by Nicholas Griffin

The Atavist No. 3, March 2011

Intrepid naturalist Mark Moffett is tracking an ant species on a march toward bug-world domination. What a controversial theory of insect society may tell us about our own.

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Excerpt

1. EMBEDDED

When I shook Mark Moffett’s right hand, I glanced at his left and noticed it was swollen with a distinct red mound the size of a grape. He followed my gaze. “Have you met my botfly?” he asked, grinning. It was late October, and we were standing outside a research station at the foot of the Sierra Nombre de Dios, in northern Honduras. Or at least Moffett and I were standing: His botfly, a white maggot that had been implanted through a mosquito bite and had grown to three quarters of an inch in length, was apparently dead.

“I could see its breathing tube, but then I banged my hand on a door, and I think I’ve killed it,” he said, sounding disappointed.

“Does it hurt?”

“No … it’s dead.”

“Should it be removed before we head into the rainforest?”

“No,” said Moffett. “I’m waiting for my body to absorb it.”

Moffett, one of the world’s leading naturalists, is 52, red-bearded, barrel-chested, and prone to wearing sandals while walking in rainforests or lecturing at New York City intellectual clubs. He spends most of the year traveling. In his closet at his office in Greenport, Long Island, hangs one tweed jacket and a single bow tie with a pattern of orange butterflies.

He had come to Honduras to, as he put it, “look for critters.” Kathy Moran, a senior editor at National Geographic, says that, “in an age when we’re all used to wearing one hat, Mark needs an entire rack.” Moffett holds a Harvard Ph.D. in entomology, is an accomplished scientist, an award-winning author and journalist, one of the best nature photographers of his generation, and an aspiring comedian. Long ago, he left academia to trudge through jungles, occasionally cheating death, drawn by the odd behavior and extraordinary complexity of some of the world’s most neglected creatures.

The northern Honduran climate is so stifling that even the October cold season is hot. The downpours came every afternoon and lasted hours. Honduras is jaguar territory, but Moffett doesn’t care for big cats. Though he’s been shooting for National Geographicfor 25 years, the appearance of feline cubs or baby polar bears on magazine covers makes his eyes roll. Moffett’s favorite creature, the ant, is a lot less lovable. (The bullet ant is among his favorites. It sits at the top of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which compares its bite to “firewalking over flaming charcoal with a rusty nail in your heel.”) “Ants,” Moffett tells me, “are melodrama.” They forage and fight, build and destroy. “You can take a box of dirt with a colony in it, stare at it for two weeks, and know the ins and outs of their society,” he says. The fact that ant society is generally dictated by hierarchy and specialization makes it all the more interesting to a man who can’t seem to stand either one.

When Moffett walks, it’s always with his heavy camera, a Canon 5D Mark II, in one hand. It has a short, thick lens and is custom-mounted with additional flashes and batteries. Around his neck is a jeweler’s loupe, a minuscule high-powered magnifier, vital for getting a close look at the tiny specimens he pinches up from the ground. Moffett wanders haltingly, prodding stones, overturning logs, staring up tree trunks, breaking apart rotting wood, snapping dead vines. He’s been known to spend months in the field looking for individual species and then pass entire days sitting cross-legged, waiting to capture a single moment of curious behavior.

Moffett has devoted years to the study of Hymenoptera, the order of insects that includes wasps, bees, and ants. It is a line of work that also kept such men as Charles Darwin and Alfred Kinsey occupied, as well as Moffett’s mentor, E. O. Wilson. Many of the biggest ideas to have rocked science in the past 150 years have come from studying the societies buzzing around us.

On this particular expedition, Moffett is looking for evidence to support a still controversial theory: that ants form superorganisms—colonies that effectively function as a single body. In Honduras he’s in search of two of the most pronounced examples: hyperaggressive army ants, which move in killing columns and bivouac in a living ball on the forest floor, and leafcutters, the agriculturalists of the ant world. The latter, Moffett points out, have been farming on a large scale for at least 12 million years longer than we have.

Last year, Moffett released a book, Adventures Among Ants, to widespread acclaim, lectured across America, including at the Smithsonian, Caltech, and the World Science Festival, and was a guest (for the third time) on The Colbert Report. The media has been dreaming up new names for him: the Indiana Jones of Entomology, the Jane Goodall of Ants, and the Martha Stewart of Dirt. On his Web site he calls himself Dr. Bugs.

Some fellow scientists, however, can have other words for him. The more he crisscrosses the lines separating television, books, lectures, adventure, and biology, the further removed he becomes from the academic world he sprang from. His critics accuse him of passing off observation as science. Reviewing Moffett’s book in the journal Nature, Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, wrote that Moffett “wants to be the first to see a new ant escapade and capture it on film, not to test hypotheses.” Another scientific journal critiqued his “chatty paragraphs.” It noted Moffett’s “willingness to dispense with rigor in the face of a compelling tale” and accused him of “storytelling gone amok.” “He earns a living as a photographer, not as an entomologist,” Gordon told me. “He’s not out collecting data to test hypotheses and establish new results. He’s not asking the community of scientists to evaluate the data. There’s a game we play, and he’s not in that game.”

Moffett, however, values his independence above all things. He calls universities places “filled with nervous people.” He survives on book advances, lecture money, grants, and National Geographic assignments. He maintains attachments to Harvard and the Smithsonian; they are prestigious but unpaid. “That way I don’t have to be indentured to anything,” he says. He has often lived without health insurance or savings, juggling television-news appearances, chat shows, Web interviews, newspaper reporters, magazine columns. He also posts videos to YouTube that have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Moffett traverses the boundaries between science, adventure, and journalism, and he believes none should exclude the other. He seems to agree fully with a sentiment expressed by Charles Darwin in 1856, that “general and popular Treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work.” And with his latest theory, he intends to prove it.

2. ‘PHEIDOLE MOFFETTI’

Moffett wasn’t always outgoing. Like many biologists who spend their lives devoted to an unloved species, he had an introspective childhood. He was born in the tiny town of Salida, Colorado, and his father, a Presbyterian minister, remembers Moffett giving individual names to the ants and insects that passed through their backyard. “Through graduate school, I was very shy and reclusive,” Moffett says. He credits the change to his camera. “Once I learned to tell stories with pictures, I found that people would be interested in me in a natural way, and I would flow into the kinds of stories I tell now.”

During his preteen years, his family moved to Wisconsin, and he started attending meetings at the Wisconsin Herpetological Society, a place populated, he says, by “a mixture of serious scientists and bizarre amateurs.” Max Nickerson, the eminent herpetologist who founded the society, says Moffett was “the youngest member—easily.” The majority were master’s candidates. Moffett was 12 years old.

Three years later, his father left the church and became a career counselor at Beloit College, near the Illinois border. Moffett, never one to let classes interfere with his education, dropped out of high school and began to work casually as a research assistant to the college’s biologists. Liberal Beloit turned a blind eye to his missing diploma and let him enroll. Determined to be an autodidact, he avoided any courses that coincided with his interests, roaming from German to psychology, music to anthropology. To this day, he’s never taken a class in entomology.

His first break came at 17, when Nickerson invited him on a species-collection research trip to Costa Rica. Because he had once caught a black-tailed rattler by himself in Arizona, and perhaps because of a dearth of volunteers for the role, Moffett was given the job of snake wrangler. While biologists with long poles wrested poisonous vipers from trees overhanging rivers, Moffett would stand in the water beneath and catch them. He used one hand to break their fall and the other to grab for the backs of their heads to avoid being bitten. He felt so at home in the jungle that he kept a wild pet in his tent, a Hercules beetle the size of a man’s fist. It ate a banana a day and kept him awake at night with its heavy breathing. Nickerson was soon surprised to find his teenage apprentice pursuing his own fieldwork on insects. It was, he says, “the sort of experimental design I’d expect from a master’s candidate.”

By the age of 20, Moffett’s name was already appearing in scientific publications for work he had done chasing lizards, snakes, and butterflies across Central and South America. Still, Moffett’s heart remained with his “unloved ants,” an affection that had been cemented when he read a book called The Insect Societies, by Harvard professor E. O. Wilson. He still remembers it as “an awesome book full of arcane mysteries.” On a whim, Moffett wrote Wilson and asked if he might visit the world’s most famous entomologist. Wilson replied simply, “Come by.”

If Wilson was surprised to see Moffett when the young man tapped on his office door, he didn’t let on. One was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the other a high school dropout with a few academic citations. Moffett’s first words were “Hi, Ed.” Until he enrolled at Harvard, Moffett wouldn’t realize how presumptuous his behavior had been. What was important was that the great scientist shared his enthusiasm. “It was like being with another boy who loved ants,” remembers Moffett.

Wilson encouraged Moffett to apply to Harvard’s biology department for his Ph.D., and then selected Moffett as his only graduate student for seven straight years. What Moffett hadn’t learned by avoiding entomology classes he discovered instead in the lab and out in the field. The University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology housed the department, and it was home to the world’s largest collection of ants. Moffett would open compartments at random, searching for a species interesting enough to study. In the corner of one drawer, he spotted an ant whose enormous major workers, the heavy lifters and warriors of the colony, measured 500 hundred times the size of their minor colleagues. He eventually gave the ants their common name, marauders. Their main habitat was in South Asia, an area ideally situated for Moffett’s traveling tastes: hot and cheap.

Moffett left for India the moment he received his first research grant. Most scientists would drift back to their academic home after a few months; Moffett stayed two and a half years. After three months at Harvard, he left again. Though he admits that the university contained a few “marvelous pools of positive energy, including Wilson’s lab,” Moffett says he spent as little time there as possible. “I’d already figured out that I could live in Asia for six months on $100,” he says. From abroad, he mailed fresh articles to Harvard, balancing remote research with mainstream academia.

Moffett was following in the footsteps of his mentor, Wilson, a man so closely associated with fieldwork that he titled his autobiography Naturalist. Recently, Wilson was asked if there was anyone he considered an intellectual heir. He replied, “I’m especially proud of Mark Moffett. He’s a real naturalist, more than I.” Wilson even named an ant species Pheidole moffetti. According to the professor, its genus is both “dominant and hyperdiverse.” According to Moffett, it’s simply “a bigheaded ant.”

But Wilson’s status as a grand old man of science was achieved in part by tempering the naturalist impulse with the rigors of a university existence, something his protégé has little tolerance for. Moffett admits to problems with “pretty much all authority.” “To have someone tell me what to do in biology never made sense to me,” he says. “I don’t like exams. I don’t like giving exams, and I don’t like meetings.”

National Geographic’s Kathy Moran points to this as “perhaps the one weakness” in Moffett’s diverse career. As a biologist who taught himself to tell stories, a photographer who understands narrative, a man who can entrance audiences, he is obviously a teacher. Moran points to the fact that had Moffett stayed within academia, “he would already have a generation of scientists generating buzz” on his behalf. Wilson, at 81, has certainly benefited from the rise of his disciples to scientific prominence. Moffett chose to find his community in places more remote.

You’ve reached the end of the excerpt. The full story “Before the Swarm” is currently available on Kindle here, on the iPhone/iPad/iTouch here, and on the Nook here.