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straightforward. He was, by then, a naturalized New Yorker. He
had replaced all of his colorful clothes with black shirts and black
jeans, took to referring to New York as “the city” and, more
importantly, made the landscape of tall buildings, subtle hills and
patches of green forest his own. There were big forests in
Manhattan, he assured me. He could see them from his seventh
floor window.
The New York expedition was part of a course called “The
Frontiers of Science” designed to expose every new student
enrolled in Columbia College at Columbia University to how
neuroscientists, astrophysicists, geologists and biologists
approach the world. Our job was to show them the frontlines of
biology by having them make discoveries in the city. The
astrophysicists could point to the stars, James said, “but what if
we took the students to the least disturbed parks in the city and
had them point to life forms no one knew were there!” James
wanted to send Economics, English, Political Science, African
American Studies and even English majors, English majors mind
you, to document the wild life of Manhattan. It would be, he
argued (and he was right), one of the first major studies of the
biodiversity of America’s biggest (he probably said “greatest”)
city.
At that time, the ants of New York had not really been surveyed.
Stefan Cover, a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative
Zoology, spent hours scrambling through some of the boroughs
looking for ants early in his career, but that was about it. None of
the many hundreds of entomologists who have lived in New York
had ever really studied its ants (and the same is true to varying
degrees for nearly all of the other groups of insects). Dr. Amy
Savage, for example, recently searched the collections at the
American Museum of Natural History, collections that literally
contain millions of pinned specimens of insects from around the
world, and encountered essentially no ants from New York City.
Entomologists, it seemed, had not studied the life right in front of
their noses, or at least right beneath their feet.
Yet, while James reminded me of these sorts of realities and
conjured big discoveries, I found it easier to conjure disasters. I
worried we would not find anything interesting. Worse, I worried
about the students. These were urban New Yorkers. Many of
these kids had probably never seen a wild animal larger than a rat
(though, I suspected, they had probably seen some pretty big
rats). I pictured Gucci bags snagging on tree branches, black,
high heels stuck in the mud, leaf litter samples filled with equal
parts broken glass, poison ivy, and needles. Then, of course,
there was the issue of the bodies. As everyone who has seen Law
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