The Ant and the Grasshopper. The Journal of Life Sciences.

Several years ago while I was living in the Bolivian Amazon, I developed aching joints. In a jungle populated by people who had malaria, dengue, and the chronic problems of a hard life in a poor country, my complaints seemed silly. Still, my joints bothered me, so one day, over a dinner of jungle rat and rice, I mentioned my ails to my neighbor, Maria Sosa, who said she could help.

She took me to a Devil Tree surging with long, thin, reddish ants and told me to put my leg against it. The ants lived in the hollow center of the tree, which they were prepared to defend. A dozen ants immediately swarmed onto my leg and up and beyond. As they began to sting me, Maria said I could move away. After I stopped screaming, I looked over at her. She was on her knees laughing—but my knee had stopped hurting. I thought at first that the pain was gone only because of the very new and more acute pain of the ants. But today there is a U.S. patent, held by Gunter Holzmann, a Bolivian resident, on the chemicals those ants were injecting into the fat above my patella (Read More...).

The Quokka Chronicles. National Wildlife Magazine.

IT WAS NEARLY 200 years after Christopher Columbus voyaged to America that the first Europeans “discovered” Australia. On maps, the continent was marked only by a thin line, a smudge of unknown at the south end of the Earth believed to harbor mysterious creatures such as troglodytes and mermaids. Willem De Vlamingh, one of the first European explorers to reach Australia’s shores, did not find any mermaids. But on an island just off the continent’s west coast, the Dutchman did encounter an animal, now called the quokka, nearly as unusual (Read more...).

Dig It! Natural History.

The common wombat is a chubby marsupial that can weigh as much eighty pounds. It lives in an underground nest, or den, served by a network of tunnels collectively as long as a hundred feet, and all wide enough—between twelve and twenty inches—to accommodate the animal’s hind end. By midnight, it is safe to say, Peter was the only fifteen-year-old boy from Canberra testing his girth against that of a wombat.

Everything was going well until the passage through which Peter was crawling began to narrow. Because Peter’s explorations were secret, no one would know where to look for him if he turned up missing. Who would think to check a wombat hole? And the threat of burial was real. Peter had previously found the remains of wombats that had been trapped in their own tunnels. Dirt fell on his back. Deep beneath the forest, he began to worry. When tunnels cave in, animals that are effective diggers can escape. Those that aren’t, become part of the soil (Read more...).

What Humans Can Learn from Social Insects. Seed Magazine.

Humans have spent millennia suspecting there is something to be learned from the social insects. Everyone from Aristotle to the indigenous Kayapo of Brazil has held them up as positive role models. Even the Bible exhorts readers to "Go to the ant, thou sluggard."

At this summer's International Union for the Study of Social Insects—July 30 through Aug. 4 in Washington, D.C. —almost 1,000 scientists gathered, as they do every four years, to report on what they'd found after, well, going to the ant (and the bee and the wasp and a half-dozen other orders). To be around so many like-minded social insect—studiers is a departure for this bunch (or rather, colony), who are accustomed to having to justify what they do for a living: When in mixed company, they can be overheard saying things like, "But ants represent 40 percent of the biomass in many forests" or "Without bees, agriculture would be nearly impossible."(Read more...).

Dunn, R. R. 2007, Notes from the Edge. Natural History.

The first reports home from early European explorers in the tropics told of impenetrable jungles ("we hacked through a dense, green hell ..."). But truth be told, the average tropical forest is fairly open. Large trees darken the forest floor, discouraging understory growth. What is impenetrable is the edge of the forest, where weedy species clamber for light, jostling into every empty space. The edge was the thorny tangle the explorers first confronted.

Those who pushed on found a more inviting forest--albeit one that harbored malaria, the odd poisonous snake, and assorted other perils. Those early encounters came to mind when I began teaching a summer field class in the Dominican Republic for college students from New York City. The course was held in a small patch of forest next to a seaside resort hotel (a location that posed multiple challenges, including how to keep students attention when a topless bather walks by). One of my first goals was to get my charges used to the forest. They could appreciate nature, I reasoned, only if they learned to be comfortable in it (Read more...).

Impostor in the nest. Natural History Magazine.

When most people think about the explorers and adventurers of the past, figures such as Captain James Cook or Sir Edmund Hillary come to mind: heroic individuals who explored the world's greatest oceans or climbed the world's highest mountains. My own heroes were another group of explorers, who set out with more modest conquests in mind. They were the natural historians who headed for the hills to chase a new species of beetle, or snare a new bird, or climb a hollow tree to capture a new snake. As an entomologist working in the tropics, I see these collectors as my sometimes humbling, sometimes fumbling predecessors. When I kneel in the forest and turn over rocks, I feel some of the awe my predecessors must have felt. Unfortunately, though, the days are now few when I get into the field as a biologist, with no more tangled purpose than to find and observe rare species. Darwin had a ship that carried him to biologically unexplored terrain. My colleagues and I are preoccupied with committee meetings, student cheaters, and asbestos abatement (Read more...).