journey takes years to complete, and enables the author to introduce a wide variety of ants and their amazing adaptations. In addition to the agricultural leaf-cutters, we meet army ants, honey-pot ants, harvester ants, slave-making ants, and ants that herd aphids.

The author's second purpose is Swiftian satire. He gives us an ant's-eye view of human affairs that is delightfully skewed, while at the same time poking fun at the ants themselves, who are as guilty of misplaced pride as the humans they look down upon. During the journey they meet a dentist, a farmer, and a myrmecologist, but the most amusing bits occur in New York City. There they take up residence in the Public Library, and one of them becomes addicted to crime fiction. Wawa-quee's confused observations about clothing are priceless.

Unfortunately, while ants are fascinating creatures, Grove fails to find a consistently entertaining way of melding fact with fiction. The subplot he comes up with (seditious egg-laying) is not very compelling, and in fact is just another way of including an interesting bit of ant lore. As a result the book is rather dry and tedious until the last of the five chapters, when the ants finally reach New York. For me, the book remains an interesting but flawed attempt (like Anthill by E.O. Wilson) to novelize the lives of ants.

Frederick Philip Grove

Grove was born in Europe, where he translated into German the work of many important writers (Swift, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, etc.). He was a friend of H.G. Wells, and led an adventurous and somewhat unsavory life, which included a stint in jail and a faked suicide, before he finally ended up in Canada. Grove is not the name he was born with, and he wrote under a number of pseudonyms.

In Canada he achieved a lasting respectability, publishing the following novels: Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), Fruits of the Earth (1933), Two Generations (1939), Master of the Mill (1944), and Consider Her Ways (1947). He won the GG for non-fiction in 1946 for the autobiography In Search of Myself (parts of which are fictionalized). He died in 1948.

Adventures Among Ants

A Global Sarafi with a Cast of Trillions

Mark Moffett studied under E.O. Wilson, who described ant societies as "civilizations in the dirt." This book, printed on coated stock and illustrated throughout with wonderful close-ups of ants, is a justification of that term.

The focus is on six different kinds of ants: marauder, weaver, leafcutter, Amazon, Argentine, and African army.

A few interesting details:

The global biomass of ants equals that of human beings.

Ants are self-organizing. They have no leaders, yet somehow accomplish feats rivalled only by humans.

Some species build roadways. Others herd insects and create underground gardens.

Some are arboreal, constructing shelters in trees out of leaves.

Some raid the nests of other ant species and carry home the pupae, which become willing "slaves" of their kidnappers.

Some are a suicide bombers, blowing themselves up and spraying out a toxic glue that immobilizes foes.

Some can remain underwater for several hours, and others when dislodged from a tree can control the direction of their fall and glide back to the tree.

Argentine Ant

This is an introduced species that doesn't sting and is too small to bite humans. Yet somehow it has developed the ability to form "supercolonies," which consist of widely distributed nests.

One of them has taken over most of California. Thus an Argentine ant from LA can be dropped among other Argentine ants in San Francisco, and not be torn to pieces. It is accepted as a sister.

The largest such colony to date is one that stretches from Italy to Spain.

The only ant which so far has been able to resist the Argentine ant is the fire ant, which originates from the same area of Argentina.

Links

Adventures Among Ants website
Mark Moffett's website
Great ant photos by Alex Wild

Anthill

As fascinating as ant societies are, they seem to have limited narrative potential. Usually they're portrayed as menacing hordes or anthropomorphized creatures with little resemblance to the real thing.

Thus, when I heard that the great myrmecologist, E.O. Wilson, had brought forth a novel, I was keen to see how he approached this challenge.

The Ants

The heart of the book is a 70-page account of warring anthills in southern Alabama. A slight mutation has caused one of the anthills to become a supercolony with thousands of "queenlets." This allows it to outcompete all other colonies in the vicinity, to the point that its success becomes its downfall. It is out of balance with its surroundings, and on the verge of a Malthusian downfall, when humans intervene.

The name of this section is "The Anthill Chronicles." It is centrally positioned in the book and purports to be a laundered version of Raff Cody's honours thesis. The colonies inhabit a patch of old-growth forest with which he is intimately acquainted.

The People

Prior to "The Anthill Chronicles" we learn the story of Raff's upbringing, and are given a satisfying glimpse of life -- both animal and human -- in southern Alabama where Wilson himself grew up.

In the final portion of the book, after "The Anthill Chronicles," Raff heads off to Harvard to study law, the application of which he decides is the best way to save the old-growth forest. Wilson's acquaintance with academic life in "the great brainy anthill" of Harvard infuses this part of the story.

After graduating Raff returns to Alabama and, in a nice dove-tailing of events, gets caught up with the very people who intervened in the fate of the supercolony.

The Ending

The novel so far has been an enjoyable read. It educates, it entertains, it keeps us guessing. Now it suddenly shifts gears and becomes a plot-driven thriller with a conclusion that felt (to me) unsatisfying and out of character with the rest of the book.

The Lesson

In a short prologue Wilson says, "This is a story about three parallel worlds, which nevertheless exist in the same space and time." They are the world of ants, the world of humans, and the world in which both live, the biosphere.

The supercolony then is a symbol for humanity. It "mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy..." We too are in danger of authoring our own demise by our very success. And just as humans played a godlike role in the supercolony's destiny, so too might the biosphere play a similar role in ours.

Links

Margaret Atwood's review ("Homer of the Ants")
Barbara Kingsolver's review ("Ear to the Ground")
Radio interview with Anna Maria Tremonti

Suggested Reading

"The Empire of the Ants" by H.G. Wells (1905) appeared in The Time Machine and Other Stories.

Consider Her Ways by Frederick Philip Grove (1947) is a Canadian SF classic, not to be confused with the John Wyndham novella of the same name.

The Ant Men by Eric North (1953) is pure pulp fiction, yet appeared first in hard cover before going through several softcover printings.

The Fungus Garden by Brian Brett (1988) takes the reader on a surreal journey underground into the world of termites.

Les Fourmis trilogy by Bernard Werber includes Les Fourmis (1991), which sold more than two million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 languages (Empire of the Ants in English), Le Jour des Fourmis (1992), and La Revolution des Fourmis (1996).

The Hacker and the Ants v. 2.0 by Rudy Rucker (2003) is a sci-fi tale involving software ants.

Journey to the Ants by Wilson and Holldobler (1994) is one of my favourite books, and likely more fascinating than any work of ant fiction can aspire to. Highly recommended.

Adventures among Ants by Mark Moffett (2010) is a work of popular myrmecology by a former student of E.O. Wilson. Fabulous photos.

Insect Dreams

The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

It turns out the protagonist of Kafka's Metamorphosis didn't die after all. He joined a freak show in Vienna where, as "the human roach," he reads from Rilke and holds seminars on Spengler. Such is his notoriety that Wittgenstein and novelist Robert Musil pay him a visit, and in America he inspires a dance craze.

In New York he meets composer Charles Ives, and provides the inspiration for the "Insect Sonata," which is performed on the piano with the use of a brick and a couple of two-by-fours. Gregor goes to work at Ives's insurance firm, where he specializes in risk management and develops a formula to gauge the probability of a person being kidnapped. The formula incorporates an Index of Suffering -- "an original contribution of Gregor's, now in standard use among economists."

                    (unemployment rate in percent)(inflation in percent)
        S =  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
                 1 - (probabability of situation continuing another month)

He moves to Washington DC and takes up residence in a White House broom closet, working for the Dept. of Agriculture as an expert on entomological matters. The US is mired in the Great Depression, and Gregor, while studying grasshopper behaviour, discovers "smelltrons" and invents the Elektroantennograph and the Heuschreckekitzelapparat.

When war breaks out he meets Einstein and delivers his famous letter to FDR, then is reassigned to Los Alamos as a risk management consultant. He pals around with Feynman and Oppenheimer, and suggests the principle for the device used to trigger the atomic bomb.

By then Gregor's despair has deepened to an intolerable level; there's the wound in his back, FDR's dithering over the war, and the decision to continue the Manhattan Project even after Germany had abandoned its own efforts at an atomic bomb.

The book's humour, erudition, historical characters, and WW2 setting reminded me very much of Cryptonomicon and Gravity's Rainbow, but at 464 pages it is much shorter and not as convoluted. Interestingly, all three novels end explosively.

Viva la cucaracha!