URBAN NATURES

Brian Fisher and Stefan's guide to the ant genera of Northa America.

Wild Times in New York

“The crow…is so loud because no one will listen.” – T. Kooser

The list comes in large part from the collections Stefan Cover (the ant guru's ant guru) made as a young boy living in New York. That is to say these are the collections many a small girl or boy living in the city might make. Just look. All it would take to find a species not yet known from the city is patience and a willingness to look silly turning over the occassional rock. Repeat after me, "Officer, I swear, I am looking for rare ants. This device is called an aspirator.

I had cause to think of this story when I was asked to come to Manhattan to help with a class ambitiously called “the Frontiers of Science.” The course was designed to expose new Columbia University students to scientists working at the “Frontiers” of their respective fields. By the time I arrived, the students had already learned about Neuroscience and the tunnels and caves  of the brain (they would later learn about geology and astrophysics), and for a few weeks, we--the Ecologists--would have their collective ears into which to holler or whisper something about biodiversity, conservation, ecology and the future of life.

The Ants of NYC

The Columbia courses reminded me of the story of my grandfather not just because to my country boy sensibilities entering New York is as terrifying as being suspended over a crevasse, but because we were being asked to remind a generation of students raised on Simpsons, cell phones, and cynicism that with simple tools they could still discover mystery beneath Gotham. Little is known about the nonhuman inhabitants of Manhattan. Even a group of students with no background in science could discover new species, understanding, and experiences, in a week or two, or so we hoped to convince them.

James Danoff-Burg, then a professor in Columbia’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC), and a longtime friend decided that while we had the ears of 600 Columbia students we would have them inventory the green spaces of their urban isle. Each student would collect data with which they would later test current ecological theory.  For a few days, I would play Gilligan to his Skipper (Maybe I was more like Ginger. Who can tell?) as we taught the students the process of science and showed them the living beasts in their city. The astrophysicists could point to the stars (or at least their statistical representations) but we would put a bug in each soft, hand. We would send Economics, English, Political Science, and African American Studies majors to take samples of the ants and understory plants in the green spaces across the city and in doing so also conduct one of only a handful of studies of biodiversity in the Big Apple. I pictured a student army cloaked in black, high heels stuck in the mud, Sex in the City gone bush, grown men running from beetles, and leaf-litter samples filled with equal parts broken glass, poison ivy, and drug envelopes.

The 600 students in the class were to pass before us in turns. James would lecture to each group on conservation and ecology, tell them about the project they were to undertake, and send them off into the city. By the time I had arrived, several groups had already returned with their samples of ants and plants and so I was shown my microscope and the vials of bugs. I was one of the tour guides to the lesser known inhabitants of the city, but first I had to assign names to those inhabitants. I needed to disentangle the piles of ants, spiders, and other creatures the students collected, give them their proper names, and tell the students about them. I soon found old six-legged friends and would raise my head occasionally to hold up a strange ant to any student that happened to be nearby.

No fewer than 38 ant species have been recorded from the green spaces of Manhattan and over the course of a few days we collected almost half of them. Manhattan has been studied infrequently enough by biologists that the possibility of finding a new species of ant for the island was reasonably high. “Such discoveries,” we explained to the students, “are a possibility in any forest.” Every tree on the island is mapped, but unnamed species of bugs lurk in the leaf-litter as they have for millennia, their intricate bodies gleaming like so many well-limbed gems. I told students about nameless species so many times I convinced myself we would find some.

I was working in the back of the lecture room and over days I memorized the lecture James gave the students, word for word, corny joke for corny joke. As James introduces an aspirator--the flask with a tube attached through which the students sucked up the ants--he would pause to say “depending on where you are from in The City this may look like one of two things to you, either a crack pipe or a bong. It is neither, so don’t try and take it home." In the afternoon, the students chuckled. In the morning they just stared. Eventually I decided it was time to get some air. It was time to go to the “field” via the subway. The students were going to Inwood Park at the far north end of the isle of Manhattan. I tagged along, with some hope of being the one to find a new species for the island.

We descended the 8 floors of the building and pressed along the sidewalk, past the most visible Manhattan wildlife, New Yorkers, each hurriedly bent into their particular life while covered in mites, filled with bacteria, and the basis of one of the most interesting and convoluted of urban ecosystems. Life thrives in even the roughest sections of Manhattan, but against the din of modernity few animals and plants call loud enough to the throngs of humans to be heard. Even the animals large enough to be visible on the streets--pigeons, roaches, and an occasional rat --seem to specialize on staying out of the mind’s eye. Roaches avoid light. Rats hug corners. As for the forest’s calls, the crickets’ creeks, hawk whistles and owls hoots, they are rarely loud enough to leave the dark spaces between trees. It is hard to see the forest for the buildings, hard to extract oneself from the speed and architecture of the city, and hard to remember that the world is alive with organisms other than us.

But today was our chance, a chance to break out of the city’s bubble and listen to the forest, and watch its ants, plants, and thousands of other inhabitants. After a short subway ride through and over the ancient bedrock of Manhattan, we found ourselves between the trunks of the ancient trees of Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park. As we moved along the trail, we entered the darkness of the understory and the city began to seem distant. Inwood Park is a section of old, tall forest at the north end of Manhattan . Thick trees cast shade over an understory of poorly used trails. From the top of the park we looked down at children playing baseball to the East and to the west we saw the sound, where dolphins used to leap. Few of the students I talked to had ever entered the park. It is hard to believe such wildness still exists so close to Broadway and Wall Streets. The park is large enough that a few years ago, a homeless man from Guayaquil, Ecuador lived in a cave on its grounds for weeks before ever being seen. It is forest enough to hide a man, or, as we hoped, rare insects.

The teaching assistants and other professors began to point the students to the sections of forest they would sample. Six, seven, and then eight times I heard someone say “If you see poison ivy don’t touch it. Wipe your hands in the dirt, if you do touch the poison ivy. If there is broken glass in your plot, let us know, and we will find you a new plot.” Undeterred, group by group the students sifted leaf-litter onto white sheets and as quickly as they could used their aspirators to suck up what scurried away. We could not lower the students into the caves of the park, and had no chance of discovering a new mammal species, but we could focus their attention on the mysteries that exist under every leaf.

While the students collected samples, I helped them see ants they were missing and then wandered around with one of the teaching assistants to see which ant species we could find. We peeled back bark, turned logs and rocks, sifted through handfuls of leaf-litter, and soon forgot we were in the middle of one of the most populous and powerful cities on earth. Slowly we found our quarry, ‘A Wood Ant” (Formica sp.)I yelled, and then a Citronella ant (Lasius claviger). Beneath the large stone a thousand sweet, orange ants, moved about, their tiny eyes letting in the light we shed on them. By the end of the day, we had collected 13 ant species, individuals of thirteen lineages, each older than humanity, and I had forgotten I was in Manhattan.

I could hear the students in the background. I expected them to whine and complain, to squeak, squeal, howl, and run down the hill yelling “I am not touching a slug….” They didn’t. Many students were smiling. 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!”  “Shut up asshole." I thought about telling them that they were only supposed to collect ants, but who am I to judge style. 

In the end, none of the students discovered a nameless ant species, but none of the boys my grandfather took into the caves in Maryland discovered any cave paintings either. In one sample, we did find an ant species from a genus not previously recorded from Manhattan, but it had apparently been jostled enough on the subway ride back so as to make its parts too mashed to fully identify. In any case, our goal was just to show the students the places where these kinds of discoveries might be made, and in doing so to show them how close the unknown lurks. Even if we did not have time to search the forests well enough to discover new species, or to observe new behaviors of the known species, it wouldn’t take much more time. It wouldn’t take many more trips to the forest islands of New York. In the short time we had with the students we could only shine a dim light into the lives of other creatures and say to them, “Look at the ant. It lives. It has a heart and a brain and it spends its entire life trying to survive. It does all of this in Manhattan.” The crow yells for itself. For a little while, we made the students yell for the ants.

I survived the trip to Manhattan and flew back to Knoxville where the subway is just a restaurant. Time will tell what mysteries lurk in the data the students collected and have now analyzed, whether there will be any surprising patterns in the distribution of ants and plants of Manhattan, and whether the small trail into the forest we have shown them will be one that takes them further. Our goal is not that these hundreds of students become biologists but that a few might have lives enriched by nature would be nice. As for the children my grandfather dangled into caves, my father was the first down the rope.  He did not become a spelunker. He did, however, fall in love with wild places and beasts and when it came time he lowered me into my own caves. I have carried a flashlight ever since and it is this light, burning since my grandfather lit it for my father that I can offer to these students now, that they might carry it on and shine it into their own wild corners.  With the right light, you can still dock a boat at the limits of our knowledge, scurry up through a cave entrance, and discover the unknown on the other side.

One by One

(an article by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker about Marko Pecaravic's work on Manhattan's median ants).

If people, viewed from a great height, look like ants, do ants, viewed at close range, look like people? Of course not. Ants have six legs, compound eyes, no lungs, and impossibly narrow waists, and they tend to hang around with aphids and mealybugs. Still, behavioral similarities make them excellent analogues. Ants, like humans, are into career specialization, livestock herding, engineering, climate control, in-flight sex, and war; for them, as for us, free will may or may not be an illusion. As for whether ants look to humans for insight into themselves, science has no answer.

A few years ago, Marko Pecarevic, a Croatian graduate student studying conservation biology at Columbia University, met with his adviser, the urban ecologist James Danoff-Burg, to come up with a subject for his master’s thesis. Danoff-Burg had some data on ants in city parks and wondered if Pecarevic wanted to work on that. Pecarevic thought not. But afterward, crossing Broadway, he saw ants crawling around a garbage bin on one of the avenue’s medians. Medians! As habitats, the planted medians of Broadway were ubiquitous but overlooked, suitably biodiverse but extraordinarily distressed. For someone interested, as Pecarevic was, in the ecology of heavily compromised urban environments, medians were like remote, unexplored island chains—a Galápagos in Manhattan. He decided to be their Darwin. Employing Google Earth (forgive him, he’s from Zagreb), he chose three median-rich stretches—Park Avenue, the West Side Highway, and Broadway—then made himself an official-looking ID, dressed in parkish green, and started collecting ants, travelling the city with a duffelbag of garden tools and Evian bottles filled with antifreeze. No one bothered him. On a recent afternoon, Pecarevic, a trim, wry thirty-two-year-old, went out on a survey of his medians. For demonstration purposes, he had cadged a plastic cup from a coffeeshop, and pocketed a spoon. He carried, as he always does, an aspirator, a plastic tube that he uses to collect ants. He inhales them, alive, into a chamber. “Sometimes, when you suck up ants, they’re not happy about it,” he said. “If you blow cigarette smoke on them, they calm down.” Really, this was a farewell tour—he was returning to Zagreb the next day, to pursue a doc-torate. His thesis (“Ant Diversity and Abundance Increase with Increasing Plant Complexity and Amount of Garbage Bins in New York City Street Medians”) was done, and he was bequeathing to New York some interesting conclusions about its ants.

For example,.... (read on)