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e very, very common, no one
appears to have ever found
their queen, at least not in a
mature colony. She is down
there, no doubt, fat and fertile,
but well hidden, a discovery
waiting to be made even in
New York. With those ants, I
was rolling. I yelled to the
nearest students to come see.
One came to look and ask
Biologists love flipping
questions. It was the English logs. Give it a try to see
major, the one who had earlier what might be living
given me a look that seemed
beneath...
to say, “I am an English major
and I am going to be a great writer, please let me go back inside.”
She was smiling. Success! I was off, looking for more logs.
As the day progressed, I found more ants. I turned more logs. I
peeled back bark. I broke open acorns. I was happy. I had found
the real societies of Manhattan —or at least the ones in which I
was most interested— and was able to share them with students
who would never have seen them otherwise. Here were bulbous
species of Formica ants, polygamous odorous house ants
(Tapinoma sessile), and more, even the long-legged
Aphaenogaster rudis, carrying off the head of the beetle (for the
record, the only dead body we found in the park). By the end of
the day, the students, teaching assistants and I had collected 13
ant species, individuals of 13 lineages, each older than humanity.
In the process, I heard laughter and even some outbursts of
unprompted joy. One guy mentioned he wanted to come back
and look some more another day. Two women were talking about
how to tell a spider from an ant and then as I walked past one
group I heard “How are we going to get the worm in the jar.”
“Suck it up.” “Expletive!” I thought about telling them that they
were only supposed to collect ants, but who am I to judge. I just
hoped their aspirator had a filter.
That might have been the end of the story. In some ways, it was
an end, at least to the students’ experience that day. It was a
good day, a day that mattered, but there was to be more.
Most people on Earth now live in cities. If they are going to care
about and understand nature it is going to have to be urban
nature, at least as a point of departure. This concept has been
called the pigeon paradox, where the paradox is that the
conservation of wild things, like tigers, can depend on the ability
of urban-living folks (who have most of the world’s power and
money) to care about the species around them, be they red-tailed
hawks, ants or even pigeons. If there was a lesson from these
students, it was a hopeful one. They could be shown the way
toward caring about or at least paying attention to the life around
them. I thought about all of this as I rode the subway back to
Columbia where I sat down with James to identify the ants the
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