In the Anza-Borrego desert, woody aster bushes with their sky-blue flowers and stiff, brittle stems prefer the edges of dry washes. On our dirt-road desert drive, their beauty entices us to stop for a sandwich break. Sitting on the sandy bank, dry as it is, it is hard to imagine that all that we see before us is evidence of past transport by water —- braided patterns of stream beds that probably haven’t carried water in a century. As rare as rain may be, this landscape was formed by rainstorms in episodes of erosion, transport and deposition, relentlessly moving sand, rocks and gravel incrementally downhill. Thus the cut bank where we sit exposes alternating layers of gravel, sand and pebbles, all sorted by size.

All landscapes are shaped by the relative rates of two processes that occur at vastly different scales of time and space—-on the one hand, the slow, molecule by molecule weathering that crumbles rock into soil, and soil into solute, and on the other, the rate at which these granular and soluble products are moved farther downhill by water (or wind), to be deposited eventually in the sea (or in a closed basin as in the Great Basin of Nevada, Oregon, and western Utah).

These multiple forms of transport occur at vastly different scales of time and space. At the lower extreme is the scale of microns to millimeters, milliseconds to minutes: a raindrop splashes down like an Apollo capsule on a square centimeter of sloped soil, sending a starburst of smaller droplets outward, deranging the soil particles into a moon-like crater half a millimeter deep. Gravity pulls at both the displaced grains and the spray of radial droplets so that they come to earth a millimeter or two farther down the slope, a difference noticeable only with a microscope. Sometimes gravity acts alone, giving a micro-nudge to tumble unstable grains down a micro-hill. Much of this transport is small in comparison to the landscape being moved, but multiply these small to tiny down-slope derangements a trillion-trillion-fold, and the entire surface layer of soil actually flows down the hill as a fluid in ultra slow motion, like a flood of cold molasses. This downslope creep is especially apparent in climates in which the soil undergoes cycles of freezing and thawing. Over millions of years, the peaks gradually decrease in elevation, the slopes become gentler and the mountain slowly flows into the sea, flattening the landscape.

In the deserts of the world, transport sometimes, though rarely, occurs at the other extreme of scale--- huge, violent and catastrophic. An earthquake sends a whole mountainside into the valley, a drenching thunderstorm dumps an ocean of water in a few minutes and a surging flood scours a canyon, tumbling boulders the size of houses before depositing them out on the alluvial apron in a mile-wide swath of debris and gravel. In heavy rains, water flows over surfaces as sheets, dislodging loose material an acre at a time, and moving it to lower elevation, or into a stream channel where it can cut, scour, and deposit. The wash in which we eat our sandwiches and admire the blue aster has been visited by such floods many times over millennia, each time moving a bit of mountain a step closer to the sea. In the Anza Borrego Desert, the rainstorm of 2013 swept alluvium five miles down from the mouth of Glorieta Canyon, a white scar still faintly visible in 2026.

When transport by water is faster than the formation of new soil by weathering, we see the gentle, rounded landscapes of humid, rainy zones like eastern North America. But in deserts, rock crumbles into soil faster than water can clear the valleys and move it downhill, and mountains become buried up to their necks in their own waste, only the peaks peering out from under their wide skirts of trash.

As the weight of the mountain decreases, it slowly floats upward to compensate for the lost mass, while the valley sinks under the weight of thousands of feet of sand, gravel and rocks, waiting to be moved farther downhill by the ephemeral, braided streams that feed the valley layer-cake.

In our every-day human reality, we can hardly imagine the time scale of this geological drama, but this unimaginable drama created the scene where we eat our sandwiches among the blue woody asters.

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Introductory note: my wife and my daughter have sometimes told me that my essays get too science-y, and that my readers might be put off by this. They are probably right, but geez, I spent my life in science and science is how I approach the external world. I may not be the best judge of science-yness, still, I am going to risk posting this rather science-y essay in the hopes that many of my readers will bear with me, and thereby get a glimpse of a few of life’s hidden marvels.

As even middle-schoolers know, arthropods have an exoskeleton, a secreted outer covering that is both a skeleton giving form to their bodies, but also a barrier to nasty things from the outer world. What middle-schoolers probably don’t know is that to make such an exoskeleton, the animal’s epidermis (or hypodermis) is a chemical factory that makes a wide range of chemicals needed for making that exoskeleton. Moreover, like many human factories, once you’ve got the building and the machinery, you can make any number of products as well as switching among them as the situation demands.

The basic ingredients needed to build an exoskeleton are (1) a protein gel that can be hardened into shapes, a sort of casting material; (2) the chemicals needed to do the hardening that incidentally give color; (3) waxy stuff for coating the exoskeleton to reduce water loss. Thing is, several of these needed chemicals are toxic even to the cells that synthesize them, so the cells have evolved a work-around by synthesizing the non-toxic precursors of the cuticle inside the cell, then excreting them to the outside along with enzymes that complete the final chemical step resulting in the exoskeleton. Once hardened, these materials are no longer toxic. In this way, the toxins are made outside the cell, and the cell is safe from its effects.

This system is a “pre-adaptation” for the heavier artillery that is the subject of this essay. Many biologists huff at the term “pre-adaptation” because it seems to imply intent on the part of evolution, and in the words of Monty Python, intent is not “A-1 Theory With Our Lot.” To be clear, I don’t mean to imply intent, I am merely emphasizing (yet once again) that evolution always molds the clay already in its hand. In the present case, the “there” is an epidermal factory capable of manufacturing and exporting a wide range of chemicals with a few twitches of the machinery.

Back when I was a mere scientific puppy, I heard a very exciting talk by Thomas Eisner that lead me to undertake more than a decade of research on the chemical defensive system of tenebrionid beetles, aka darkling ground beetles. The more spectacular ones, such as Eleodes armata, can spray their noxious secretion for almost a meter, god help you if it gets in your eyes (see below). What’s more, by doing a headstand, these beetles warn you that they are going to squirt if you persist (see image at the top). Eleodes is one of about 1500 species of tenebrionids in North America, and 12,000 in the world.

But the tenebrionid ancestor of Eleodes didn’t start with such heavy artillery. For some reason, that ancestor had a fold of soft, intersegmental membrane at the tip of its abdomen, a pocket into which it began to excrete an excess of the same quinones that had tanned its cuticle after a molt. Quinones are oxidizers, tanning agents and strong irritants with a sharp odor and a repellent nature. When this ancestral tenebrionid was occasionally attacked by a predator, it almost incidentally exposed this irritant-coated intersegmental membrane in its struggles, perhaps slightly increasing its survival in proportion to the amount of noxious quinone secretion and size of the pockets. This “starter” condition is still represented today in the common mealworm beetle and its close relatives. Hold one of these beetles between your fingers, and it will evert these small quinone reservoirs as in the image below. The secretion bites the nose and causes brown spots on the skin (it’s a tanning agent!). Release the beetle and the glands are retracted once more.

But as the hundreds of species of tenebrionid beetles evolved from this ancestor with its simple pocket of quinones, the defensive value increased through increased reservoir size, gland size and quinone volume. I set out to map these changes on the evolution of tenebrionids by analyzing the defensive chemicals, gland morphology and behavior of over 150 species. I collected the emitted secretions when the beetles were handled and threatened, separated and analyzed the chemicals with a range of physical and chemical methods, and observed the defensive behavior.

I studied the gland morphology by fresh dissection as well as in preparations made from dead, dried beetles, including long-dead museum specimens. This is one of the wonderful things about studying insect morphology—- the gland reservoirs are part of the exoskeleton made of cuticle and therefore remain behind intact after all the soft tissue has been dissolved in strong base such as sodium hydroxide (Drano!). It’s sort of cook and look. Even tiny details and fine structures remain intact. The gland reservoirs can be freed from the ventral abdomen as in the picture below, and mounted on slides for detailed study.

Below is such a preparation of the simple glands of the mealworm beetle, so similar to what the ancestral gland must have looked like. Why the mealworm beetle didn’t evolve a fancier gland in its millions of years on earth is a bit of a mystery.

However, that is not what happened during the evolution of most other tenebrionid species, many of which got very large and fancy glands indeed, with reservoirs sometimes as long as the whole abdomen, and plenty of secretion to hose down a careless attacker. In addition, most species also added simple, linear hydrocarbons of nine to fifteen carbons (basically paint thinner) to the mixture to produce a solution with increased irritating quality, decreased viscosity, and increased ability to wet/penetrate skin and cuticle. These noxious liquids are stored safely in the reservoir through the chemical-physical properties of both the solution and the reservoir. So once this mephitic mixture is in the reservoir, it is sort of harmless to the beetle, a cannon round waiting to be fired.

Making this stuff faces the same problem that making the exoskeleton did— the reagents are toxic to living tissue, including the cells that make them. Part of my project involved detailed light and electron microscopy of the glandular cells. In the simplest case, for example in the mealworm beetle, the cells are scattered about the inside surface of the reservoir. Two types of cells are present on all tenebrionid defensive glands, and all have the same ultra-structure under the electron microscope, but vary in their distribution and drainage into the reservoir. Along the way, electron microscopy reveals that life is beautifully structured at all levels, from the organism to the cell, to the molecule.

Speaking of electron microscopy, it always surprised me that you can pickle tissue in really toxic stuff, precipitate all their biomolecules into shoe leather, dose them with the deadly heavy metal oxide of osmium, embed this micro-carcass in plastic, slice off sections as thin as a wavelength of light that you float on water, and then pick these up on a super-fine copper grid, pop this into the high vacuum of an electron microscope, and blast it with an intense electron beam. On a fluorescent screen you then see the shadow created by how much the variable density of the specimen impedes the electron beam.

And yet, the images, as near miraculous as they are, tell us a great deal about the structure of cells at a magnification far greater than achievable by light microscopes. Of course, my part of this miracle was simply to provide the dissected gland tissue and pickle it. All the rest was done by salaried experts in electron microscopy on a super-expensive instrument with a super-expensive maintenance contract. But what a thrill to get the images of my beetles at sub-micron detail, full of wonder and beauty, and to interpret how these revealed the three-dimensional structure of the gland cells. Admittedly, I wasn’t the first to reveal that this kind of structure occurred widely in insect “exocrine” (secreting to the outside) glands, but of course, adding more examples helps confirm the generality of this structure.

Light and electron microscopy confirmed that each of the two cell types (brilliantly named, type 1 and 2) has a central cavity (vesicle), and that of type 2 is filled with extensions of the cell membrane into finger-like projections called microvilli (an aside: in response to the test question: define microvilli, one student wrote “small rental apartments on the Italian Riviera.” I gave him full credit). Microvilli enormously increase the surface area of the cell membrane and are reliably and consistently associated with cells whose job is to exchange a lot of stuff across cell membranes, including secretory cells that make a variety of defensive secretions. In tenebrionid beetles, one type of cell secretes quinones and the other one hydrocarbons.

In the center of each vesicle is a cuticular structure that is continuous with the reservoir wall, essentially an extension of the reservoir wall into the heart of the secretory cells. This cuticular extension emanates from the reservoir via a cuticular duct secreted by an associated cell giving a three-cell unit (type 2), and a two-cell unit (type 1) as in the schematic below.

I suggested at the beginning of this essay that secretion of cuticle by the hypodermis was the pre-adaptation from which the defensive glands evolved, including at the cell level. The schematic below shows how I think the type 2 unit evolved from the elaboration of ordinary hypodermal cells that greatly increased their ability to make some of the chemicals needed to make cuticle, but were now exaggerated and “repurposed” for a new function, defense. Type 1 cells would be similar in their evolution, but are not shown.

So how do these little cellular factories work, and how do they avoid poisoning themselves? In the late 1960s, George Happ did a series of histochemical and microscopic studies of two tenebrionid species (Eleodes and Tribolium) to answer this question by localizing the precursors and their products to different parts of the cells (J. Insect Physio. 14: 1821 (1968)). Thus, in the cytoplasm of the 2a cell, he detected only the precursor of quinone, hydroquinone bonded to a glucose molecule, which rendered it both harmless and water soluble. In the vesicle, he found the enzyme glucosidase, plus free glucose and free hydroquinone because the enzyme had cleaved the bond between hydroquinone and glucose. Inside the central cuticular organelle, the enzyme phenol oxidase was busily oxidizing the hydroquinone into the irritant, toxic quinones. As this stream moved toward the reservoir, another enzyme (peroxidase) continued the oxidation of the quinone precursors even in the tubules that finally emptied into the reservoir. Through similar methods, George showed that the hydrocarbons were secreted by the type 1 cell, again with the pattern of carrying out the final step outside the cell. The stored secretion in the reservoirs confirms these chemical steps, for it consists of an aqueous phase that contains the former blocking molecule glucose and the enzyme proteins, and a separate organic phase with the toxic quinone/hydrocarbon solution, nasty things dissolved in paint thinner.

So there you have it, the rather science-y story of how insects produce toxins to which their own cells are not immune. Solving how they do this engaged a lot of different procedures and skills, not all of them mine—- dissection, behavioral observation, chemical analysis and identification, electron microscopy, and histochemistry. In the classical sequence of most biological studies, these moved from level to level, from gross morphology, to fine structure, to cells, to cellular organelles, and finally to chemicals and enzymes. Together, these revealed the secret that evolution has discovered many times across the animal kingdom for many different secretory systems—- export the harmless precursors plus the enzyme and execute the final step outside the cell, and do so by modifying a capacity and machinery that is already present.

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Postscript: This essay brings to mind a poem, Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff, by A.E. Houseman, the last verse of which is—-

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

-I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

I spent a good deal of my scientific career sorting causation from correlation. Humans (and other animals) evolved to detect patterns of things that vary together, because when they do, one might be the cause of the others. In any case, if things reliably occur together they have predictive value, so does it matter which is cause and which effect, or whether they associate by random chance? Most people are quite ready to accept causal relationships if they seem to make sense, even in the absence of experimental tests in which the putative cause is varied and the response of the dependent variable is measured. That’s a lot of trouble, so why bother?

In the age of powerful computers, one can correlate any variable with any other variables, so-called data mining, and because of the endless mountains of online data, you can reap a bountiful harvest of spurious correlations that make no sense whatsoever. You can amuse yourself by checking out this website, to discover that there is a 96% correlation between the number of civil engineering doctorates awarded and the per capita mozzarella cheese consumption in America. Or a 95% correlation between the marriage rate in Kentucky and the number of people who drowned falling out of a fishing boat. And for a visual example, I offer the amazing gull below.

Correlation is often the source of superstitions, both for humans and animals. At feeding time, our three cats always gathered at our feet and one of them, Chit’lins, always engaged in “intense milling behavior”, rubbing back and forth against my ankles while I prepared the food. One day, out of curiosity, we deliberately shut her in another room, and behold! one of the other cats performed the milling behavior. We tested this several times, and each time, one of the other cats took over. One of my undergraduate students did the same study on three different households that had three cats each, and found similar results. The cats, having taken note of the high correlation between milling and feeding, concluded that the ritual of milling was the cause of feeding. Quite logical, really. The ritual probably also gave some feeling of control—- no milling, no feeding. Many of us would have done the same, and few of us (other than pointy-headed scientists) would have done the crucial experiment of “milling vs. non-milling.”

Of course our lives are replete with correlations, and most of the time, it doesn’t matter much whether the correlation has an embedded cause, but sometimes it does. The entire point of blind clinical trials with placebo controls is to determine what part of the effect is caused by the drug treatment. The FDA and NIH do their best to figure out how much of the correlation is “the cat effect” (aka the milling ritual) and how much is the drug treatment.

After the exotic fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, made land in Mobile in the mid-30s, it became associated with a lot of confusion over correlation and causation. It was an almost universal belief that this was The Ant From Hell, and that it wiped out native ants and other creatures from quail to cows. The basis for the ant part of this belief was that there was a strong negative correlation between fire ant and native ant abundance. With the same logic as our cats, the inescapable conclusion was therefore that fire ants hammered native ants. It took Josh King and me more than six years and several hundred thousand dollars of federal grants to show that this conclusion was rubbish, and that the culprit was human ecological disturbance, to which native ants were poorly adapted, but fire ants were supremely adapted. In other words, the same cause (ecological disturbance) hammered native ants and favored fire ants. Same cause, opposite effect, and therefore a negative correlation between fire ants and native ants. Our cats would have made the same mistake, perhaps, though I’d like to believe that Xanthia would not.

This mistaken logic was not harmless. Once the government Fire Ant Warriors understood that broadcast pesticide application killed all the ants, not just fire ants, and that the fire ants resurged much more quickly than the native ants, native ants became the Saviors that would rescue people from the Fire Ant Scourge. Here again was the assumption that the fire ant was a superior competitor, and that by “helping” native ants, fire ants would be suppressed. The state of Texas (of course!) had a veritable propaganda campaign urging Texans to be nice to their native ants. But as Josh and I showed so clearly, habitat and disturbance are the main determinants of ant communities, and once you whack the native ecosystem, you’ve made the world safe for fire ants, and disastrous for most native ants. When Josh and I removed fire ants from pasture habitat (a highly disturbed habitat in most of the USA), the abundance of native ants did not change. Indeed, most of the ants that occurred together with fire ants were also exotics that also depended on ecological disturbance.

So you can kind of see why I was such a stickler about separating correlation from causation, and why I might want to emphasize this point in the education of the students under my care. Clint Penick was one of my excellent undergraduate students with a passion for biology, even though he began college as a creative writing major. In addition to this distinction, he played in a punk rock band and had a leg tattoo decades ahead of the “tat-epidemic.” He wanted to do an Honors Thesis under my direction, and I suggested that for its educational value, he test one of the most general, obvious correlations-assumed-to-be-causal, namely, the movement of brood by fire ant workers into their mound during cold but sunny winter mornings. This placement is easily demonstrated by cutting a mound in half on such a morning, as in the image below. All of the brood is located immediately below the mound’s surface, as in the image below.

A long time ago, my graduate student, Sanford Porter, had shown that the mound fire ants build over their subterranean nests acts as a solarium that warms in the morning sun in the winter, extending the brood-rearing season. By building mounds, fire ants can rear about 15% more brood annually compared to not building a mound, and that translates into larger colonies and higher fitness. He also showed that the optimal temperature for larval development was 32 degrees C when well fed, but cooler when underfed. Workers are clearly endowed with sensitive thermometers.

Perhaps you think it’s obvious that the workers were responding to warmth and it wasn’t worth the effort of running an experiment. That would be thinking like a cat, not a scientist, and I was trying to train a scientist. So, Clint’s challenge was to determine which, if any, of several correlated variables (sunlight, radiative warmth, temperature, time of day) caused workers to move brood into the mound. To do so, he had to vary each possible factor independently of the others, and determine to which one the workers were responding. How hard could it be?

Like most scientific studies, his started with a description. By burying “i-buttons” in the mounds, he recorded the temperature every 10 minutes on the north and south sides of the mounds, as well as the air and non-nest ground nearby. Because Tallahassee is in the northern hemisphere at 30 degrees N, the sun’s daily arc is to the south and the south side receives more direct sun.

The graph above shows that the south side of the mound warmed much faster than the north, which warmed at the same rate as air. In other words, in the absence of direct radiation from the sun, the mound was warmed indirectly by air. But this graph also shows something easily missed, specifically, that although the soil surrounding the nest mound is irradiated by the sun for the same period, it warms very little during the day. Why the difference?

Although Clint did not test this in an experiment, he knew the answer from high school physics. First, because the mound was honeycombed with galleries, its bulk density (mass) was much lower than the mound-less soil, and therefore, it took fewer solar calories to raise its temperature. Second, the angle at which the sunlight strikes a surface determines the energy per unit area. This energy “density” is related to the cosine of the angle and is maximal when the sun is 90 degrees to the surface, and decreases to zero when the surface is parallel to the sunlight. Third, the soil of the mound is usually drier than the surrounding soil, so less energy goes into evaporating water rather than warming the soil.

This clarifies the energetic benefit from building a mound—- the sides of the mound have less mass, are drier, and for the south face, are at a higher angle to the incoming light. By burying i-buttons at different depths, the record showed that warming was most rapid just under the surface (1 cm), much slower at 5 cm, and very little at 40 cm. The sun’s heat is transferred only at the surface and moves downward by convection or conduction, both slower processes. On cloudy days, mound warming was very modest at all depths.

OK, so much for the physics. How did the movement of brood correlate with these temperature patterns? Because Clint couldn’t see through the mound surface to see where the workers put the brood, he made a “standard spoon” device with which he could extract small standard samples from several depths. The basic data are thus the number of brood in each sample in response to the treatments.

If the sun, and not correlated variables, especially air temperature, is the direct cause of brood movement, then shading a mound should affect the north-south brood distribution because both sides would more or less track the air temperature. And it does—- in shaded mounds, brood is equally distributed between the north and south sides, whereas in the non-shaded controls, it is almost all on the south side.

Sunlight, in contrast to air temperature, is directional. Thus, Clint reversed the direction of the sun by shading mounds and mirroring the sun from the north. In response, the brood were almost all on the north side, whereas in the unreversed control, they were on the south side.

This is all well and good, and it looks like the case for the sun’s warmth being the cause of brood movement is pretty strong. However, ants are living animals, and all creatures undergo cycles that are entrained by the night-day cycle. What’s to say that the ants aren’t moving brood on an entrained daily cycle, and that they would do it in in constant light or darkness, the classic test of a circadian cycle?

Clint couldn’t alter the day-night cycle for this test (no kidding?), and he couldn’t easily move colonies into constant light or dark. But he could provide heat out of sync with the solar cycle. This wasn’t that hard to do—- he set up a grill over each mound, and in the middle of the night, put a layer of burning charcoal briquettes on each grill, high enough above the mound that most of the heating was radiative, not convective or conductive.

His nocturnal efforts paid off. Whereas no brood were brought up into unheated mounds, workers carried abundant brood up into the charcoal-heated mound, placing them just under the surface. Thus, the ants were not the puppets of an entrained circadian rhythm, but were responding directly to the heat. Because all the radiation from the charcoal was at the red and infrared end of the spectrum, it suggested that this part of the sun’s radiation, not shorter wavelengths, was the source of solar heat.

These simple experiments thus teased apart several correlations and put a finger directly on an immediate cause. Maybe our cats would eventually have come to the same conclusion, but maybe they would have been satisfied with the general correlation. Like all science, these experiments still leave a lot of questions unanswered, but also like all science, the questions are answered one at a time, often working down from general to more and more specific. And also like all science, it raises additional questions, such as how do workers deep in the nest detect the warm mound? How sharp a temperature gradient can they detect? Through what sensory mode? What switches on their brood shuttle mode?

Clint went on to pursue his passion for biology and ants in graduate school at Arizona State University, then did tours as a postdoc and beginning faculty before coming to roost in a faculty job at Auburn University in Alabama where he continues to pursue his passion for ant biology. His career is evidence of a wider view of the world. When most ant biologists yearn for habitat untrammeled by humans, Clint zoomed in on the ant fauna of Manhattan, a focusing on the relationship of ant ecology and human ecology. I don’t know if he still plays in a punk rock band, and I don’t know if he has added more tattoos to his epidermis, but he is well-launched as an ambassador between the world of humans and ants. And I’m pretty sure he knows the difference between correlation and causation.

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The Boy Scouts had a number of little rhymes that helped keep boys out of trouble. Having spotted a snake with red, yellow and black rings, we were encouraged to remember “red and yellow kill a fellow; red and black, a friend of Jack” and thus refrain from picking up a venomous coral snake, but perhaps handling a harmless king snake. Similarly, “leaflets three, let it be; leaflets five, let it thrive” might keep a camper from developing a galloping case of poison ivy from exposure to the allergen, urushiol. It takes a little more checking just to be sure, for sometimes some of the compound leaves of Virginia creeper have only three leaflets, but then again, what’s the harm of “letting it be?” It’s not like anyone might have a pressing need to fondle Virginia creeper.

Of course, as a grown-up weeding one’s yard, the distinction takes on importance again, because an oozing, itching case of poison ivy definitely tries the soul. Distinguishing between the two vines can be important even for those of us who are insensitive to poison ivy. Upon returning from the woods, I have given my wife a hug and a case of poison ivy on more than one occasion, so nowadays, I hit the shower before I give her the hug.

When Vicki and I got married, we spent our honeymoon in a beautiful, charming house on the north California coast, Pacific waves crashing on the rocks below. We took leisurely walks on trails through the coastal chaparral, one of whose common shrubs was poison oak, a close relative of poison ivy, and just as menacing. Sadly, this is when we discovered Vicki’s lifelong extreme sensitivity to poison oak or ivy. Having recovered from that case, she repeatedly got poison oak at the back of her knees, until we figured out that the blanket covering the front seat of my 1946 Ford V8 convertible was contaminated from our honeymoon adventures. Still later, her sensitivity was accidentally confirmed on a winter walk with my parents when we all rested on a leafless, viney slope, and learned that poison ivy doesn’t need leaves to give you grief.

But Vicki’s adventures with poison oak go all the way back to her mother, who shortly before she was to deliver the baby Victoria, picked a fall bouquet that included some very pretty red foliage that gave her a galloping case of poison oak. Had she been a Boy Scout, she would not have made this mistake. The doctor was so mad that he whisked the newborn away and assigned her mother to an isolation ward. Who knows if Vicki’s hypersensitivity was the result of in utero exposure? She eventually developed whole-body responses that she tried to prevent with desensitization injections, but the lasting solution has been that I have eradicated poison ivy from our yard, and Vicki has gotten much better at recognizing it by using the Boy Scout mnemonic phrase.

Continuing the “ivy” theme, I went to an Ivy League college (actually, it was in the so-called Little Ivy League, aka The Potted Ivy League), where one of the songs we sang over dinner had the lines, “O ivied walls, O storied halls.” It took me a while to realize that those ivied walls encasing those storied halls were actually not ivied but Virginia creepied, or sometimes fox-grapied. Hardly any ivy in sight, either English or poison. Of course, “ivied” sounds better in a song than “creepied” and goes better with “storied.” The non-ivied condition of those storied college halls became especially apparent in the fall when the Virginia creeper turned lovely shades of red, and then dropped all those leaflets onto the storied lawns. Real ivy neither turns color, nor loses its leaves in the fall, but I guess botanical correctness was not highly valued for most of the history of the Ivy League, whether potted or not. I am glad they took what was inside those storied halls more seriously.

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So when Linnaeus invented his system for categorizing the different kinds of creatures, he didn’t start something that hadn’t been going on since the Pleistocene Era. He merely set up some standards of similarity for deciding what was a different kind of organism, called each kind a species, and arranged all species into a hierarchy of categories, like boxes within boxes. What separated Linnaeus’ classification from others was that each of the higher categories was also based on shared similarities. He thereby invented the science of biological taxonomy. This allowed him to use only a simple, two-part name for every species, because the species could be uniquely placed within this categorical hierarchy by higher-level names. So now, instead of naming the Mojave rattlesnake by its attributes (spade-headed, brownish, long fanged, diamond-marked, slit-pupil, sure-to-kill poisonous snake with loose rattles at the hind end), we can refer to it merely by the name of the genus and species to which it belongs, Crotalus stutulatus.

Linnaeus knew nothing of evolution. Like others of his era, he believed that all creatures were god’s creations (hence creatures), and that there was some ideal version of each creature somewhere in the ether, of which every earthly representation was a mere imperfect approximation. Therefore, there existed for him the notion of a type, and we can fairly refer to Linneaus’ system of classification as typological. This is probably the origin of the practice of choosing a single specimen of each new species, and describing it as the representative of all members of this species. If other individuals didn’t conform exactly to this description, well, they were just less perfect specimens, their tough luck. God didn’t always take adequate care in making replicates. Members of a species might be somewhat variable as a result, but the species didn’t change. In his early years, Linnaeus believed each species was the permanent and unchanging creation of god, a real entity.

Later in his life, the reality of hybridization dawned on him, and he came to believe that the variety of plants god put in the Garden of Eden had increased through hybridization since the creation. In no way, however, did Linnaeus ever consider that creatures might change in an open-ended fashion, without a divine plan. Had Linnaeus ever had this thought, he would have been appalled at himself. No, to Linnaeus, to study nature was to discover god’s plan. And discover Linnaeus did, carrying his Systema Naturae through ten editions, the first nine dealing with the classification of plants, and the tenth finally including animals. Systema Naturae is the rock foundation of modern classification, elbowing all previous classifications into the dustbin of history.

That was before Darwin and Wallace upset this comforting permanence with the idea of evolution. Not only did they show that creatures changed through time, but also that the variation within species was not merely annoying imperfection, but the very stuff upon which evolution acted. Nature selected from the wide array of variants within each species to determine whose offspring would inherit more of the earth and whose would inherit less. Worse yet, the offspring of one type might thrive over here and at this time, whereas the offspring of another might thrive over there or another time. And of course, these shifting fortunes brought change to the species. Where Linneaus’ world-view was one of order, permanence and structure, Darwin and Wallace’s was one that was ever-shifting, where new kinds of creatures could arise and perish, a picture of struggle and hapless victim-hood.

Twentieth century biology placed the revolutionary ideas of Darwin and Wallace on a genetic footing, and drew genetic boundaries around species that replaced the typological ideas of Linneaus. Species were no longer cuticle and hemolymph representations of an ideal type, but were now recognized as all the members of a gene pool, that is, all the creatures that could exchange genes with one another, no matter how different they might seem (I need to caution that other definitions of species exist).

Molecular genetics has allowed taxonomists to sort this pool into genetic puddles, variation on a fine scale. When a modern species includes all of the variation within a gene pool, you would expect that the manner in which taxonomists name and describe species would change, wouldn’t you? Yes, you would. But you would be wrong. The process differs little from how it was carried out in Linneaus’ day. The collision between the type-thinking of Linneaus’ system and the fluid, uncertain shiftiness of modern evolutionary thinking simply didn’t happen. Or more exactly, it was a glancing blow that left much of typological taxonomy intact. Yes, it gave a new flavor and purpose to the arrangement of the higher categories, because these could now be arranged to reflect the evolutionary family tree, but this was a minor change because in most cases similarity of form predicts lineage anyway, and Linnaeus had already made similarity the basis for higher categories. However, when it comes to describing the species, the very foundation of the whole enterprise, the colliding concepts just bounced off each other, and it is taxonomic business as usual. Revolution? What revolution? I didn’t see no revolution?

And so it is that whenever someone discovers a new species, he or she still selects a single individual to describe. If it is a new species of tachinid fly, it would be pinned with a number two insect pin, and one of the labels on the pin would be blood-red, designating it as the holotype, the basis of the whole species. If the new species were an ant, it would be glued to a little paper triangle by its coxae, then pinned with the red-labeled pin, and if it were a new species of human, I suppose one luckless specimen would have to be pickled in a large jar of formalin, or prepared as a study skin and kept in a drawer with mothballs.

It seems a bit risky to base the recognition of all the members of a particular species on a single individual. Perhaps in response to this, or perhaps simply to deal with the arbitrariness of choosing the holotype, the taxonomist designates all the other specimens in the same study series as paratypes.

If the paratype is of the opposite sex as the holotype, we have the pleasure of referring to it as an allotype. Sometimes a taxonomist will describe a species without choosing a holotype out of the series of specimens before him. In that case, all the specimens in the series become syntypes, a sort of default punishment for the sin of being so forgetful. These used to be called cotypes too, a usage that is now archaic. If the author later attempts to rectify his oversight by choosing one of the syntypes to serve as the basis for the species, this specimen becomes the lectotype, and the ghost of Linneaus once again smiles on the author from on high. The poor, shunned co-specimens that are not honored with the status of lectotype, receive instead the also-ran name of lectoparatypes, a bitter fate.

Usually, authors label the holotype as such, and publish the place where it is stored. This makes that specimen an explicit holotype. Sometimes authors forget to do this (they are human), but it is still obvious which specimen they looked at because there is only one. Then this specimen becomes the implicit holotype. Should the holotype become broken and its pieces separated, the pieces are magically transformed into merotypes, an example of reproduction after death. Or say the author chose as holotype a specimen that, it later turns out, does not display certain characters essential for taxonomic separation, he may designate an epitype, a specimen that displays those essential characters. This is not considered a demotion for the holotype. Unauthorized removal of a type from one museum to another converts it into a kleptotype (yes, it happens!). Perhaps the author works on a cloning organism that produces genetically identical offspring or elements. Then he is in a position to designate these as clastotypes. In most museums, specimens are given accession or collection numbers, creating an opportunity for establishing arithmotypes--- all specimens bearing the same number (whether they are the same species or not).

Finally, what if something should happen to the holotype, paratypes, allotypes, syntypes, cotypes and lectotypes? Tiny insects on pins, or dry study skins in drawers are no match for the ferocity of modern war (or old-fashioned war, for that matter), the vagaries of fires or the appetites of skin beetles and clothes moths. Many types of all types have disappeared through World Wars, accident or poor janitorial service. In such a case, an author can still designate a specimen from another series of the same species as the neotype. And in cases where we are forced to work with drawings or photographs of type specimens, we are dealing with iconotypes. In a nod to modernity, the name phototype is even allowed. When not even this is available, and the taxon is based only on a description, we finally arrive at a type without substance, a type in its most abstract form, the typotype. This is pretty close to Linneaus’ own conception of a type.

Having chosen the holotype, the specimen must now be described and named. Describing and naming a new species is one of those pleasures of discovery a taxonomist lives for. A new specific name must be chosen (or a new generic one if needed), and the taxonomist appends his own name as the author. For example, when Bill Buren decided that the fire ant he was studying was a new species belonging in an existing genus, he created Solenopsis invicta Buren (thereby memorializing that the ant had survived three wars against it).

Most species names are descriptive of the specimen at hand, and so we get parva or grandis or nigra, or they indicate the place where the creature lives, such as floridanus, or michoacanensis. Species may also be named for people, most commonly for the collector of the new species, for example, Pheidole tschinkeli Wilson.

But a taxonomist can also honor a person he or she admires. This gave us Mastophora dizzydeania, a spider that catches its prey by swinging a sticky ball on a thread. With some careful thought, he can even insult his enemies in the same manner, as was done by the taxonomist who named a species hotchkissianus after his loathed enemy, Hotchkiss. Linneaus himself, as a Swede, surely knew what he was doing when he named the brown rat, Rattus norwegicus, in honor of his neighbors to the west. Sometimes the intention is positive, but the author overlooked something important, as in the case of Neumoegen, who named a moth Dyaria, “in honor” of the great entomologist, Dyar. It seems doubtful that Dyar was amused.

Scattered among the thousands of dry, routine names chosen by taxonomists, there is also much playfulness and whimsy. Who can resist the percussive rhythm of the hoopoe bird’s scientific name, Upupa epops?

Who is not amused by the insult in Z. morio or Stupidogobius? When Estes created the genus, Cuttysarkus for a fossil lizard, was he telling us something about the lizard, or his own fondness for things Scottish, or Scotch?

The humor in Pepsis cola is surely far from timeless, and will push no chuckle-button in the post-Pepsi era or in Pepsi-free zones of the world (if there are any). The same fate will probably also befall the fossil snake, Montypythonoides riversleighensis, or the midge, Dicrotendipes thanatogratus (The Grateful Dead). Some references are already obscure because the expressions are no longer in fashion. This would include the chigger species, Trombicula fujigmo, based on a World War II acronym standing for, “f--- you, Jack, I got my orders”. On the other hand, their musical congeners, T. doremi and T. fasola still ring a bell. And then, one does not have to be tied into pop culture, or even speak English to raise an eyebrow over Pinus erecta, Pinus rigida and Pinus flexilis. Does it reduce the humorous effect to suspect that the authors were probably not trying to be funny? Or were they? And one would want to see the credentials of the taxonomist who named the moth, La cucuracha.

In the case of Aha ha (Menke), there can be little doubt about the humorous intent--- the name is on the author’s license plate. Better this for a license plate than his other creation, a sphecid wasp named, Pison eu Menke. There is also little doubt that humor was on McAlpine’s mind when he named a new genus of fly This. The poster on his office door shows the fly, with the statement, “Look at This!”

Word play is another good source for whimsical names. Once the carabid genus Agra was created, it was only a matter of time before there was Agra vation. It may have taken a sharper eye, but Phthiria relativitae (a fly) may have been equally inevitable. Perhaps it was frustration that led Kovalev to the name a “difficult to see” fossil fly Dissup irae.

Vernacular expressions can also be a source: the deer fly, Chrysops balzaphire probably hurts when it bites, and we can presume that the horsefly Tabanus rizonshine is active in the morning. Less obvious is that Tabanus nippontucki was named during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

There is also the predictable battle for first and last in the list. It seems unlikely that anyone will beat out the mollusc, Aa for first place, but the existence of Zyzza, Zyzzyva, Zyzzyx, Zyzzyxdonta and Zyzzyzus suggest that a mighty battle was waged for last place.

Of course there is a police force to assure that this naming game doesn’t get out of hand. Every name must be submitted to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature for approval. Evenhuis originally proposed to name a fossil chaoborid fly, “I” as the genus name. Although this is allowed by the ICZN rules, a colleague who also worked on these flies told Evenhuis that he never wanted to have to write in a paper that “I have small male genitalia”, so Evenhuis changed it to Iyaiyai. On the other hand, Dybowski failed to win approval of the name he chose for an amphipod from Lake Baikal, Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis. I wonder why?

At one time, this playfulness and humor circulated only among taxonomists, informally, like a West African oral tradition. With the advent of the internet, these pleasures have been shared with the world on several websites. If you are a serious taxonomist who has no use for such frivolity, you can always call upon the snail, Ba humbugi to express his opinion.

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Following an educational trend does not always lead to satisfactory outcomes. I should know because I did, and it didn’t. During my college years, the hot topics in biology involved a lot of physiology, bacteriology, and biochemistry, all interesting stuff, especially for a guy who liked to draw benzene rings in organic chemistry. What’s more, the biology department had only seven faculty, and one of them was always on sabbatical somewhere else. As a result, the course offerings were somewhat constrained, to the extent that ecology was taught as a sort of afterthought by an embryologist (great course, anyway). But in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, it gradually dawned on me that if I became a biochemist, I would be looking at flocculent white precipitates in test tubes for the rest of my life, all indoors under fluorescent lights. What kind of life would that be for a barefoot nature boy like me? It was time for a “course correction.”

But what was I to do with all this background in physiology, organic chemistry, and bacteriology? Just abandon it as I laced up my heavy boots to become a pine-cone-kicking field biologist? I began hunting around for biology that would combine my chemistry/biochemistry background with working with real, tangible, creeping, crawling critters that did stuff you could see, touch, and feel. The first inkling that this might be possible was during my senior year at Wesleyan, during a talk by Thomas Eisner from Cornell. With spectacular photos and clever experiments, he showed how insects use chemicals for defense, the biological equivalent of chemical warfare. It was biology at its most dramatic.

In graduate school at UC Berkeley, biology was represented by several departments, a sort of spectrum from mammology and entomology to bacteriology and molecular biology—- plenty to choose from. I attended seminars by outside speakers that promised to be both interesting and not to involve flocculent white precipitates. The most influential among these were talks was by a young professor from Harvard named E.O. Wilson who promised to enlighten us about chemical communication among ants. Perhaps this speaker could set me on a research path involving both live critters and chemistry.

The lecture room in Wellman Hall was about as old-fashioned as you could get. The floors had a very steep rake and the rows of seats curved so that each seat faced the speaker. I chose my favorite location in the balcony that hung over the level below, giving me an almost aerial view of the speaker on the stage below.

Professor Wilson began by asking us to imagine that we were the first explorers on Mars and had discovered a new life form that communicated, not by sound or light, but by emitting puffs of chemicals. While this might be perfectly possible, he said, the trouble was that these creatures could never be more than a few millimeters tall, a claim that he then explained through the laws of diffusion, gas movement, turbulence, molecular weight, and vapor pressure. He then went on to present his experiments on chemical communication in the exotic fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. I was sold. Simple experiments with living creatures and simple materials, involving chemicals.

So I resolved that when I got a real job, I would start doing research on chemical communication in ants. But in the meantime, I would work on the chemical defense and communication of tenebrionid beetles, the topic that Tom Eisner had introduced me to. This was a communication system with much simpler and more compelling messages—- on the one hand, leave me alone or you’ll regret it; on the other, come mate with me, I’m hot to trot. So Tom was one of the two top influences that saved me from a life of flocculent white precipitates.

At a scientific meeting in 1968, I agreed to meet with Tom Eisner to discuss a postdoc position in his lab. Tom asked me to come along with him and his friend E.O. Wilson for dinner. There wasn’t much talk about a postdoc with Tom, but I got to meet Ed Wilson in person, the man who had inspired me to try my luck at ant chemical communication.

My real friendship with Ed began when he visited Florida State University to give a seminar, and I took him out to the piney woods so he could reacquaint himself with the ants of his adolescence. We lay on the ground at the base of longleaf pines and flaked bark down to ground level, revealing one tiny ant colony after another, up to seven species at the base of a single tree. Ed greeted each species like a long-lost friend, reciting their colony life and natural history. His relationship to each of them seemed quite personal and pleasurable, a state I found appealing, and an ability I reached much later in life as I got deeply immersed in ant natural history.

On that field trip to the woods, we discovered something besides ants and an inborn love of critters that cemented our friendship, namely, that we had both spent our youth in the South, Ed in Mobile and several other southern towns, including high school in Decatur, Alabama only 30 miles from my southern home of Huntsville, and we were both fond of the many quirks and idiosyncrasies of Southern Culture. What’s more, we had both been nature boys who spent a lot of exploratory time alone in the woods, building a world firmly founded in experience. Ed had left the South to take the professorship at Harvard, and as much as he valued the high-performing, intellectual, snootiness of Northeastern culture, he missed the South.

It may not easily compute that a German-born, hybrid American like me would bond with a Son of the Deep South over Southern Culture. But there you have it. Even though Ed was ten years older, our memories meshed and our shared love of things biological was obvious. Like many friendships, you can’t quite put your finger on its source, but that is probably true of friendships in general. It helped that I could mimic Southern dialect, and we hooted it up like a couple of Good Old Boys. The Boy Scouts with its Scout Manual full of practical and moral advice had been formative for both of us. We started calling each other Cousin Ed and Cousin Walter as is custom between close friends in the South. Cousin Ed reminisced about collecting snakes and bugs, and sometimes waxed sentimental about such Southernisms as Moon Pies (a near-inedible baked product beloved in the South, but unavailable in New England) and orange Nehi sodas, and of course hush puppies, a delight that the Northeast had not yet heard of before the turn of the millennium.

This mutual understanding came in very handy the second time Cousin Ed came to FSU to give a seminar and to visit with students. As his host, it was my job to introduce him before his talk. By this time, E.O. Wilson was a Big Name in biology, a leading voice in the field of evolutionary biology, the Charles Darwin of our time, it was said. He had written The Insect Societies, more or less my bible, in 1971, and the controversial Sociobiology: the New Synthesis in 1975. He was writing books faster than I could read them, and he never relented during his long life.

Because Ed was already a Famous Man, I needed to explain how I enticed a man of such stature to come give a talk at poor ol’ FSU. I had my props ready. Well, I said, it’s just like fishing—- you gotta use the right bait, as I pulled out a Moon Pie and a bottle of Nehi soda, and a brown paper bag full of hush puppies, explaining that you can tell the quality of the hush puppies by the size of the grease stains on the bag, and these are tops. I gave the floor to Ed, handing him his baits. For once, he said, shaking his head, I’m speechless.

Moon Pies became a running joke between us, to the extent that I modified several photos of Ed to celebrate his nostalgia for this Southern memory. Several of his emails to me ended with: P.S. Send Moon Pies.

I recently reread Ed’s autobiography, Naturalist (written 32 years ago in 1994) and gained a fresher understanding of what had made us friends. Of course there was the fun of being ‘Bama boys, but it helped that I spent most of my research life in the same longleaf pine flatwoods, sandhills, swamps, and creeks of the Gulf Coastal Plain that had kindled Ed’s childhood interest, and was sustaining mine. It also didn’t hurt that I devoted 25 years of my research to the biology of the exotic fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, the ant that Ed, at the age of 14, had been the first to realize was a new species in North America. Mean, aggressive and venomous as it was, it always occupied a special spot in Ed’s heart.

But there was another connection between us— our biological “world view” was built “from the bottom up”, that is, based on intimate knowledge and experience of creatures and habitats, rather than from the “top down” from testing theories or hypotheses. This gave our research a natural appeal to a wider public, and made Ed a larger than life figure. Ed’s youthful explorations gave him an early familiarity with ants and other creatures at the species level and later lead him to wonder how these might form bigger patterns. In other words, how the living world could be explained at higher levels under the guiding light of evolution. Ed was a fearless writer with a legendary ability to synthesize diverse data into new wholes that took him to ever larger and more inclusive scales, from insect societies, to biogeography, to sociobiology, and ultimately human and cultural evolution. He rankled ideologues with his account of human evolution, and he sometimes stepped on the toes of experts in other specialties, making them go harrumph!

So, Ed was the Big Picture Guy synthesizing from the bottom up, and I was the Detail Guy trying to figure out how particular critters worked, what they did, and how they did it. We had both started as Nature Boys, and both had a deep conviction that natural history, not grand theory, was the ultimate well-spring of biology, a point of view we both defended multiple times. This conviction was behind the only paper we ever wrote together. Following the publication of The Superorganism by Bert Hölldobler and Ed in 2008, Ed and I wanted to feature the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, as a model for answering fundamental questions about superorganisms. This seemed reasonable in light of my 25 years of fire ant research and my authoritative book on fire ant biology (The Fire Ants, Harvard/Belknap, 2006).

Our project languished, however, until on a trip to West Florida, Cousin Ed had a mild stroke and was laid up in a hospital bed, probably bored. I guess his conscience was also nibbling at him, so he got someone to bring him his customary lined yellow legal pads and wrote the first draft lying in bed. The paper advocated the pursuit of natural history for its own sake, or as Ed eloquently put it, Telling the Epics of Nature. In an era of molecular genetics and grand ecological/mathematical theories divorced from human experience, we proposed that every species deserves to have its story told, the story of millions of years of persistence.

We wrote, “The naturalist does not ask what problem in biology his subject might solve. He asks simply what the species can tell him.” We used the exotic fire ant to argue that the intense study of this single species has yielded unexpected insights, novel phenomena, and a deep intuitive understanding of biology writ large. “The best discoveries are those neither anticipated by any prior knowledge nor prescribed by any theory. This delightful property has been experienced by countless biologists in many disciplines.” We paraphrased the words of Karl von Frisch: each species is a magic well—- the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw. Science pursued in this older and more everyday human way taps into a shared experience of the world to produce harmony and beauty. It is not the world of flocculent white precipitates that I had fled as a graduate student.

Of the thirty-plus books Ed wrote, only one was fiction, Ant Hill. It follows the life of a young Southerner name Raf, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Cousin Ed. The central story is the conservation of wild places and their biodiversity, a passion of the non-fiction Ed too. Raf’s mentor was a professor at Florida State University that Ed told me was modeled on me (I was flattered, and took it as a sign of approval). He also frequently had me check whether his account of fire ant biology was correct. Having reread Ant Hill recently, it occurred to me that in the novel, the elder FSU professor modeled on me was mentoring the younger man who resembled the real Ed. In reality, it was more the other way around—- the elder Cousin Ed had mentored the younger Cousin Walter. Also on display was Ed’s southern fascination with toxic religion, strange, anti-social men living deep in swamps, and serious violence. In the novel’s denouement, the bizarre, swamp-dwelling Frogman saves Raf’s life by killing his assailants with a shotgun, spilling blood and guts on the floor. Pure Cousin Ed, boy of the South.

Ed’s beautiful writing about conservation and biodiversity earned him a passionate following. I joined him on some of his trips, and waited as he, with endless patience, signed book after book that the rapt fans in line clutched to their chests. I kidded him that he had become a cult figure, a statement that he met with a wry smile. He was a man on a mission, a preacher for the biological world, and he fully acknowledged that facts and figures would not save the biological world—- it would have to be something akin to a religious belief. And who better to understand and promote this view than the Cousin Ed who had grown up in the born-again Southern Baptist church. He ultimately made the audacious proposal that humans should set aside half of the Earth for the living world.

Cousin Ed’s roots were deeply Southern, in a region where his name is a two syllable word, Ey-ud, and folks have a deep devotion to civility and courtesy. His family extends to the early 19th century, and most of his male ancestors had fought for the Confederacy. I once joined him on a trip to the Mobile-Tensaw Delta where he advocated for its conservation (which succeeded). We happened upon a Civil War re-enactment, and in talking to one of the actors, it turned out that Ed knew exactly which regiment was being reenacted because some of his ancestors had served in it.

On another trip to a conference in Mobile, I sought out the address on Charleston St. where Ed had been the first to recognize that the spectacular mounded ant colony in the next yard was new to the USA. Ed’s ancestral house was no longer there, but the site was an appropriate pilgrimage for me in light of my decades of fire ant research. Wandering the harbor of Mobile where S. invicta first came ashore, its Normandy Beach, so to speak, I found a bleak, industrial site in which nature had been beaten to a pulp, so much so that S. invicta no longer found it congenial, replaced by the less particular and more tolerant Argentine ant from the same homeland.

In spite of his many syntheses of important fields of biology, Ed’s heart never left the love for ant taxonomy that I had found so charming during his first visit to FSU. He spent many years on his compendium of the 600 New World species of the genus Pheidole, drawing each species by hand under a dissecting microscope with a gridded ocular. In the early 90s, I had collected a new species of Pheidole in the Mayan ruins of Tikal while visiting my brother in Guatemala. Ed honored me by calling it Pheidole tschinkeli, pretty cool in my book. Sadly, there are always curmudgeons, and one claimed that Ph. tschinkeli was an invalid name because the species had been previously described under another name. There’s a guy that I will never treat to a beer.

One of our very Southern-flavored running jokes was that I was out to assassinate Cousin Ed (oddly, Ed’s taste in mystery and detective novels ran toward the very violent). This began on a field trip in which the leaf-strewn trail down the steep hill was so slippery that Ed slipped and slid until he just sat down to await our return. This was followed by a wade in a blackwater stream where he stumbled and almost went flop into the river. There were many admonitions in which Cousin Ed gave advice on the best assassination methods to Cousin Walter, often involving guns, with or without silencers. But the joke came uncomfortably close to reality at my retirement celebration in 2013.

The celebration began with a day-long symposium about natural history, with Cousin Ed as the featured, lead-off speaker. The place was packed as Ed gave his talk sitting on a high stool. Upon finishing, he started to exit stage right from the platform, but suddenly went wobbly, fell, and hit his head on a corner as he hit the floor. The audience gasped, but what went through my head as I rushed toward the stage (and I am not proud of this) was, O Lord, don’t let Ed die on my watch! Lots of blood, but Ed quickly regained his wits and put on his “just a scratch” act. The emergency med tech patched him up quickly, and whisked him off to the ER for a thorough check.

By the time of my retirement party that evening, Ed was just fine. It was, of course, impossible for either of us to resist making the next installment on the running assassination joke, and both Cousin Ed and Cousin Walter went at it with enthusiasm, as you can see in the picture below.

In his follow-up thank-you letter, Ed wrote “Except for my badly performed finale at the end of my talk, it was altogether a superb event…. P.P.S. On assassination: your current methods are too oblique. Try the Mafia standard method: silenced .22 pistol, two to the head.”

By the time of his death in 2021, Ed had published 35 books, and won two Pulitzer Prizes. All of those books began handwritten on yellow, lined, legal paper, for Ed either could not or would not type (I don’t know which). These literal manu-scripts were transcribed by his lifelong assistant Kathy Horton. Ed’s prose was far beyond ordinary scientific writing, sometimes tending toward the lyrical, as much works in the humanities as in science. My favorite is a slender book of very human, beautiful, lyrical essays, Biophilia, that influenced how I try to write about science in my Substack essays. I try to present science and biology (and life) in a way that speaks not only to the human mind, but also to the heart. I think Ed would have approved.

By the age of 92, most humans are spent shells just waiting for the inevitable, but Ed was still thinking, arguing, writing, and being productive, as he had been all his life. He wasn’t finished yet, and that thought makes me a bit sad. I would like to think that he left behind a yellow, legal-sized, lined pad with the hand-written beginnings of his next book.

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A while ago, Dick Conniff published an essay “In Praise of Being Useless,” stimulating me to write about useless science, to which I have (no doubt) contributed my share. In my experience, biologists can be divided into two camps, those whose science is goal-oriented and useful, and those who are primarily pursuing curiosity (e.g., me). At the goal-oriented end we have those who are feeding the world with hardy stuff, protecting corn or eggplants from insect scourges, curing citrus of its various viruses, breeding better fish to farm, trees to grow, ways to kill ants, or protect cotton from boll weevil. As laudable and important as this research is, most of it is, frankly, boring, because the goal is so limited and the results are mostly so predictable. Because the object is to manipulate nature, it provides little metaphoric food for the soul.

At the other end are those biologist who are, so to speak, curiosity addicts whose goal is simply to see how something works, irrespective of whether the result would be useful, or even important. Of course, whether useful or useless, much research costs money, and those who are curiosity addicts (and there are many of us) often feel the need to justify their addiction by making up stories about how their research is going to be useful in either the long or short run (see Conniff’s eloquent examples). Take your pick from curing cancer to saving the planet, and any number of other slices of baloney in between. Those of us in academia in the USA are lucky that the major funding agency, the National Science Foundation, handed out a lot of grant money without even asking whether the project might prove useful. The reasoning behind this largess was justified with endless stories about basic science that eventually lead to major benefits. In my brother Henry’s opinion, a lot of this money would have been better spent researching something “practical”, rather than “basic.” I suppose he thought I should have figured out how to save slow-witted children and pets from fire ants, but honestly, I was just curious about how fire ants lived their lives. I was thus one of the beneficiaries of a widely shared belief, a belief that Chuck Berry captured so well in the song, C’est la Vie—- “it goes to show that you never can tell.” And of course, all these stories are true—- you really never can tell.

Doing “useless science” is satisfying and fun, and in contrast to Henry’s type of practical science, really does feed the soul as it reveals and connects us to some tiny bit of how the real world works, a thin sliver of the wonders of which we are a part.

Here is just one example of a project that was fun, yet opened a window into the (possibly) unknowable mysteries of the world. The initial observation was made by Awinash Bhatkar, a graduate student working at Tall Timbers Research Station north of Tallahassee. The colonies of the northern fungus gardening ant, Trachymyrmex septentrionalis had the peculiar behavior of piling all the sand from nest excavation to one side of the nest entrance to form a crescent shaped mound, like a barchan dune (see image at the top). Awi noticed that if he wiped away the crescent, the ants built it back in the same location. In my youthful enthusiasm as a young faculty member, I saw that this invited a series of simple field experiments. Only later did I realize that I should have cleared it with Awi first. I did my best to make amends (Awi is a coauthor on the paper).

The first question was simple. Are the ants choosing a celestial or other long range cue? They do not, for the crescents are oriented in random compass directions, and the orientation of one mound does not predict that of its neighbors. However, as Awi had observed, when the mound was removed, the ants continued to dump dirt within three degrees of the same average direction. Removing the mound multiple times did not change the ants’ direction, nor did it change the mean distance at which the soil was dropped (8 cm), or the arc subtended by the crescent (about 75 degrees).

The simplest explanation would be that there were cues on the ground, say, an odor trail or similar. I cleared the site around the entrance, laid down a circular turntable of cardboard with a central hole over the nest entrance. As expected (or maybe not), the ants piled soil in the pre-turntable direction, immediately dimming the odor trail idea. When I turned the cardboard 180 degrees, leaving the mound on the turntable intact, the ants stubbornly built a new mound in the original direction. So the directional cue was neither an odor trail nor a cue in the immediate vicinity of the entrance.

Most nest tunnel openings were not vertical and emerged to the surface at a tilt of about 30 degrees, and most mounds were within eight degrees of this direction. After leveling the area immediately around the nest, I reoriented the entrance tunnel by inserting a nail and changing the angle to one of four directions. Although the ants readily used these altered entrances without modifying them, it did not affect the orientation of the mound.

On slopes, the mounds were generally downhill from the nest entrance. Were the ants just making their work easier? Maybe. So, with a trowel, I strongly reshaped the slope immediately around the entrance to one of four directions so that the burdened ants would experience the new slope immediately as they hit the open air outside the entrance. On the first day, the ants still oriented the mound within two degrees of the original, pre-slope direction, but over a few days, they gradually oriented the mound more and more down the new slope, so that after 20 days, all still-active colonies had oriented their mounds completely downslope. So while the slope may determine the ultimate direction of the mound, it is not the immediate cue by which the ants orient.

What if we eliminate all visual cues? I leveled the area around 30 nests and covered them with large cans. This was not popular in the ant world. All but nine of the 30 nests refused to dig at all, but those that deposited some dirt were disoriented with respect to both direction and distance, and then they too ceased digging, suggesting a line of research I did not pursue. When I removed the cans, the ants went back to their original directions.

Together, these results suggested that the ants were using a distant visual cue. Well, it was beyond my capability to turn the ants’ whole horizon, so I placed a “landmark hat” over each colony. These were cones like coolie hats with an approximately 40 degree arch cut out of one side (see image below). Placed over an ant nest, this gave the ants a very prominent, oriented visual cue that I could change at will. I placed 30 of these hats over nests so that the arch was oriented over the mound I had just removed and the apex was over the nest entrance, and gave them a few days to acclimate. Interestingly, the mound the ants then built under their hats was not necessarily in the direction of the bright arch, and thus not simply a response to brightness. But more importantly, when I turned the hat 180 degrees, 22 of the 30 colonies reoriented their mounds by 180 degrees. Three colonies did not reorient the mound the first time, but did when I repeated the experiment. Thus 25 of 30 nests were using the visual cue offered by the landmark hat to orient while taking the dirt out.

In two cases, I repeated the experiment six times, but the ants stubbornly insisted on retaining their original mound orientation. This raises an issue worth considering. We use mean (average) values to describe things all the time, implying that the behavior, size, color, texture, etc. varies on a continuum, and the mean along with some measure of variability adequately describes what is going on. In this experiment, the measure was the precision with which workers deposit their burdens. But in this case, five of thirty colonies were quite precise, but for a completely different reason than a visual cue, and two of them were extremely stubborn about it, for the test I was using had no effect at all. What might they be doing that made them totally unresponsive to changes in their visual world?

A closer look at the details of reorientation suggested that most colonies were referencing more or less the middle of the open arch (or landmarks visible through it), but one colony seemed to be using the sharp left edge of the cut-out, creating a linear, radial mound rather than a broad one. Turning the hat by a few degrees each of several times created a set of linear, radial dunes like the petals of a sunflower. Another colony that I established in the lab made a circular crater around the entrance rather than an oriented crescent even though they had plenty of visual cues. This colony, along with the “linear dune” colony, and the five non-visual colonies (especially the “refusenik colonies”) told me that it is easy to overlook individuality or to devalue it in the quest to nail down a simple average plus the standard deviation. Standard methods of science can readily produce satisfying answers, but they only answer questions you asked. So far, my colonies have told me how precisely 25 of them used visual cues, and that five did not use visual cues, but what those five were doing could not be answered by this experiment. The five were not on the same continuum of variation. I had asked the ants to dance to my tune, but a quarter of them did not recognize the music.

Over the course of a summer, old crescents get packed down by time and rain, and a new, actively growing crescent often has a radically different orientation. Each old crescent was produced during a phase when colonies were digging new chambers to fill with their fungus gardens (see below). This was followed by periods with little excavation while the brood developed. In many cases, the sum of the summer’s crescents made a complete circle because the workers used a different direction for each cycle, or perhaps a new group of workers began anew rather than continue the direction of their predecessors.

Hiding behind this fun stuff is something much deeper. The crescent mound is not the work of one ant, but of an unknown number of workers within a colony of a few hundred half-milligram workers that have somehow “agreed” on the direction and distance that all will walk before they drop their pellet of excavated soil. The mound is a three-dimensional graph of the probabilities of direction and distance. How did they make this decision? Did they get together in the ant equivalent of a conference room and talk it over? Did one ant make a motion in favor of direction X today, a motion that the group then voted on, and a decision that they then faithfully abided by to the best of their abilities (20 or 30 degrees)? However the decision was made, it remained in force for at least a couple of days, but was gradually modified in the long term by slope. How did the workers gradually alter their group behavior? Did they cast another vote? Did some individuals shift their usual direction gradually, to be copied by others? Was the whole thing based on the random choice of a “first ant”, then copied by all subsequent ants? If so, how did they all agree to use the same visual cue? Or visual cues at all, rather than something else that also required a group decision? Or did they? Can you still believe that ants lack individuality, that ants are tiny robots, that ant colonies are mindless entities?

You might argue that I could have followed up my colony-level study with one that looked at individual workers within colonies, and of course, you would be right. Such experiments would have been much harder, but it is also possible that they would have revealed a level of complexity among workers similar to what I observed among colonies. There could easily be “clueless ants,” or “uncooperative rebel ants,” or “total conformist ants,” and so on. Once again, a simple average would fail to capture the individuality of the ants, with some ants dancing to one tune, and others to a different one, and some not dancing at all. And then there is the obvious question of why did oriented mounds evolve in the first place, given the complex coordination required?

This, of course, is how science works. The molecular biologist and philosopher of science, Gunther Stent described science using the Russian Doll metaphor. Each doll that you open reveals another doll inside. In the real world of science each doll gets more and more difficult and expensive to open, yet there is always another. One of the possible outcomes is that you get tired of opening dolls, and the science approaches an asymptote or limit, or the results cannot be expressed in simple, comprehensible terms. In the end, because science is, above all, “simply” a method of querying the world, there always remains the unknowable, an idea captured so eloquently by H.L. Mencken: “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

As far as I know, my useless study has not (yet) lead to a practical scientific breakthrough that would please my brother Henry. Boar-hogs still have useless tits, but I would like to believe that this study has lit a glimmer of appreciation for how complicated and subtle the living world is. I ended our paper with the sentence, “We are continuing work on this fascinating and unimportant problem.” In the galley proofs, an alert editor had changed “unimportant” to “important,” failing to appreciate my (questionable) humor, but in the page proofs, I changed it back.

Let the record reveal that hope for the usefulness of my study is still alive. After all, you really never can tell!

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Introductory Note: my older brother, Henry (1938-2021) spent 37-years in international development, mostly in relation to tropical forests. He was employed by a veritable alphabet of international and government agencies, working in Costa Rica, Colombia, Tunisia, and Honduras, and was Forestry Advisor to USAID for all of Central America. His most lasting contribution was to head an ambitious international effort in Guyana to develop sustainable forest management on a huge area of pristine rain forest. The following is Henry’s account of an incident during his time in Guyana. I took this story from his memoirs and have edited it to a moderate degree. WRT

Henry: security in Guyana, 1996

Georgetown, Guyana is not an easy place to live. Petty crime is a serious problem, and there is no real ready-made entertainment here, unless you like Kung-fu and movies from India. After surviving years of socialism, Guyana’s shops are just beginning to stock up with consumer goods, usually a bizarre mixture in small lots. Maria’s greatest consumer accomplishment was finding four bags of black beans. She is still on the hunt for the ingredients of tortillas.

Since there is not much to do, a decent house becomes more important. As in any small town, one has to be creative. We actually have had an active social life, partly because people want to check us out. After our first year in Georgetown, we moved into the upstairs of the white wooden, Victorian-style house of Oliver Hinkman. Windows on all fours sides, lacquered wooden floors, shaded by Caribbean style shutters that gave good cross ventilation, a necessity in the muggy tropical weather of coastal Guyana. The front windows faced Church Street with its sparse traffic and the sluggish, murky waters of the main drainage canal. Oliver was a cheerful, hefty black man who inspired confidence. He lived alone, except when his voluptuous girlfriend stayed over. He was a pleasing landlord, always asking, “How yo’ doin’ up thare?” Whenever, we had a problem with the raised water cistern or anything around the house, he would send a workman to fix it. One would never suspect that he had been the head of military intelligence in Guyana under the previous dictatorship. Because he had murdered a man, he had to leave the country for 15 years, only recently daring to return to make a new life here running his bakery. Judging from the stream of sleazy visitors that came and went downstairs he must have been operating more than a bakery.

In Georgetown, people of means, especially expatriates, hired private guards for their homes. In our previous house, we had contracted a company for a night guard. Most were women, dressed in ill fitting, dark blue uniforms and armed with nothing more than a big stick. Usually, if we arrived home late, I would find our valiant protectress sitting on the porch, with her head down on the table. I felt mean arousing her from her peaceful sleep so that we might sleep peacefully that night.

Everyone told us that a guard would not be necessary for Oliver’s house because he was a feared and respected man. However, evidently not all thieves knew this, because one Sunday morning, with the sun already brightening our living room, I called out, “María, did you move my laptop computer?” “Of course not,” she mumbled still half asleep. “Hey, and where is my backpack with the video camera?”

We knocked on Oliver’s door downstairs. He was not at home. We phoned the police. The two policemen seemed efficient. They identified the window of entry, dusted it with a white powder to record fingerprints, asked the right questions and had us sign forms. A total of about US$4000 worth of our stuff was gone plus the priceless information on my computer.

What was most disconcerting was that some of the stolen stuff had been stored under the bed in which we had slept soundly that very night.

Oliver was furious and felt insulted. Someone had intruded into his territory. The next night and every night thereafter, his muscular friend Andrew slept on our porch. Andrew was the goalkeeper for the national football team. María and I marveled at his physique. One day as I was loading a box so heavy I could hardly lift it, he said “Let me help yo’, Mistah Henry”, swung the box onto his shoulder in one smooth motion and set it down gently in the pickup.

With Andrew stretched out like a watchdog on the mattress out front, machete at his side, we again slept peacefully under our mosquito net.

But Oliver’s pride was hurt. He put his intelligence network to work and began to ask around. After all, the market for laptops in Georgetown was exceedingly small at that time (1996). A week later, Oliver pulled up in his car with three other husky black men. Any one of them alone could instill fear. “Mistah Henry, I think we found yo’ computer. Please come along.”

I quickly told María whom to call in case I did not return within a couple of hours. I crammed into the back seat between an imposing man a head taller than I and a brawny chap who took up more than his third of the seat while he caressed a club between his muscular thighs. Their faces were expressionless. Nobody said a word.

We drove into a part of town I had never dared visit. Run-down wooden houses on pilings, the stench of a dead cat floating in the black water of the drainage canal, laundry strung on wires with no hope of drying before the afternoon rains on this overcast day, kids playing ball between the potholes on the narrow, muddy, rutted street. Our car stopped and the tall man walked ahead with a limp. For several minutes, we watched him gesticulate and talk with a young man in a torn, smudged Tee-shirt and shorts leaning on a fence.

The young man approached us and leaned in the car window, “Mon, Oliver, if I had known it was from yo’ place I wouldn’t ha’ bought it.” He invited me to come and get the computer. As the only white man in this completely black space, you can imagine my unease at following this shady stranger though alleys and over boards spanning murky puddles. Only the expectation of recovering my precious computer somewhat alleviated my unease.

“But Mistah, yo’ goin’ to pay me somethin’? I had to pay good money fo’ this thing.”

Of course I would. “How much?” “Thity dollahs.”

We clambered up wobbly wooden stairs and entered a musty room littered with dusty, broken furniture and cardboard boxes. He opened a box in the corner to show me a white laptop computer.

In dismay I stammered, “But mine is black”.

Well, would yo’ like to buy this one fo’ $30?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

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P.S. Editor’s comment, I don’t know if Henry ever recovered his stolen goods.

In Ft. Bliss, living as we did behind barbed wire and under Army guard, almost all of our social life was among the German families and kids in the Annex, an odd slice of Germany in the desert, so to speak. While the men interacted with both American Army and civilian employees during their work, for their families, contact with Americans was rather rare. Within the Annex, there were dinners, celebrations, tea-with-cake, kaffee-klatsches, gossip, factions, kids games-and-or-fights, and car camping trips to a few points north. Even at school in El Paso or in base schools in Ft. Bliss, there were so many German kids that our friendships remained mostly German, and the language we spoke among us and within and between our families was German. Not the least reason was that we lived in a compound surrounded by barbed wire with a guardhouse at the entrance—- not an easily accessible neighborhood for any potential American friends.

But when the Army moved the project to Alabama in 1950, they in effect, turned us loose on American society, expecting us to find and/or buy houses, attend local schools, and shop in local stores. Effectively, this was the real moment of our immigration into the US, or more specifically, into American society. From this time onward, I started becoming a Hybrid American, a slow, shifting cultural mixture of German and American that, bit by bit, year by year, made me into what I am today. In one form or another, it is a common immigrant story, variable and nuanced in its many particular outcomes, often leaving a trail across generations.

The move from Texas to Huntsville was a pioneer-style adventure, an opportunity to tour America along the route. Our father, inspired by the cowboy culture of the American West, modified a two-wheel trailer for our 1939 Plymouth into a sort of chuck wagon and supply transport. Moving a family of five from Ft. Bliss to Huntsville, there wasn’t enough room in the car’s trunk for our baggage, and the cab was stuffed with two parents and three kids, aged 13, 10, and 9. A stop in Balmorhea Springs in west Texas with its huge natural pools, waving algae filaments, and friendly fish was like heaven for a couple of days. A night in a cheap motel in Shreveport, Louisiana as we dodged a hurricane, ratty beds and iron-stained sink did not qualify as heaven for my mother. Maybe the Army paid to have our meager furniture and other possessions shipped to Huntsville, but it couldn’t have made much of a dent in their budget.

The house our father had agreed to buy in Colonial Hills was not yet ready upon our arrival, so we rented a small stone cabin in the Monte Sano State Park outside Huntsville, convenient to walks, woods, playgrounds. It rained almost every day, an unaccustomed pleasure and a sharp contrast with the four almost rainless years in Ft. Bliss. When our house was still more delayed, the builder allowed us to move temporarily into a house down the block.

By today’s standards, the houses of the Colonial Hills subdivision were small, mostly around 1500 square feet, and were prefabricated—- the workers merely assembled the walls, rafters, roofs, and floors that had been brought in by truck. Prefabrication was an attempt to meet the high housing demand of the 1950s. The land had been a farm, as evidenced by the ruins of a house with remaining stumps of columns, but “Colonial” was a bit of a stretch because Alabama was not one of the thirteen original colonies, and Huntsville wasn’t founded until 1805.

Then, as now, a house was not only a place to live, but also a sign of social status and wealth. Colonial Hills was a bit downscale compared to my friends’ neighborhood in the Locust Street area, an area that soon earned the name “Kraut Hill” because of the many German families there (one of my friends once sent a postcard addressed to his parents at “Kraut Hill, Rocket City, USA” and it got there, no sweat). Nevertheless, several of the Germans also settled in Colonial Hills. There were the Poppels down the block, and the Vowes at the other side of the development with their twin daughters Ursula and Gisela (to our amusement, one of their teachers called them Ursula and Gursula), and just up the block, the young Hoelkers with their baby Melanie, whose mother, Anneliese was among the prettiest of the German women.

Our next door neighbors were Herr and Frau Kurs and their three kids, one of them a teenage daughter that still sucked her thumb. The kids formed a string quartet with their father, and their music often lulled me to sleep in the hot summer, window-open nights. When the stumpy Frau Kurs wanted a favor from my father, or wanted to borrow something (which was often), her mellifluous voice would drift into our yard—- “Doktorlein…!” (The English equivalent would be “Doctorkins!,”). I don’t remember if my father made for cover, but he certainly knew what was coming next.

Some of the influences on my hybridization are obvious, others more subtle. Upon arriving in Huntsville, my parents registered me at the East Clinton Street School where I fell in love with my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Thomas. The school followed a classic model of education with a few modern bits thrown in. My German tendency for directness earned me a reprimand from Mrs. Thomas in front of the whole class when, very proud of my knowledge, I corrected her on a point of science in class. I still feel a pang when I recall this incident. It was a learning moment.

What is more remarkable is that from the 5th through the 12th grade, although most of my schoolmates were native-born Americans, I can recall only one native American (BB Weber) among my friends, the rest were all German. Perhaps it is significant that BB’s family was from upstate New York, and thus culturally different and more intellectual than the southern culture in which we were embedded, a culture in which intellectual interests were suspect, and were likely to get you beat up. BB, with his curly red hair, freckles, obvious smarts and lack of a southern accent got him into many fights, and he was a favorite target for bullies (of which there were several). It was gratifying, but certainly not surprising that the two worst bullies were in jail shortly after graduating from high school because they had been running stolen cars from Tennessee to Alabama. High school was certainly an interesting social mix.

Like all high schools, there was a hierarchy of sorts, and in Alabama, as in much of the US even today, athletics was the crucial metric. The old popular song, “My Football Hero” wasn’t far off the mark. This hierarchy of popularity and recognition had its inverse in that anyone with brains and intellectual interests was more or less either invisible or endangered. That was BB Weber’s problem. I think I was luckier in that I was more or less invisible. More interesting is that the “jock” hierarchy was not particularly based on actual ability, but on something much less tangible, including the Old South culture of Huntsville. This also meant a strong class divide, Charles and Bill on one side, and Slick and Fuzzy on the other. One of the skinny German kids, Peter, could outrun and outlast any of the jocks (and did, because they picked on him a lot), I could hit a softball farther, and throw it with more accuracy, BB, Uwe and I could all press our own weight (150 lbs) which the high status jocks could not, and Steve could outlast any of them in a fist fight behind the school. None of this made any difference in who got picked on teams during phys ed class. The same hierarchy made playing basketball in phys ed a total bore because you weren’t ever going to get the ball from the jock ball-hogs. Me hate basketball? Wherever did that come from?

Befriending native American families was a major step in our hybridization. One of the first Huntsvillians to befriend our family was Celeste Steger, a handsome, cultivated Southern lady married to a hearty, man-of-the-earth cotton farmer, Charles. When Charles got too enthusiastic in conversation, Celeste would calmly say, Chaahls, don’t yay-yull. Celeste advised my parents on school and many other local issues and often invited us to their house for dinner and socializing. They had four beautiful daughters that Celeste did her best to marry off to appropriate men (and succeeded), Cherry and Bill being the first, putting an end to my brother Henry’s crush on Cherry.

The Steger’s friends, Foyle and Lily Dubose also became our friends. Foyle was a high school principal who had a (rather large) nursery business on the side. As my parents were always short of money, Foyle convinced my father that a sideline nursery business could help with that problem. Our house was on 1/3rd acre, so I guess that seemed like plenty of room.

And it was. My father’s second entry into the American business world was based on “rooted cuttings”, that is, twigs of popular shrubs such as Pfitzer juniper and Japanese holly that one dipped in “rooting compound” (indole-3-butyric acid), then planted in moist sand under glass and waited until the little buggers had sprouted roots. This process took remarkably little space, and you could root thousands of cuttings in small “cold frames,” which is why my father could run this business on a fraction of our lot. These cuttings, once rooted, were sold to nurseries with more space to plant as “potted liners” where they grew into diminutive bushes in small pots, only to be sold on to still larger nurseries where they became transplantable shrubs, ready for the retail trade for plantings around the millions of new houses that were sprouting all over the US in the wake of World War 2.

The source of the cuttings was largely through pruning the full-grown shrubs in Foyle DuBoses’ nursery, free of charge. My father built the “cold frames” with their beds of sand from salvaged window frames, but there were also “hot beds” in which the sand was heated with buried electric cables to speed the rooting during the winter. Even with the nursery, there was enough room in our lot for a vegetable garden and a small fish pond, all of which served my father’s love of gardening and nature. Not rocket science, but a satisfying shadow of his youthful desire to be a biologist. His passion for mulching the garden made him known as The Mulch King within the family.

The rooted cuttings nursery was fairly labor intensive, and the most affordable labor available was me and my friends on weekends for 50 cents an hour, or our maid’s grandson, Bobo. For us teenager boys, it was sociable and fun, an opportunity to talk and tell jokes. When it came time to ship rooted cuttings out to other nurseries, my father had built a simple “packing shed” from salvaged materials. There we packed the rooted cuttings in rolls of damp newspaper and stacked them in shipping crates similar to the ones that oranges were shipped in, but lacking the fancy, artistic labels on the crate ends. Among my friends, father was known as The Pfitzer King. One summer, a bumblebee founded her nest under the shed’s table, and we had to be cautious about our movements, lest we get stung. Which I once did. It hurt.

Huntsville was, of course, in the segregated South, and socializing with black people was neither allowed, nor possible. My parents had never seen a black person before the black soldiers who were part of the US Army’s German occupation after WW2. Southern schools were, of course, all white, except for the janitors and laborers who were usually black. Much of the inter-racial contact was employer/employee, and so it was for my parents. Mother hired Ophelia Seay as a maid to help her with housework, which, being a German housewife, was pretty intense. Mother and Ophelia developed a very affectionate relationship that continued through letters even after we moved to Connecticut in 1957, and ended only with Ophelia’s death in 1966.

But cultural changes are rarely unidirectional. As the Huntsville Germans were Americanizing, they also “Germanized” Huntsville in lasting ways. Being in the South, Huntsville’s churches were mostly of the southern Baptist and similar protestant flavors, with a minority of Catholic. Very few of the Germans joined the Southern Baptist congregations. Instead, a couple of years after moving to Huntsville, many of them banded together to start a Lutheran church, with the pastor initially in a “missionary” (visiting) role from some more established congregation whose location I don’t remember.

My parents joined this congregation even though my father had grown up Catholic and my mother was non-religious. I guess, like many parents, they thought they needed to expose their kids to this dominant, American social phenomenon, unlike the state-funded churches of Germany. Of course the financial angle was far beyond my role as a kid, but I saw a small envelope with money placed into the “offerings” plate as it circulated during each service, and all the members “pledged” a certain annual amount. Our family dutifully went to church most Sundays, but try as I might, I failed to see the light of the spiritual insights I believed I was supposed to have during the boring services. I can still recite the Benediction and Doxology, for what little that’s worth. I was even confirmed and got the highest grade of any of the boys. I don’t think I was the only family member who went to church out of obligation. My parents starting designating one or the other of them to attend with us kids, but eventually, we began missing Sundays and bit by bit, and the Era of Tschinkel Church Attendance fizzled.

The congregation bought a former funeral home, and added a steeple to make it look more like a church and less like a funeral home, calling it St. Marks Evangelical Lutheran Church. It helped to remove the embalming equipment from the basement to make space for more appealing activities like Luther League and Boy Scout meetings, as well as dances and get-togethers for the congregation’s children (which included me). Embalming tables would have spoiled the ambiance for teenage dances (how can I be so sure of that?), which occurred regularly. There were bible study classes and Sunday school classes, but for me, enough was enough.

I did not see some of the changes the German presence brought to Huntsville take full shape, including the formation of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, many of whose musicians came from the German families, the founding of the Huntsville Astronomy Club and Observatory with its hand-ground mirror, and the beginnings of a branch of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, today a major part of Alabama’s higher education system.

Much of this happened after my family had moved away to Connecticut in 1957. As a result of this move, I entered the final phase of my Becoming an American, for none of my friends in Connecticut were German, and all conversation was in English (except at home). In Hamden High School, brainy and intellectual kids did not get picked on or beat up, jocks were not the top of the hierarchy, all of my friends were college-bound, and as far as I know, nobody in the school was running stolen cars across state lines.

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To look upon the annuals in this wash, is to ponder life’s capriciousness, for their size, including Phacelia’s, varies from tiny single-stemmed, single flowered dwarfs to multi-branched giants (relatively) blooming luxuriously. Luck plays its tricks at every stage--- which particular genes have found their way into the ovule during meiosis, which genes were delivered to the ovule in the pollen nucleus, not to mention the luck of having an insect provide pollen at all. Then comes the luck of escaping being a caterpillar’s lunch or a bruchid’s dinner, followed by the luck of exactly where the seed falls to ground. And here luck is multiplied by luck, for particular combinations of genes from both the ovule and the pollen suit the seed better for some kinds of ground rather than others, and this is multiplied again by the luck of a rainstorm at just the right time. So luck multiplied again and again by luck means that some plants grow to large size and others remain stunted or even die. The unfairness of this is that, as in human society, affluence is heritable, and luck echoes down to the next generation and beyond, for large plants are more attractive to pollinators and produce lots of seeds and many offspring in the next generation, and small plants do not. Is it possible to reverse one’s fortunes, whether human or plant? I suppose so. Moreover, by definition luck is capricious, and attributes that are lucky one year may be unlucky the next. The luck of plants, like the luck of humans can propel them into affluence, or sink them into poverty, but the luck of the affluent beats the luck of the poor most of the time.

As I make my way up Flat Cat Wash the walls close in and the stream bed begins to rise steeply, becoming a scramble over boulders with ponds of sand behind them. In a seep near the top of the canyon, just below an impassable rockfall, grows a grove of native fan palm, Washingtonia filifera, a grove that is rarely visited by either people or fire. Reduced neither by decay nor fire, the fallen fronds have been accumulating for decades, and form a thick floor dense enough to walk on (with care), suspended 6 feet above the ground on the tops of hapless, struggling bushes.

Here too, life’s capriciousness reigns, for this grove was established by just a few of the millions of seeds produced by fan palms of the region, seeds delivered by some bird, and falling on this rare permanent seep at just the right time. Just as the grove’s birth was capricious, so will be its future demise when, just by chance, fire reaches it and the accumulated dead fronds explode into a roaring, lethal blaze. But then, the offspring of the sacrificed palms will have a larger draw of luck, for their seeds will be in the right spot to create the palm grove again. No matter how you slice it, you need luck in life.

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Note: This is an expansion of one of my first Found Objects essays in November 2022. I have also added more images.

I like it when the Entomological Society holds its annual meeting in Reno, Nevada, not because the meetings are better, but because I can take a day off from fidgeting during boring talks to drive the 40 miles up to Pyramid Lake on the Paiute Indian Reservation. This desert lake is one of the jewels of the Basin and Range Province, that deranged, stretched piece of Western geology in which narrow, north-south mountain ranges alternate with valleys that have no outlet to the sea, most of them occupied by shimmering beige to white dry lakes. This has not always been so, for as recently as a few thousand years ago, the climate here was cooler and wetter, and many of these closed basins were filled with bona fide lakes. The Pleistocene ancestor of today’s Pyramid Lake, Lake Lahontan, occupied most of what is now northwestern Nevada.

It would not be fair to say that this arid region is currently without charm, but in my imagination, open woodlands surrounding dozens of large, blue, deep lakes have a milder, softer charm than today’s austere landscape. Over the last 10,000 years, most of these lakes have dried first into puddles, then marshes, then dry lake beds that emit billows of alkali dust on windy days, but after rare heavy rains, hold short-lived lakes a few inches deep, swarming with brine shrimp. Pyramid Lake still survives as a brackish lake because the Truckee River delivers water from the Sierra Nevada, but it too is shrinking because of water diversion from the river.

From the hilltop, the lake shimmers glacial-ice blue surrounded by brown, beige and black mountains. Here and there, temporary streams descend from the surrounding mountains to sustain scattered groves of huge willows and cottonwoods, sheltered, secret refuges from the vast sagebrush flats that surround them. The willows are yellow in the autumn cold, their brown rugose trunks bent and leaning, some parallel with the ground.

But the unique charms of Pyramid Lake require a closer look and more knowledge. Stroll the quarter mile from the willow grove to the water’s edge and you might easily miss the gravelly-sandy strips running parallel to the lakeshore ahead. Scrape up a handful of this material to see that it consists largely of tiny snail shells (see top image). Turn around to look back and you might spot more such strips behind you, and farther still, you will see them climb step by step, strictly parallel and level up the foot of the mountains. Once you understand that the snail shells in your hand are aquatic, you will have an epiphany--- the strips are rings around the drying Pyramid Lake bathtub, old wave-cut beaches from when the water stood higher and snails thrived where there is now only rabbit brush and sage brush. To walk away from the lake, from old beach to older beach is to walk through centuries and then millennia.

With this knowledge, the odd, scattered “towers” that dot what was once the lake bed ask for attention. Some are as upright as chimneys, some broken and fallen, revealing a dramatic radial internal structure, looking for all the world as though these chimneys grew outward from a central core. The outer surface of many appear as though fashioned from pillows. And indeed, these scattered towers are the products of growth, a stone of biological origin called tufa, formed when algae deposit limestone over mineral-laden springs that once opened on the lake bottom, only to be stranded high and dry as the lake receded.

Tufa formation continues to this day, as a stroll on the lake shore reveals. The flow of of mineral-laden water from multiple springs supports limestone-depositing algae as well as strands of sulfur bacteria waving like hair in the stream. Most of the rocks in the lake’s shallows are covered with a film of algae busily depositing pillow-like limestone on their surfaces.

On my desk at home is a bag of snail shells from an old beach half a mile inland from the present shore. Sometimes I ponder--- as beaches progressed landward, which ones are composed of fossils, and which are just made of snail shells? When does a snail shell change from just old to a fossil? And does the fossil gain in intrinsic value and meaning over the original old object? Is time as arbitrary as value?

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A letter from Henry, dated December, 1995. Several months ago I learned that the one-year course for mid-level certificates in forestry was to be taught again at the School of Agriculture at Mon Repos (Guyana), and the school was looking for candidates. I thought it might be good to train some of the Amerindians from the Iwokrama region so that we could hire them later as forest rangers. So I asked Fred, the head of our field operations at Iwokrama, to spread the word among the villages. Subsequently, I received two applications which I sent on to the school.

Then on Friday, my colleague Ivan Welch here in Georgetown asked me how to contact one of the Amerindian applicants because he had won a scholarship to the school, but it was urgent because classes had started a week ago. I told him to send a radio message to the Amerindian village, Annai and to explain that on Monday afternoon we would have three planes dropping off the participants of our seminar in Annai and flying back to Georgetown with 24 empty seats. The student should get on one of these empty planes for a free and quick ride to Georgetown.

When the seminar was over on Tuesday, we piled all 24 of us back on the three 8-passenger Islanders to return to Georgetown, and as the last one to get on, I already had my hand on the door, ready to climb in, when Fred came to say that the scholarship student was standing there in dismay, not knowing how to get to Georgetown to take advantage of his scholarship. As happy as he had been to get the news, it had only reached him that morning, so he had missed the ride on the empty plane.

I did not have an answer. The plane next Friday was full and there were no plans for another flight. Then it occurred to me to ask the pilot whether the co-pilot seat was free. Yes!

Fred explained to the startled would-be student that he could get on the plane. Now or never. Getting a scholarship is not easy for a poor Amerindian boy from the hinterland. Neither is a trip to far-away Georgetown. The boy had no bag with him and no money because he had not expected to go just like that. I waved for him to come. Said they could send his bag on the Friday plane and I would loan him some money. He leaned his bicycle on the fence and got on the plane.

We touched down at Ogle Field outside Georgetown after office hours, so I offered that he could stay at my house until tomorrow when he could report to the school, which includes room and board. Since María is on vacation I improvised supper for the still-startled, timid fellow. I wondered what was going through his mind. He went right to sleep.

Next morning I loaned him a shirt, shoes, socks, towel, writing materials and money and introduced him to a colleague connected to the school who drove him out there. Later I arranged for him to get an Iwokrama scholarship for his incidental expenses. I found out he was doing well at the school.

There was definite job-satisfaction in thinking that maybe some of my simple actions would give an Amerindian from a remote area a boost to his education and his future.

Maybe some day he will work for Iwokrama. His brother does already. He is our medic.

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Introductory Note: my older brother, Henry (1938-2021), was a tropical forester who spent 37-years in international development, working in Costa Rica, Colombia, Tunisia, Honduras, and Guatemala. One of his most successful jobs was to head an ambitious international effort in Guyana to develop sustainable forest management on a million acres of pristine rain forest. The following story is part of this project. WRT

There probably aren’t a lot of people willing to take a job of setting up an organization for sustainable management of a million acres of untouched tropical forest after learning that the original commitment had fallen from $50 million to $5 million, that the forest lay 300 km south of any real towns, that land access was by an almost impassable road, that the legislature of Guyana would have to be convinced to give title to this new organization, and that the indigenous inhabitants of the area were to be important, functional stakeholders.

But that was Henry! Just the kind of sweet little job he wanted…. In two years, he succeeded in putting the Iwokrama International Centre for Rain Forest Conservation and Development on its feet, and it continues to this day to set standards for tropical forest management. Its headquarters are in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, with the Iwokrama Forest Reserve Station in the interior on the Essequibo River near the Amerindian village of Kurupukari (editor’s note on “Amerindian”: the population of Guyana is about half black (African) and half East Indian, i.e. from India, thus the term “Amerindian” distinguishes the small minority of indigenous American Indians from East Indians).

The organization’s mandate was to manage the rain forest not only for timber, but also non-timber forest products and wilderness, and to benefit the regional Amerindians. But there was a problem: malaria infections were very high among the Amerindians, and when Henry accepted the job as the new Director General in March 1995, this was one of the first issues he needed to address.

A brief primer on malaria: the disease is caused by five species of protozoa (Plasmodium) transmitted through the bite of one of three dozen species of female Anopholes mosquitoes. It differs from many of the other insect-vectored diseases because it is, more or less, only a disease of (1) humans and (2) female mosquitoes, meaning that it has no “natural reservoir” outside those two species. This absence of a natural reservoir makes Plasmodium vulnerable to three methods of control (or their combinations). You can (1) cure mosquitoes of malaria (yeah, I know your sympathies for mosquitoes probably aren’t high); (2) you can eliminate mosquitoes as vectors by killing their larvae or adults (including the innocent males); (3) you can cure humans of malaria, eliminating a supply of infective stages for mosquitoes to transmit. If you choose number 3, you are also doing number 1, curing mosquitoes, although that may not be your intention. In practice, number 2, eliminating the vector is usually part of any program.

Here is Henry’s account of the malaria problem in a letter dated April 15, 1995. For us to get to Iwokrama, flying in on a chartered two-engine Islander is the only practical solution. On Sunday morning we landed at the Annai Amerindian village where the Iwokrama Rain Forest Programme Land Cruiser was waiting to take us on the two-hour trip to the base camp at Kurupukari.

The Iwokrama station sits on the bluff above the Essequibo, within view and hearing of the Kurupukari rapids. It has all the basics: dormitories for about 20 people, a kitchen and eating facility, four boats with motors, an equipped storeroom, a fuel deposit and a large roofed structure where the workers hang their hammocks.

The foreman, Fred, who directed the construction runs the place with the help of drivers, boatmen, a cook, a handyman, a variable number of Amerindian workers and a medic. The medic was one of the centers of attention of this trip, because we were accompanied by two specialists from Vector Control who came to work with and train him. The problem is that the huge biodiversity of Iwokrama also includes Anopheles mosquitos and two types of malaria. Malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum can easily be fatal. Since January it has claimed the lives of three children in the village of Kurupukari. Out of the 130 people living in the village, 15 cases of malaria have been reported this year. That is why I made malaria control our first priority.

Mr. Schroom, the head of Vector Control, is an enthusiastic source of information on his favorite subject. I also got to be an instant expert during the week we spent with him and his microscopist. He explained all the precautions which we should take, then proceeded not to follow any of them himself. Every evening until late at night he sat half naked in various places, as human bait for Anopheles, aspirator in hand. Mr. Schroom was trying to find the peak times and places where adult mosquitos were active so as to determine the best times to fog the area with malathion. In four nights he did not get a single bite. He was puzzled. But the habits of these mosquitoes are complicated and dependent on several variables.

In spite of these negative results he did train our medic in the use of the ULV (Ultra Low Volume) sprayer we bought for the camp. Taking blood smears of the camp workers and the Kurupukari villagers brought more clear-cut but unfortunate results: of the 90 smears, 9 were positive. Those individuals were immediately treated with chloroquine drugs. The trick in malaria control is early detection before symptoms develop, so having a microscopist nearby is of vital importance. The problem is that many of those who are sick take the medicine (which is free) for a few days, feel better, and stop taking the bitter stuff. A few weeks later they have relapses.

Mr. Schroom’s solution: station one of his staff with microscope in Kurupukari for one to three months. His job will be to take blood smears periodically and have those who are positive swallow their medicine in front of him every day. This was the only practical way to get the epidemic under control. In the meantime, our medic will receive training in microscopy in Georgetown, so that in a few months Iwokrama will be self sufficient for detection and treatment. In addition, he will spray the insides of houses and treat all mosquito nets and some clothing with an insecticide (Permethrin) that has a long residual effect. Only such an integrated campaign can solve the problem. But it will be a continuous battle because travelers along the road and gold miners will constantly reinfect the area.

On Wednesday we met with the entire village of Kurupukari, including the kids. I had to give a little speech as the new Director General of their Iwokrama neighbor. Malaria did worry them and Mr. Schroom explained what was being done. But the insecurity of their land rights worried them a lot more. Although we can help them with malaria and even with their request for a teacher, we cannot do much about the ubiquitous problem of indigenous people obtaining clear legal documents assuring their rights to the land. As a matter of fact, one of the main obstacles of Iwokrama is that we ourselves still lack a legal framework which gives legal right to the site. Lobbying and applying pressure to get such enabling legislation passed will be one of my most delicate jobs over the next weeks.

When Henry and I visited the Iwokrama station in January 1996, the station manager, Fred, briefed Henry on progress—- malaria at the station and Kurupukari village was way down, thanks to the program begun in April 1995. Every week everyone at Iwokrama and in the village was lined up so the medic could take finger-prick blood samples and do smears for microscopic examination. If the smear was positive, the medic dispensed an anti-malarial medication immediately and quarantined the sick. Because Anopheles are mostly nocturnal, the distribution of mosquito bed-nets had also contributed to the decrease in infections, as did the dusting with DDT powder.

With the success of this approach, the medic began traveling regularly from village to village with his equipment to sample the blood of every person in each village. If the smear was positive, he gave them anti-malarial medication, quarantined them, and checked again on his next visit. Because of the relative isolation of the villages, this simple intervention reduced malaria to low levels by curing both humans and mosquitoes.

In spite of this very encouraging progress during Henry’s time as Director General, malaria is still very much present in the Amerindian villages today, and has recently increased so much that in 2025, the Guyanese government, supported by USAID, announced a renewed effort to end malaria in all of the Amerindian regions in the interior of Guyana. It has been said that the rate of malaria infection rises and falls with the price of gold because the vast majority of cases are among legal and illegal gold miners among whom malaria increased ten-fold between 2014 and 2024. Guyana alone reported about 26,000 cases annually in its interior regions in 2024. Of course, the worker migration associated with mining is not limited to Guyana, but affects all the countries of the Guiana Shield (Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil). Ironically, a Brazilian military crackdown on illegal mining in 2023 spilled malaria over into the Amerindian villages of several countries when displaced workers returned home.

The continuous migration of labor to and from the mines not only brings infections to local communities, but also renews susceptible hosts in the open-cast mines where health care is poor, and conditions favor transmission by Anopheles mosquitoes. The mines are thus a pervasive, regional threat to the health of indigenous and forest-dwelling communities of all of the Guiana Shield countries.

The early successes of Henry’s Iwokrama program did not hold. Perhaps complacency and declining institutional support contributed, but far more important was the greatly increased human mobility and traffic resulting from an expanded road system linking towns, villages, mines, lumber mills, and tourist sites. The earlier relative isolation of the Amerindian villages has more or less evaporated, while malaria-infected humans and mosquitoes do the bidding of that implacable foe, Plasmodium. It will take much more than a medic, a microscope, and some supplies to tame the outbreak this time.

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As an initial ambassador for Frenchness, Étienne did not do his native land a big favor. It wasn’t the French accent that earned him demerits, it was his general scruffiness, dirty, disheveled hair, and superior opinion of all things French. He would shuffle by my open lab door while my graduate student, Dennis, was eating the lunch he had brought from home. Leaning in the door, Étienne would tilt his head back a bit and peer down his nose at what Dennis was eating. What eez that you are heeting, he asked, and then without waiting for a response, he would bend down to lift the corner of the top slice of bread, and add, Heet lookz deesgusting!

This from a guy who seemed pretty casual about washing himself or his clothes and who seemed not to have heard of deodorant. Similar scenes followed at intervals, with Étienne declaring in a righteous voice, Thees Americang food, heet eez too sweet, too sweet. It’s not necessarily that I disagreed, but as an example of French diplomacy, it didn’t fly.

I suppose that he wanted us poor, uncivilized Americans to be impressed by French sophistication in all things gastronomic, but then one memorable day, he came into the lab and said, You know, zeez MacDonald’s ‘amburgaires, zey are nod bad, nod bad!

At around the same time, one of my colleagues at the University of Georgia sent one of his graduate students, a 23-year-old Frenchwoman, down to Tallahassee to collect research specimens in the forest south of town. Vicki and I offered Aurélie abode in our guest room. For three days, she collected in the forest, returning in the evening to have dinner with us. I don’t remember any specific dinner conversations, but to the best of my recollections, they were reasonably intelligent, hospitable, middle class conversations, in other words, normal socializing.

For dinner the evening before she was to return to Georgia, we prepared a nice meal preceded by hors d’oeuvres (hey! those are French words, aren’t they?) that included a French cheese or two. As we were finishing dessert, she said to Vicki and me: You know, you are not like uzzaire Americangs, you are so sophisticated! Vicki and I caught each other’s eye, both of us stunned into immobility by this remark from a woman more than 10 years our junior. Yeah, I thought, we changed out of our animal skins just before dinner, chose not to serve our usual canned beans, and did a quick run-through of Cliff Notes for smart-sounding topics to talk about. It conjured up my brother’s story about his drill Sergeant Nelson in boot camp, who bellowed at his recruits, Don’t be actin’ smart wit’ me! I been further ‘round the world than you been around a goose egg!

The sequel to the Étienne story is that he landed a nice job at a Paris university, and had a productive career in natural products chemistry there. About five years into this, I received an email that he was going to be in Tallahassee and would like to visit me. I wrote back that I would like to see him (I was tempted to make him promise not to bring up ‘amburgaires, but didn’t), and gave him my phone number. Not a word during the week he was in town, but on the evening he was scheduled to leave, there was a message on my voicemail. ‘Allo Waltaire, zeez eez Étienne. I am calling from zee airport. My flight has been canceled and I wondaire eef I could stay at your ‘ouse? Here eez my phone numbaire. Please call me.

I still enjoy picturing him sleeping on an unyielding plastic bench at the Tallahassee airport, an airport deserted of all human souls, especially taxi drivers, after 10:30 p.m.

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The booklet on day hikes in the Anza Borrego Desert State Park suggested I might see desert bighorn sheep (“borregos”) watering at Rattlesnake Spring in the Santa Rosa Mountains, especially in the dry season. Well, it’s a desert, so it’s always dry season, isn’t it? No matter; the prospect of spotting some of these elusive animals was enough to send me on a hike into the Santa Rosas.

There are no trails, and the navigational advice was pretty typical for desert canyon hikes, i.e. inadequate. Park your car at the milepost, it said, then head straight up the alluvial fan for 2.3 miles, enter Rattlesnake Canyon (which, by the way, was one of three canyon mouths visible from the parked car), and proceed upstream for 2.1 miles to the mouth of the 3rd “significant” side canyon. OK, how significant? And 2.1 miles? Why not 1.967? I am not a car with a built-in odometer, rather, I am a biped dodging around boulders, clambering over small rockfalls, diverting around big rockfalls, weaving through catclaw mesquite thickets, treading up stretches of gravel accumulated behind boulder dams, so how far have I gone? In spite of my considerable experience as a blister rust checker estimating distance by counting paces in mountainous terrain, this was no easier, nor was I in a mood to count paces whose number would have meant little anyway.

The instructions went on to advise that, having entered this “3rd significant” side canyon, there is an impassable dry waterfall about a quarter mile up, so just scramble straight up the right slope to the ridge above, and from there you can see the spring and make your way over a couple of small gullies and low ridges.

My idea of “significant side canyon” seems to have been at odds with the guide’s idea, for I ended up climbing all the way up to the ridge at the upper end of Rattlesnake Canyon where I was surprised to find Indian stone circles (but that’s another story). Looking back from this high spot, I saw my error, for about a mile or so back down the main canyon was the side canyon I should have taken. I could see the white scar of Rattlesnake Spring at the head of this side canyon. From my high vantage, it sure looked to me like it was the 2nd “significant” side canyon, not the 3rd, explaining why I was now perched like a vulture on this high ridge. But it had been a hard climb and winter days are short, so I resolved to try again the following year.

Which I did. Only this time, I got the side canyon right, clambered past the impassable dry waterfall up onto the ridge from which I got my first view of Rattlesnake Spring located at the base of a rather friable, white geological layer. It was guarded by a single cottonwood tree, a sure sign of water because its toes must at least be touching ground water. The same water also formed a seepage slope with a generous growth of grasses and shrubs.

Approaching quietly, I hoped to spot a borrego (desert bighorn sheep) or two taking the waters, but that was just dumb human thinking, for I had climbed with an up-canyon breeze at my back, and only a dead borrego would have hung around for me to arrive.

Sadly, one did just that, its remains desiccating in a mesquite thicket. The life of a borrego is not easy, contending as they do with unpredictable water and forage. It is not that rare to come across borrego skeletons, especially of young ones.

Resting from my climb, I was astonished to hear the clear, high pitched, endless trill of a toad’s mating call. A toad? Here on a mountainside in the middle of one of the hottest deserts on the continent, miles and miles from the nearest water? Where could this toad be? Was this a new toad species able to reproduce on a waterless desert slope? Really? A live, singing toad a stone’s throw from the skeleton of a drought-adapted borrego?

My search finally turned up a pool only two or three feet across, overhung by grasses and shrubs, and there was the male toad, singing his heart out. He stopped briefly as I appeared, but soon resumed trilling, as if there were no time to waste. In this sere, desert place, what were his chances of finding a female toad to woo?

Here was a mystery that was hard to grasp. How did he get here in the first place? Was it like the species of pup fish in widely scattered desert springs in the Great Basin that were once connected when the valleys were filled with lakes during the last Ice Age pluvial period? But there was never a lake here, and in any case, this toad’s home was up a mountainside 2000 feet above the valley floor. The area’s climate was certainly wetter a few thousand years ago, but was it wet enough so that this toad’s ancestors could hike and hop their way up seasonal streams to what is now the last vestige of water in the desert?

There is little doubt that when dry spells come, this toad is able to burrow to survive, for toads all over the arid West do this, but could he have crossed the miles and miles of waterless desert to get here? The fact that he is here in this isolated place suggests that he was born here, and that at least in his lifetime, there were female toads around, for he must have had a mother, but of females I saw no sign (but of course, I don’t have a toad’s skills in that regard).

And then it comes to me slowly, what if he is the last toad of a population established in the late Ice Age, a population that, if he cannot find a female, was about to wink out? The last, lonely member of a long line of descendants going back thousands of years in this desolate place… it simply breaks your heart.

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Introductory Note: my older brother, Henry, spent 37-years in international development, mostly in relation to tropical forests. He was employed by a veritable alphabet of international and government agencies and private consulting companies. In the course of his career, he did research and university level teaching in Costa Rica and Colombia, ran a reforestation project in Tunisia, managed a watershed project in Honduras, was Forestry Advisor to USAID for all of Central America. One of his lasting achievements was to set up an ambitious international effort for sustainable forest management on a million acres of pristine rain forest in Guyana. The following account is taken from Henry’s letters and his memoirs. Henry died in Guatemala in 2021. WRT

Georgetown, Guyana, 29 MAR 1995

Hi All,

By 1994, my job with USAID in Central America was moving in directions not to my liking, and I began looking for another job. In November 1994, on the way back from a State Department mission in Surinam, I stopped over in Guyana to check out a possible job that was created when in 1989, the prime minister of Guyana, Desmond Hoyte, at the meeting of the Heads of Governments of the Commonwealth had offered the international community a million acres of magnificent pristine rain forest (named Iwokrama) to be managed as a model of how to do forestry right. Nobody had yet been crazy enough to take the job. Early in 1990, this gift to the international community was followed by a report by a Commonwealth Expert Group led by Dr M.S. Swaminathan, then President of the IUCN, who together with Norman Borlaug, was one of the “fathers of the green revolution.” Together with a Guyanese committee they selected an area of central Guyana for the project. The Iwokrama Mountain Range to the north lent its name to this site of pristine forests, scarcely touched by human hands, representing about 2% of the country’s tropical rain forest. Swaminathan continued on as interim chairman of the Iwokrama board of trustees to begin establishing the institutional, operational, research, communication, and strategic framework for the program. Although the Government of Guyana and the Commonwealth Secretariat had given birth to this project, too many others since then have tried to raise this new creature, with the result that progress has been disappointingly slow, the result of byzantine institutional arrangements without clarity as to who is in charge.

The job on offer has a number of obvious caveats—- political, organizational, and practical. But after my hosts flew me out to the Iwokrama forest 300 km south of Georgetown, I realized this was a forester’s dream, managing a large tract of forest in an innovative way. I was realistic enough to foresee the problems and checked out as many angles as possible in those few days. It was a fateful decision, and after more correspondence and haggling, I finally agreed to take the job.

Contrast is the outstanding characteristic of this new job and of Guyana. What other country is shared about equally between such contrasting races as blacks of African origin and blacks of East Indian origin (India, Indonesia, Malaysia) with a sprinkling of indigenous Amerindians and whites? Where can you find Christians, Moslems and Hindus worshiping side by side? Where can you find a crowded coast and an almost empty interior? The only English speaking country on a continent where all others speak Spanish or Portuguese. A country that is trying to recover from a socialist past and convert to a competitive market economy. A country with hundreds of kilometers of Caribbean shoreline, but no beach. A bizarre mixture!

So, late at night on 6 March 1995, María and I landed at the dismal Timeri Airport that serves Georgetown, a full hour’s drive away on a dark narrow road. The solid rain outside the barred windows of the dingy room in the Tower Hotel did not make a good initial impression, neither did the permeating curry smell in the hotel restaurant at breakfast time. It was not a good beginning.

In spite of my descriptions, María had not expected Guyana to be so backward. The mood improved once we moved into a pleasant guesthouse, then found a huge wooden house and started to equip our new home. María, in spite of her almost non-existent English, made many contacts and scouted out sources of essential stuff, not easy in the primitive economy of Guyana. At the same time, I was under pressure from my new job as Director General of Iwokrama, trying to make contacts and to give some sensible direction to the floundering three ex-expatriate professionals.

As the new Director General of Iwokrama I made two important trips early on. On the first, I flew south in one of those strange box-like military-type planes with about 20 other people, including the Minister of Amerindian Affairs, the Advisor to the President for Science, Technology and Environment who is also one of the members of the Iwokrama Board and therefore a useful ally, plus a bunch of other dignitaries and Iwokrama staff. We flew over almost 300 km of uninterrupted forest to the village of Annai to inaugurate a one-year study by the University of Guyana, financed by Iwokrama, of the ways in which the indigenous people use the forest’s biodiversity and in general how they run their lives and how we could relate to them. There are no people living in the Iwokrama forest, but three small villages are located nearby and use the area for hunting, fishing, gathering and other purposes. The study is supposed to say more exactly what and how much. Since the rights of indigenous people are a hot issue, we could not afford to make mistakes.

After a skimpy breakfast we were escorted into the schoolhouse/assembly hall and I was placed at the table of honor in front of about 200 people and their leaders from nearby villages. Here I patiently sat on a very hard chair for four hours, listening to speeches, including my own, and participating in the occasionally lively discussion which followed. It was only my fifth day in Guyana and here I was already giving talks in Indian pow-wows. I met a lot of the important players in a short time, especially during the lunch which followed.

On the flight back, we flew over unbroken forest for one full hour with no sign of human intervention. About 20 minutes of that was over the Iwokrama site itself. Then the hundreds of islands in the mighty Essequibo River, reflecting the low sun, the color of the gold that is mined there.

The second trip was just two weeks after our arrival. I flew north to London to meet with Sir Humphrey Maud and a very small, exclusive group of leaders of the Commonwealth Secretariat, the organization responsible for the creation of Iwokrama International Rainforest Programme, and one of its important donors.

The Iwokrama organization had been slow to get off the ground. One of the reasons for delay was that they could find no one crazy enough to take on the job of Director General until they ran into me. First, who would voluntarily live in Georgetown? Second, who wants to deal with all these institutions intertwined in a Caribbean tangle? Neither one of these prospects turned me on either, but working in a large tract of virgin forest did. For a long time my dream has been to be involved in managing a discrete forest area, where I could see concrete results. With some luck and skill, this job might actually provide me with some of this kind of satisfaction. But it could also turn out to be exceptionally frustrating.

We met in the Marlboro House on the Pall Mall, formerly a royal palace. My first impressions were a pleasant surprise, but this might also have been due to my usual initial pessimism and low original expectations. During these three days in London, I was surprised by the enthusiasm of the Commonwealth Secretariat for this venture, especially by that of Sir Humphrey. Now, Sir Humphrey is not just a distinguished, charming British gentleman, he is an institution. He is also one of my bosses since he is one of the six-member Board of Trustees. “The bluest of the blue” as someone described him. Inches taller than anyone else, silver hair, aristocratic bearing and that unmistakable body language of one who is used to leading others. Very astute, extremely attentive and polite, a man who likes to “get on with it”. Evidently he earned his reputation, for he was Ambassador to several countries, including Colombia, and now is one of the three Deputy Secretary Generals of the ComSec, as it is affectionately known.

We started with lunch in the Oxford-Cambridge Club where women are still not allowed: Sir Humphrey, a member of his staff, a member of the Board, Luis Gomez-Echeverri from UNDP/NY who had flown over for the day, and myself. This club is so posh that the menu did not even have the prices on it, and fortunately, I never found out what they were. Conversation ranged from the forests of Guyana to international treaties on global warming.

Lunch was followed by a working meeting under the crystal chandelier in Sir Humphrey’s spacious office, together with three more of his staff. In two hours of intense, well disciplined meeting we got the planned business done, starting off with my presentation and including a budget issue and a promise to increase the technical specialists, both of which I had wanted. In London, as in Guyana, everyone was glad to see that Iwokrama now has a director, especially those whose work load I was easing. I felt increasingly nervous about the high expectations. Even though I might be able to handle many of the needed tasks, I cannot figure out where to find the time to do them all.

The next day I faced the same group again, but this time without the assistance of Gomez-Echeverri who only makes himself available in small doses and stood me up for our working breakfast by flying back to New York. That second session got down to more nitty gritty, ended with another two-hour lunch in another posh club, but this time without Sir Humphrey. After that and until late in the evening, Neville Trotz, a Guyanese, gave me inside tips and landmarks for navigating the minefields of Guyanese politics. The snow flurries of noon had turned into a cold rain by the time I walked to the hotel, past Buckingham palace, now without the hordes of tourists.

A three-day work visit does not leave much room for sightseeing, but I managed to do some by jogging to the most famous London monuments on a sunny Sunday afternoon —- Buckingham palace and its mechanical guards, Westminster Abbey, then across the Thames and along the river for a splendid view of Parliament and back over the Westminster Bridge just in time to be under the Big Ben as it struck 4:30. Then Whitehall to Trafalgar Square with its grand fountains and along Piccadilly stopping occasionally to look in music stores. Finally back through the Green Park to the St. James Hotel. Since I was five time zones earlier, sleep did not come until late.

In the meantime I am sitting on the short flight from Port-of-Spain (Trinidad) to Georgetown. Half the plane is full of devout Muslims with long beards, in white gowns and caps. The one in the seat besides me is reading a small book in Arabic. No, he says he is not able to speak it, only read. His parents are from India. He mentions proudly that several of the people in the plane are able to recite the whole Koran by heart. How useful! I wonder what else they could have done in the time it took them to program themselves this way. They are all going to a religious meeting in Georgetown, in the mosque just two blocks from my house, on Church Street, named for several Christian churches further down the same street.

Georgetown, Guyana, Sunday 02 Apr 95

My main job now is to give direction to the Iwokrama Rainforest Programme and its three ex-patriots, one Guyanese professional who manages logistics and seven support staff. A Brit is in charge of the site surveys, especially for soils; an Indian from India is supposed to plan research but so far his proposals are much too academic for my tastes; a Canadian resource economist has a vague assignment which seems premature and impossible.

Then there is Jean Bacchus my devout Muslim secretary who only appears in wrist and ankle length dresses crowned by a white or black headdress which only leaves her face uncovered. She tries to run my life, at least at work! Picky to the extreme. Her main priority in life is to make her boss (and herself) look important. My main priority is for her to save me time. On my first day on the job she tried to convince me that I needed a chair with a higher back to make me look more executive. Her first purchase for me was to adorn the bathroom which goes with my office with one of those horrible fuzzy covers for the toilet seat and water tank, bright blue. We still have some adjusting to do. Oh, Jenny how I miss you!

A heavy burden on my time and a new experience for me is dealing with the Board of Directors that meet twice a year. Two contrasting distinguished personalities dominate the Board, the intimidating Dr. Swaminathan, former Minister of Agriculture of India, winner of the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Agriculture; and Sir Humphrey Maud, the tall, silver-haired and silver-tongued epitome of a British diplomat. The former was not used to having anyone disagree with him. Sir Humphrey was more understanding and I occasionally turned to him with my troubles.

But first, the Guyanese parliament needed to pass a law to create the legal foundation of Iwokrama as an institution. Without that, we could go nowhere. The Chief Parliamentarian Draftsman, a proud, elderly gentleman, who was responsible for actually writing the draft of the law had been turned off and insulted by a former Iwokrama consultant. Somehow, he and I hit it off well together and with the help of Chandarpal, advisor to the President, I was able to convince him to try again.

The office of the Draftsman had two computers, neither one of which worked. He wrote in pencil on yellow legal pads and gave it to his secretary to type. We worked out an arrangement whereby I would copy his drafts into my laptop and send him the printouts a few days later. This gave me the opportunity to discuss each of the articles of the law with him and gradually gain his confidence. After several months of this and reviews by others, upon my return from one of my trips to the Iwokrama forest, I learned that Parliament had passed the law. We celebrated with a big party at our house the next night. This was a major event in the history of Iwokrama and an important accomplishment for me.

We miss a lot from our previous life. We miss our friends, the familiar places. But I was ripe for a change. This seems like the beginning of a real adventure. I feel good about the prospects.

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It’s probably a poor idea for tourists to visit countries that are in the middle of a revolution, but that is exactly what we did in 2011. Not on purpose, of course. We aren’t hopeless adventure-seekers. No, when Vicki booked the brainy cruise to visit North African antiquities, it all looked pretty rosy because Libya, with its fabulous Roman ruins, had recently opened to tourism again. So, we paid our money down, and then sent the rest after it.

Not long after, Tunisia exploded, followed by Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, while Libya descended into civil war. The Arab Spring was on! Every few days, the cruise company changed the itinerary and ports of call. Libya was scratched early on. As one country became too dangerous, another would be substituted, and this continued even while we were underway, wariness always causing us to look back over our shoulders. Sailing by the occasional French warship waiting out at sea stilled some of our worry, but then again, huddling under a naval artillery barrage was not what we had signed up for in the tour package.

Visiting the meager remains of ancient human efforts dispels any notion that the constructs and artifacts of our era will live on to be appreciated by future generations. If that was your cherished belief, this tour would not have been for you. Even when the ancients built with stone, most of what was left is now a pile of rocks, weed-covered pavements, battered columns, rain-eroded walls, and random strews of limestone fragments. Of course, the sad remains of yesteryear were exactly what we had come to see.

And see them we did! From the honey-colored limestone slab monuments of bronze age Malta, each weighing up to 20 tons sheltering statues of nearly spherical fat ladies, to the colossal multi-level Minoan palace of Knossos with its Minotaur and red columns, to the still largely standing, stupendous Roman coliseum in Tunisia, to the remains of Djemila in Algeria, a garden of stumpy columns, weed-covered crumbling walls, dried out aqueducts, its temple of Venus and triumphal arch battered but still standing, its hillside amphitheaters with rain-eroded limestone seats and acoustics that amplified even faint whispers even 2000 years later.

As we zigged and zagged across the Mediterranean, antiquity merged with modernity, as one country after another convulsed in revolution and social upheaval. Dark and labyrinthine souks, complete with snake charmers, alternated with monuments to massacres of thousands of Algerians by the French colonial police and pied noir settlers, followed by lamb roasts in Berber tents, and museums with oh so so many mosaics, and then demonstrations at Cairo’s Tahrir square whose leaders had no plan for what to do next. What could be more symbolic of antiquity than the ancient pyramids of Giza, but their glory is now crowded by Cairo slums laced with garbage-choked canals. The drive from Alexandria to Cairo revealed endless piles of garbage in the desert, mile after mile, unfinished highway overpasses without highways, sure signs of corruption, and on the outskirts of Cairo, unfinished and unoccupied apartment buildings by the thousands. The Egyptian Museum with its hundred of thousands of beautiful artifacts honoring thousands of years of civilization, flanked by the burned-out headquarters of the secret police, now uselessly guarded too late by armored vehicles.

Thus, we came to Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria, once the home of St. Augustine of Hippo and an intellectual capital in the late Roman Empire. As the empire declined, the Vandals laid siege to the city, with St. Augustine cowering inside, praying for help that never came, for the city eventually fell, but not before St. Augustine died. There followed conquest by Byzantium, then Muslims, then French et cetera. Roman Hippo gradually fell into ruin, its stones stolen by locals for their own constructions, its population dwindling and dispersing, or perhaps simply moving to the nearby Muslim city of Annaba.

We wandered among the ruins of Hippo Regius, rampant green after winter rains, speckled here and there with the same Mediterranean weeds I knew from California, only this was their native land. Among these was a lovely flower, Cerinthe major, a member of the Borage family that had clearly not made it to California, its tubular red and cream flowers nestled in purple bracts. A shame, I thought, that unlike wild mustard, star thistle, oat grass, this beauty hadn’t sequestered its seeds in the feed for horses bound for California.

Our wandering took us to the ruins of the old forum, a few standing columns and a half acre of recessed marble pavement under six inches of water, now the domain of singing frogs rather than pontificating Roman politicians. Strands of green algae promised nourishment for the black tadpoles that wiggled like crowds of commoners over the ancient marble, a grand venue for a different creature. The transition from Romans to frogs and honeyworts captures something profound about the nature of the world---- impermanence is permanent and in an endless succession, there is always something else ready to replace what is there. In 2000 years, will our meager remains be any more impressive than those of the Romans?

As St. Augustine lay dying during the Vandal siege, did he sense that his city would one day be occupied not by Vandals, but by frogs? Can we hope that our future ruins will similarly be honored by frogs?

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If you were a plant that was a parasite on the branches of other plants, how would you find your host? After all, you can’t walk or fly, and even if you could loft seeds that drifted on the wind, and some tiny proportion of those seeds landed on your host’s branches, how would you get them to stick rather than heading West on the next breeze? The mistletoes of this world have solved this problem by producing berries that birds like to have for lunch. Well, you say, what’s so unusual about that? A lot of plants have evolved a lot of berries that are eaten by a lot of birds who disperse the seeds thereby. If the birds are migrating, the seeds can end up hundreds of miles from their origin.

And all that is true, but seeds on the ground do the mistletoes (of which there are over 1000 species in the world) no good at all. Many are hemi-parasites on trees and bushes, which means that early in their lives, they photosynthesize their own stuff while they penetrate the skin of their host, but for the rest they suck sustenance from their hosts, even though they may remain green with chlorophyll. Within the plant order to which mistletoes belong, such parasitism has evolved at least five different times.

To make this parasitism work, mistletoe has evolved one neat new wrinkle on the birds-eat-berries strategy. The berry has a coating that, after it has passed through the digestive system of the bird, is very sticky, thus adhering to the branches of trees in which the birds roost and poop. This has been claimed to be “common knowledge” among ornithologists and botanists, although some of them proposed that it was more about when birds wiped the sticky seeds from their bills. The poop route was verified by at least one ornithologist, G.M. Sutton, who had shot an unfortunate cedar waxwing in order to make a study skin out of it, something ornithologists of that time (1930s) commonly did (recall J.J. Audubon of the 19th century?). Sutton wrote:

On skinning it … I was surprised when I encountered more mistletoe berries—indeed what appeared to be only partly digested berries—long before I had removed the skin. These I squeezed, quite unintentionally, from the anus as I was wrestling with the problem of skinning over the tail. The seeds were covered with a translucent pulp so viscous that it stuck first to the feathers (which I was trying hard to keep clean), then to my fingers. I had to wipe my fingers thoroughly in getting rid of the seeds and stickiness.

Sutton goes on to recount that while working under mistletoe-laden trees whose tops swarmed with chattering birds eating the berries, the rain of droppings rarely reached the ground. Curious, he climbed up (who wouldn’t?) to find most of the droppings stuck to twigs and branches, waiting, he presumed, to germinate and parasitize the host tree.

So, the “common knowledge” seems to have been, well… common. Since we all know that birds like to perch in bushes and trees, and we also know that birds can’t help but poop a lot, the sticky, post-digested berries end up glued to the branches, ready to germinate in the next rain and invade the host’s vascular system through structures called haustoria (much like dodder).

You might think that this subject was more or less closed, but a surprising number of research papers on mistletoe, berry-eating birds, and sticky poop have been written. Many identified the various mistletoe-eating bird species in Europe, USA, Asia, and Australia, noting that some feed only incidentally on mistletoe berries and others are so specialized that they are known as “mistletoe birds.” This leads naturally to the question of whether birds and mistletoes have co-evolved like flowers and their pollinators, but also to which birds’ digestions are more effective and/or faster at activating the stickiness, which destroy it, which species of trees are the seeds more likely to stick to (and why), which sizes of branches are more prone to parasitism? How far and how densely do the birds disperse this “mistletoe seed rain?” Are infested trees aggregated in space or random? Some authors pointed out that non-specialist birds clearly provide mistletoe a seed-dispersal service, possibly a mutualism, but mistletoe specialists are less charitable because they limit themselves to areas of high mistletoe densities. They thereby intensify existing infections, with little increase of range, and are better considered “mistletoe gardeners” assuring their own food security for their own gain.

Deserts are not immune to mistletoe parasitism. The desert mistletoe, Phoradendron californicum, is common and conspicuous in the Anza-Borrego Desert of California. Like most mistletoes, it is not very particular about its hosts, occurring on Sonoran desert ironwood, palo verde, catclaw mesquite, and honey mesquite. Their victims often groan under the weight of mistletoe. This load is particularly visible during seasons when the hosts are leafless (as below), because the mistletoe remains green.

A tree’s chances of getting parasitized depend on both bird behavior and the size and architecture of the tree or bush. As Sutton noted, birds especially prefer roosting and feeding in the tops of tall trees already bearing a lot of mistletoe (now there’s a surprise!), so there are more branches to catch the poop drizzle on the way down. Of course, not all poop falls in the “feeding tree”—- removal of mistletoe reduces but does not eliminate the seed rain because some birds fly before they poop.

Catclaw mesquite is shorter than ironwood, palo verde, and honey mesquite, suggesting it might be less parasitized by mistletoe. Moreover, its branches are as spiny as its name suggests, and thus less hospitable to perching birds. In spite of these impediments, the birds of the mountains to the west of the Anza Borrego Desert were particularly busy, because until a few years ago, the cat claw mesquite above 2500 ft elevation staggered under the weight of mistletoe, and many mesquites just gave up the ghost and died. But that was before The Big Fire. Most of the mesquites were reduced to charred sticks, and the mistletoe was converted into water and carbon dioxide.

And whereas the mesquite sprouted vigorously from root stocks, having been through all this fire business many times before, the mistletoe, lacking a presence in the soil, was temporarily gone. Its gradual reappearance depends completely on the service of birds with their sweet tooth for mistletoe berries and their long flight distances. With time, a lot of birds, and a lot of pooping, the catclaw mesquite’s fortunes are gradually declining to where they were before the fire, burdened by ever more mistletoe. You can get rid of your dog’s fleas, but the fleas have ways of finding your dog again.

If I were a mesquite, I would surely be dreaming of the next fire….

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Note: I recently joined a session “for photographers” that made me realize that none of the attending photographers had a clue about how silver photography worked or what it involved. Theirs was a totally digital world. This essay is my response to this realization.

Anyone who has processed silver-based photographs and negatives has at least been exposed (ha!) to something very close to magic. Although the chemistry and physics of this process are well-understood, one would have to be deliberately insensitive not to feel that something magical was happening as an image appeared on a piece of photographic paper in a developer bath under the red light of a darkroom.

The basis of this magic lies in the insoluble, crystalline precipitate that forms when you mix a silver nitrate solution in gelatin with a solution of one or more of the halogen salts —- chloride, bromide, or iodide. The result is a suspension of tiny, light-sensitive silver halide crystals in colloidal gelatin that can be coated on glass, film or paper in the dark, thereby preserving its light-sensitivity.

Although there are photographic processes that produce a direct positive image, the vast majority of silver-based photography first produces a negative of the image from which a positive print or transparency can be made. Until the invention of roll film in the early 20th century, the photosensitive emulsion was coated (in the dark) on glass plates. Nineteenth century photographers traveled with a lot of equipment, often wagon loads, and made the emulsions shortly before they exposed them. Their plates were mostly sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum (i.e. orthochromatic), so the sky, being bright blue, was always overexposed. A major advance in emulsions was the addition of dyes to extend the sensitivity into the red end of the spectrum (panchromatic).

Dried coatings were a major advance in convenience, followed by emulsion coats on flexible rolls of transparent cellulose nitrate film, an invention that opened the era of small, easily-carried cameras that just about anybody could use. The highly flammable cellulose nitrate (gun cotton) was later replaced by cellulose acetate to become “safety film.” Such film, as well as photographic paper could be processed by professional labs or in home darkrooms.

The magic begins in a light-tight box, the camera, within whose lens is a shutter that can be opened briefly to allow a focused image of light to fall on the silver halide-gelatin emulsion on the acetate film in the back of the camera. When a photon of light strikes one of these tiny crystals, it knocks an electron out of its resting place and reduces the silver halide to an atom of chemically active, metallic silver. When a crystal has accumulated four or more such silver atoms, it is “developable,” that is, the entire crystal can be converted into metallic silver with a chemical developing agent to create a tiny black dot on the film. The more displaced electrons in a crystal, the more atoms of metallic silver, and the more chemically-reactive that crystal will be to development. The more light falling locally, the greater the fraction of crystals that are developable, and the darker that spot will be after development. Thus, the light and dark areas projected by the lens form a latent image of chemically activated silver salts (although a negative one) that reliably records the brights and darks as regions of varying silver density.

The relationships among exposure, developer chemistry, time, concentration, temperature, and agitation are so complex and nuanced that silver photography is essentially a “craft,” learned by experience, trial-and-error, communication with similarly focused (ha! again) photographers who trade a lot of “recipes”, aided by the science of the photographic industry.

Among the many choices of camera (at least among the affordable ones), my favorite was the Minolta Autocord, a twin-lens reflex, designed for 70 mm-wide film (2.25 inches). The shutter speed ranged from “timed” (kept open) to 1/500th of a second, and the iris (aperture) ranged from f/3.5 to f/22. The right combination of aperture and shutter allowed just the right amount of light for the speed of the film. The higher the f/ratio, the greater the depth of field in the image. Film was available in a wide range of light-sensitivity (film speed) standardized by an international organization (ISO).

To make films of these various speeds, manufacturers vary the size of the silver halide crystals through “ripening”, a process in which some crystals grow as others get smaller. This increases the film speed, because bigger crystals are bigger targets and are therefore more likely to be hit by incoming photons and to become developable. The downside of faster film, as every photographer knows, is that larger crystals are visible as increased “graininess” of the image, as well as a decreased ability to resolve tiny details. Because I seldom photographed fast action, I always preferred fine-grained, slow film with high resolution, and often used a tripod to allow longer exposures.

Having exposed the film in the camera, the next step is to develop the activated latent image into a visible image. You can’t see this development happen before your eyes, because it must be carried out in the dark. So the film is wound on a reel by feel in complete darkness and placed in a light-proof tank that allows chemicals to be poured in or out. Mine was a stainless steel tank like the one below. Winding the film took some practice, and was harder for 70 mm film than for 35 mm. Messing up meant layers of film sticking together and ending up with undeveloped spots. Aaargh!

With the film on the reel inside the (now closed) tank, you can come out of the dark room to pour the chemical developer into the tank. As I mentioned, crystals with more reactive sites are converted faster into more silver, making the area darker and more opaque. But some kinds of developers act relatively faster on more exposed crystals than on less exposed ones, increasing the image’s contrast, while others act opposite and decrease contrast. In practice, many developers are mixtures of these two kinds of agents, and are part of the craft of photography. Contrast can also be manipulated by particular combinations of exposure and development. Thus, the relationship between developed density (darkness) and exposure depends on both the exposure and the development—- too much or too little of both is possible, hence the detailed instructions that come with each roll of film.

The developer is chemically used up in the process, so if your developer was not fresh, you would need to compensate in time, or overcome the urge to be a cheapskate, and make up fresh developer. During development, it is important to agitate at just the right intervals and in the right way. Why is this important? Film areas that received more light use up developer faster, reducing developer concentration compared with less exposed neighboring areas. Agitation evens out developer concentration over the whole film, or at least that is the intention. Because the unexposed film edges did not use up developer, “edge-burn” (areas of over-development of the image edges) is a common problem. You wouldn’t think that there was an art to shaking or twirling a developing tank, but in fact, too much, too vigorous, or too little agitation leads to less than ideal outcomes.

After the right elapsed time, you pour the developer out of the tank, and replace it with “stop bath”, usually dilute acetic acid. This stops development in its tracks because development requires an alkaline pH. At this point, still invisible in your dark little tank, you have a developed negative image, but it is still embedded in an undeveloped silver halide emulsion that, if it were exposed to light, would darken and ruin your prize-winning photo.

So you pour out the stop bath, and pour in the “fixer”, a solution of sodium thiosulfate (or similar) to dissolve the undeveloped silver halide, leaving behind a silver image on a transparent acetate film. With the silver halide gone (recovering silver from used-up fixer was once a profitable business), you wash out the residual fixer in running water, dry the film, and you have the final negative with the full range of tones from white to black, as below.

You now have a fine negative, assuming that you developed the film with the appropriate developer for that brand of film, at the right dilution, the right temperature and the right length of time, and have agitated the developing tank at just the prescribed intervals and with the right amount of vigor.

Now some math: for a given development regime, density increases with the logarithm of the exposure, i.e. it is related to multiples of the exposure, and is not additive. This is why camera shutters and apertures are graduated in factors of two: f-stops and shutter speeds. Opening the camera aperture one f-stop doubles the exposure. The same is true if you change the shutter speed from 1/60th of a second to 1/30th. Note that if you stop the iris down by one f-stop, but increase the shutter speed by one stop, the product of the two gives the same exposure, i.e. shutter speed and aperture are in a reciprocal relationship.

This sounds like a nice thing because for very dim scenes, you can just expose the film for longer, right? But not so fast! At very low light, film is less sensitive to light than its manufacturer’s rating (“reciprocity failure”), and long exposure will not completely compensate for low light, and will not produce the hoped-for result.

So far, all this complex hoopla has only produced a negative, not the print you want to hold in your hand or show to your Mom. The next magic step converts the negative image into a positive one by projecting it onto a piece of paper coated with a silver halide emulsion. The process is similar to film, but the paper is not sensitive to red light like film, so we can work under red light in a dark room, and watch the image appear on a sheet of photographic paper in a tray of developer. We’ve all seen movies where critical scenes take place under red light in a darkroom, haven’t we?

Negative size is set by your camera and the film it uses, but with an enlarger, the positive print can be made in any size (well, sort of). We now repeat exposure, development, density and contrast to produce a fine print, but because we are working under red light, we can fiddle these conditions by trial and error using test strips of photo paper. This can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if the negative is very uneven, too contrasty, or not contrasty enough. But we can block most or parts of the projected image to darken or lighten parts as needed (“dodging and burning”). Traditionally, one had multiple photographic papers in different contrast grades on hand, but eventually the industry introduced “polycontrast” paper whose contrast grade could be changed with colored filters in the enlarger.

Having exposed the paper to the negative image, we place it in the developer bath until it has reached the desired darkness, or darkening has slowed to a snails pace, then move it to the acidic stop bath, and then the fixer to dissolve the undeveloped silver halides. This is followed by a long wash in running water to remove the last traces of fixer, otherwise your print will yellow or develop blotches. Finally, the print is air dried, or it can be dried on a mirror-polished, heated steel drum to give it a glossy surface. The reward of this long, demanding process is a photographic print that will endure for centuries, recording a fraction of a second of your time here on earth.

But who among us still makes photographs with silver-based film? Except for a few very particular die-hard, nostalgic, or very contrary, photographers, most of today’s photos are “digital.” Many of the parameters and visual outcomes of digital photography are similar to those with silver: the sensitivity to light, contrast, resolution, saturation, reciprocity, and color (which I have not dealt with in this essay) are all factors to consider and manipulate. But whereas the products of silver photography are tangible pieces of film or paper whose images are composed of tiny grains of real silver, the images of digital photography are electrical: quantum responses of millions of tiny photo-diodes, light sensitive transistors, whose output, after arcane computations, is made visible in the glowing phosphors of screens or tiny dots of ink on paper.

But let’s focus on a much broader view. The transition from silver to digital is but the latest advance in over 70,000 years of recording the visual world, a technology that began with drawings scratched or painted with pigments on cave walls, later on animals skins, paper, canvas, wood, accompanied by ever more sophisticated paints and painters who rendered how light registered in their brains or their imaginations, until in the early 19th century, the ability of light itself to produce images was discovered, with silver-based photography dominating the various methods, only to be replaced by electronic blips in the late 20th century.

This evolution of what we can call “imaging technology” over these thousands of years shares an attribute with most other technologies—- it made a task less work, better, easier, faster, more available, more effective, and cheaper (think story-telling, to writing, to printing, to word processing). Also like many other technologies, the pace of innovation tended to speed up. Had I been a 19th century photographer, I would have hauled around a portable darkroom on a wagon loaded with a lot of expensive equipment, glass and chemicals. In addition, I would also have had to feed a horse or mule.

When roll film in small cameras replaced glass plates, anybody could do it, with a lot less equipment and cost. With the advent of happy-snappy cameras with their automatic, electronic exposure and focus followed by automated commercial processing reduced the cost still more, increased the ease, and multiplied the per-capita pictures by factors of ten. Finally, the computed quantum responses of grids of photo-diodes in digital cameras replaced silver (an element that cost real money) with electronic code, opening a world in which floods of billions of almost free digital images blur our vision of what is real and what is not.

Images have played a role in human memory for millennia, from the earliest cave paintings, to the Neolithic rock shelter paintings, to pre-Columbian America, Mesopotamia, Assyria, the classical empires of Greece, Egypt, Rome and beyond. All were records of some approximation of artists’ visions, most of them pretending to have some relationship to reality. With the invention of photography, the artists’ perception and brain were largely short-circuited, and something akin to a frozen moment of reality resulted. What would our historical memory be without photography? How would we imagine the American civil war, westward expansion, native Americans, major wars, world explorations and so on without the record of millions of black and white images? Come to think of it, if photography had existed during the Neolithic Era, how would we imagine its mammoths, mastodons and dire wolves ? But the digital world has begun to thaw that frozen moment of time, creating “moments” that bear little relationship to reality. We hardly have to imagine those mastodons, mammoths, and dire wolves: they already roam among us.

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For Eldridge Adams, 1957-2019, outstanding ecologist and friend

Here’s a news flash: life isn’t fair. One of the more obvious manifestations of this unfairness is the unevenness of the rewards for effort and luck. For example, more than 60% of the wealth in American society belongs to only 10% percent of our citizens, and the top 1% own almost 30% of the wealth.

Such a wildly skewed distribution is a common phenomenon in biology too. Evolution occurs because some individuals in a population contribute a disproportionate number of offspring to the next generation, and evolution takes note of the attributes of these super successful individuals. To the extent that these attributes have some degree of genetic basis, the next generation will be “enhanced” in the attributes associated with that success. Thus, to oversimplify, the “goal” of each individual’s life is to leave more progeny than anyone else in their population. Let natural selection take care of the rest.

In the course of my research on fire ants populations, my colleague Eldridge Adams and I documented that this is very much true among fire ant colonies as well. We had set up a large project on fire ant populations in the cow pastures of Southwood Farm east of Tallahassee. We laid out 12 circular plots, each 40 meters in diameter, and numbered every one of the 1000 colonies in them. Each was identified with a numbered aluminum tag pinned to the ground with a big, rusty nail, a tag that we could relocate with a metal detector if the grass grew over it (which it often did. It was a pasture, after all). Mapping was simple—- with the tape measure pinned in the plot center, one of us walked the tape in a circle, noting the distance of each nest from the center, while the guy at the center noted the azimuth with a sighting compass, thus locating the colony in polar coordinates. You held the compass up to your eye, lined up the target in the ocular, and read the visible compass scale superimposed on your view. Very convenient and easy.

Because colonies grew as well as moved, we repeated these surveys three to four times a year. In the summer, it was hot work out there in the shade-less pastures, and we began to feel sorry for the cows. Eldridge’s wife got him a pith helmet with a solar panel on top that powered a little fan blowing air into the helmet to cool his head. On the first day he used it we began to notice that many of the azimuth readings didn’t agree with our records. It finally occurred to Eldridge that, oh yeah!, electric motors have magnets and the compass detects the earth’s magnetic field, so the motor was giving the needle a nudge, resulting in erroneous readings.

Each time we visited a colony, we also measured the mound diameter and height and from these we computed the mound volume to serve as a proxy for several important biological variables, starting with colony size (number of workers). The mound volume told us the number of ants with about 85% reliability, and for population ecology, that’s good enough for government work. Other important variables also emerged from mound volume—-worker size, and not surprisingly, the number of larvae and pupae. But the critical measure for this essay is the number of sexual ants—- winged males and females—- because these represent the reproductive effort and future of the colony, the measure of the colony’s success in the evolutionary race.

Of course, none of this is static. Colonies have seasonal cycles, they grow or get smaller, they gain or lose territory, they produce sexuals mostly in the spring, and fewer in the fall, and of course, they can die. From evolution’s point of view, it is the lifetime production of sexuals that is a measure of success or failure. The chance that a colony leaves daughter colonies in the next generation depends on producing disproportionately more sexuals in its lifetime (about eight years) than other colonies. At least that’s the simple version that leaves out the effect of age-dependent reproductive success. By mapping and measuring all thousand of our colonies three or four times a year for six years, Eldridge and I, along with a small cadre of reliable field assistants amassed a large pile of data that revealed each colony’s potential lifetime output of reproductives. You can see one form of the data in the map above.

But “lifetime”means that Eldridge and I needed to track colonies from birth to death. But obviously, we began our study with a population of mixed ages and sizes, colonies to which we couldn’t assign an age. Old and young colonies look pretty much the same when you’re strolling through a cow pasture. However, colony biology came to our rescue—- most colony reproduction occurs once a year in the spring through the release of thousands of winged male and female sexuals during mating flights. These mate 100 meters up in the air, the males die, the females settle to the ground, break off their wings and attempt to found their own colony from reserves stored in their bodies. Chances of success are very low.

The few mated queens that successfully founded new colonies in our plots first became detectable as tiny mounds by the late winter or early in the following spring (most of the blue marks and small triangles in the previous figure). We could then track these annual cohorts through their lives, and thus to record age in relation to colony performance, including sexual production.

You might expect that once “born”, a colony would simply grow bigger over the years and produce sexuals in proportion, in other words, that age was strongly correlated to size. And indeed, on average, colony size increased with age, but the variability was very high. Also, colonies that were large at the beginning lost size over the years (on average).

Thus, it is far from true that age predicts a particular colony’s size. By the second year, there was no relationship of colony age to size. But why should there be? The lot of any colony-founding queen, if she survived to found a colony at all, depends of luck. Did she land in the cramped space between large colonies, in relatively unoccupied territory, or in the space just vacated by a colony that died? Is her reproductive physiology in high gear, or did she draw the anatomical/physiological short straw? Does her tiny new territory offer an adequate diet of sugar and insects, or did she settle in a relative desert? Did she mate with a male whose genes contribute well to her reproductive success, or did she mate with an incompatible dud? These, and many other chance events mean that some colonies “perform” at much higher levels, as in the graph below. True, colonies occasionally change “performance” in either direction, but most are stuck with their level for much of their lives, somewhere a stone’s throw from a blurry average.

My previous fire ant research had determined that once colonies are mature and large enough to produce sexuals, they invest about a third of their annual production capacity in sexuals, and this fraction is the same for all mature colonies, no matter what their size. The inescapable math is that colonies that were larger for most of their lives contribute far more sexuals to the future population. A colony’s lifetime sexual production is simply proportional to the sum of the colony’s spring, sexual-producing biomass over its lifetime, and if the colony was large for most of its lifetime, its sexual production was also disproportionately large. In the graph below, I have arbitrarily highlighted (in red) colonies whose lifetime reproductive output is three to five times the average for the population, and five to ten times the median.

Well, didn’t I say at the outset that life isn’t fair? And here we have an example from fire ants that parallels the extremely skewed distribution of wealth among humans. Just as a tiny fraction of people own a huge fraction of wealth, so does a small fraction of fire ant colonies contribute a large proportion of offspring to the next generation. Think of colony size as reproductive “wealth.” The direct payoff for effective competition is colony size, the indirect payoff is reproductive success. In the example below, the red point shows that when you have ranked colonies in the population and summed the sexual production of the lowest 90% of them, you have only accounted for 65% of the sexuals. In other words, the remaining 10% of the colonies produce 35% of the sexuals, and 5% produce 20%. By extension, this is also the approximate contribution of daughter colonies to the next generation. At the lower end, about half of the colonies are destined to contribute fewer than one in ten daughter colonies, but not for lack of trying.

Of course, human wealth is not directly equivalent to reproduction. My point is that the outcome of striving is extremely skewed in both people and ants, and indeed for most organisms, and it is this skewness that drives evolution. What it drives in people is far less clear. Yes, wealth correlates with better health and longer lives, but it is not clear that it delivers greater reproductive success over generations. Maybe, maybe not. Why evolution should favor this human striving is not obvious, but then I’m only an “ant guy” and this is not an ant question.

I started with the theme of unfairness and I will end with unfairness. My colleague Eldridge Adams with whom I collaborated in this work, one of the smartest scientists I have known, died of cancer at the age of 62.

No, not fair at all.

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