Living World / Unusual Organisms

In the bleak hour before dawn in southeastern Madagascar, biologist Brian Fisher and a team of five field assistants stand outside a grand, but at this moment lifeless, French colonial railroad station. The passenger train will not be running today, due to some quirk of developing-world travel. When the first railroad workers arrive, Fisher consults with them in French and Malagasy, pointing to a roadless site on a topographic map. A few hours later, suitable friendships having been formed, a freight train squeals to a stop at a rendezvous outside of town, a plume of steam drifting back from the locomotive. Fisher and his crew pile tents, machetes, headlamps, mesh sacks, pan traps, cookware, and a basket of live chickens into an empty boxcar, which carries them thumpeta-thumpeta out into the hills. Or rather, THUMPeta-THUMP-eta. These battered old boxcars have no springs. Hanging out the open door, Fisher cannot help grinning, jumping a freight train being a forgotten childhood fantasy. For anybody else, this would qualify as an adventure.

And for Fisher? Among other hazards of tropical biology, he has endured a leech up his nose and nematodes "moving fast" under his skin. He has suffered leishmaniasis—and treatment for it with the heavy metal antimony. Once, in Gabon, he collapsed with malaria. A Bakwele Pygmy woman saved his life by carrying him 18 miles on her back to get an injection. He has posed as a Frenchman among Muslim money changers who had just learned about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And he has been caught in the middle of a war in the Central African Republic. To escape the fighting, he had to cross a river between countries. Border guards picked him up, but he got away from them and joined up with a missionary pilot. Then he persuaded Air France to let him board a flight to Paris without travel documents or a ticket. As he negotiated this feat, he was dressed in blood-smeared clothes and was using a snake stick as a cane because one unshod foot was grossly swollen with elephantiasis. In his other hand he carried a greasy paper bag of barbecued goat meat just purchased from a street vendor because he was starving.

"I'm glad all my work is in Madagascar now," he says mildly, "because the African work was slowly killing me."

Most people would not risk death and misery even for a fortune. Fisher does it for ants. A slight, bearded 41-year-old researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, he has an unstoppable, infectious enthusiasm for ant biology and behavior. He is convinced that if people knew what they were looking at—if they had access to basic information about the ants living in their backyards, not to mention those at the opposite ends of the Earth—they would be as gung ho about them as he is.

STALWART SOLDIER: Cerapachys lividus, whose direct ancestors were underfoot before Tyrannosaurus rex ruled the Earth, is built to pillage the nests of other species. As with all ants, males of the species mate and die, leaving the females to soldier on. Bowlegged, slow, and tough, a Cerapachys forager can drag a giant pupa below her even as would-be defenders lock their jaws around her legs.

All Ant photographs courtesy California Academy of Sciences, April Nobile, Antweb.org

To help make that happen, Fisher has created a Web site aimed at doing for ants what bird-watching guides have done for birds. So far, AntWeb (antweb.org) concentrates on two regions, the United States and Madagascar. But Fisher's ambition is to take Madagascar's ant fauna from the least known to the best known in the world over the next decade. Then he'll use his approach as a model for conquering the planet, with all of the estimated 22,000 ant species on Earth identified and online. Given that only about 12,000 of them have been described since Linnaeus named his first ant in 1758, this is no small goal.

To achieve it, Fisher has become a leader of the movement to change the way scientists collect and describe new species, mainly with the help of computer technology and DNA sequencing. He's known for using any tool it takes to get a job done faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. Once, for example, he went to Costa Rica with a vacuum cleaner, sucked up 500,000 army ants, and brought them home alive to the academy, where he released them in a vast, looping floor-level display case that wound through the exhibition area. Kids could position themselves and watch the ants come thundering down on their prey.

E. O. Wilson, the godfather of ant biology and the conservation movement, calls Fisher's methods "industrial-strength taxonomy." He means it as high praise. Fisher himself says he aspires to the time-and-efficiency thinking of a car manufacturer.

One morning, Fisher kneels on a hillside in the rain, eyes glinting, machete embedded in the soil beside him. His headlamp lights up a patch of tiny white blobs on the base of a tree. The blobs are insects called coccids, which sip sugar from the tree and excrete a droplet of honeydew. Camponotus ants harvest the honeydew for food and tend the coccids like sheep.

"Ants invented herding," says Fisher. "If something were to come in and try to eat the coccids, the ants would pick them up and carry them below to protect them." Camponotus queens flying off to found a colony sometimes carry coccids with them to help set up housekeeping.

The conversation jumps to the genus Melissotarsus, which drills a hole in a latex-
producing tree and lives in a silk-lined tunnel inside. "It's the only ant genus where the adults produce silk. The whole gigantic head is a big silk gland. The front legs have been modified into silk brushes, to pull out silk and stretch it to where it's needed. The funniest thing about this ant is that its middle legs go up instead of down because it lives in tunnels.

 Put it in your hand, and it can't walk."

It's the sort of weird behavior that makes Fisher love ants, and especially the ants in Madagascar, where he has collected more than 800 new species. Madagascar is an island of extreme diversity. "There's a place in the south," he says, "where you can stand with one foot in the rain forest being sucked on by land leeches and the other foot in a spiny thicket with baobab trees and a 12-month dry season."

Located 250 miles off the southeast coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar is also surprisingly large, about the size of France. Fisher decided to focus his field research efforts there in 1992. To make sense of the place in a systematic way, he overlaid geologic maps with bioclimatic maps and listed 130 sites where the combined features promised to harbor interesting ants.

Says E. O. Wilson: "It's not the old style, which I admit I followed most of my life, of going where you can get. Brian laid out a series of sites that he felt were necessary for a complete sampling, and he just got there. That's an improvement."

Fisher and his crew generally travel from site to site in a Toyota Land Cruiser, staying in the field for two months straight in the thick of the rainy season, the best time for ants and the worst time for roads. At one point, when the vehicle got bogged down in an area with no trees for attaching a winch cable, Fisher and his team hiked six miles, cut down some trees, carried them back, dug holes, planted the trees, winched the vehicle 30 feet forward, then dug up the trees, replanted them—and did it again and again for two days.

Among other techniques for crossing flooded rivers, he sometimes attaches ropes to the sides of the Toyota and positions swimmers in midstream. Then he drives in till the water laps the windshield. (Any deeper, Fisher says, risks a rollover.) He shuts down just before the engine floods and waits while the swimmers haul the ropes to the opposite bank and tow. It doesn't always work.

One time, the engine died at night in the middle of a fast-moving river. The water rose. Fisher walked to the nearest village and woke up the headman, who organized a caravan of oxcarts hauled by zebus, the local cattle. The party arrived back at the river at dawn, and the headman stood on the hood of the car crying out orders to the five zebu teams spread out ahead. The car started to move. But the opening in the riverbank was too steep and narrow for the zebus. So Fisher walked 15 miles to a shrimp farm, then bushwhacked back ahead of a borrowed tractor.

"You read these stories about cowboys going all night, and I'm thinking, 'How do they do that?' But you can, when the time comes. We didn't eat for two days, and you can do that too."

Doing it for ants does not strike Fisher as odd. He grew up in Normal, Illinois, the son of a science education professor and a grade-school teacher, both tolerant of his youthful interest in animals (though his mother screamed when a pet alligator joined her in the shower). He came to science intent on discovering new things. As a graduate student, he studied the ways ants and plants benefit one another. But on a research trip up the highest mountain in Panama, it dawned on him that all the plants were already named. "I said, 'What about these ants?' And nobody knew the species, or even the genus." So he spent a year getting retooled in insect systematics. Then, for his Ph.D. thesis, Fisher set out to retool the science he had just learned, testing and revamping techniques at every stage of the taxonomic game.

"These are the magic devices," Fisher announces one morning, as he hangs up lanternlike cloth bags on a clothesline under a tarp. "This is why we are able to go to a place and collect all these things that none of the other collectors saw." A beetle researcher originally developed the device, called a Winkler bag, but Fisher refined it and established the protocol for making it a standard tool for biological inventories.

Here is the protocol: Get down on your knees, machete in hand, and start hacking at the patch of earth directly in front of you. Shovel the resulting hash into an upside-down witch's hat, with a sieve near the brim. Then bounce up and down repeatedly. The soil, which sifts through the sieve to the point of the witch's hat, doesn't look like much.
"You'd never guess that in that brown mess, there are all these beautiful brown insects," says Fisher. "And when you're doing it, you're thinking, 'There's nothing here.' "

The soil then gets carefully measured into mesh sacks and hung up inside a Winkler bag. The Winkler exploits the tendency of soil dwellers to escape by heading down, enticing them into a plastic bag filled with alcohol. Next day, the alcohol has become a tea-colored soup studded with worms, shrimp-like amphipods, and drifting ants, their delicate legs akimbo.

At the same time, yellow pan traps and malaise traps are doing their dark work. The pan traps are disposable plastic cereal bowls filled with soapy water. Ants and other creatures cannot seem to resist climbing in for a swim. Malaise traps are tentlike mesh devices set up along natural flight paths. Flying insects escape danger by moving up, not down. So when insects land on the mesh, the angled ridge of the trap leads them up and over the edge into a jar of alcohol at the top. More soup.

"I like traps that work while we sleep," Fisher says.

Shortly after dawn, he and his crew fan out across a ridge. Like any cost-driven entrepreneur, he has opted to send much of the basic work of taxonomy offshore, where he can train and pay five technicians for the cost of a single one in the United States. "You have to move to where the labor market can support the labor," he says. "And it's also where the biodiversity is, and where you want people to learn about it and appreciate it."

His team, including a former taxi driver, a cook, and a mosquito biologist, have become zealous ant hunters. (Some past crew members have gone on to earn advanced degrees in entomology.) The forest soon resonates with the splintering of rotten logs and the snapping of branches. One worker wraps his fingers under a mat of grass and peels it back, the muted popping of the roots like a string of firecrackers going off in the distance. Then comes the soft pttt-pttt of a "pooter," a pencil-thick rubber hose held between the lips and used to suck up ants. It has a fine mesh screen to divert specimens away from the mouth and into a collecting tube. Off in the distance, someone is flailing away at the underbrush with a stick, collecting everything that falls out on a white square of cloth stretched over a PVC frame and then—pttt-pttt—sucking up the interesting stuff.

The workers stop chasing ants only for their ritual food break every three hours. Even then, they hold up tiny vials to a high window of light in the forest canopy and recite treasures for Fisher to scribble down in his "Rite in the Rain" notebook: "Tetraponera, low vegetation. Anochetus, under log. Pheidole, ex rotten log." When they have finished with this patch of forest, it looks like the aftermath of a vigorous police search, everything upside down and inside out. It will take the ants a week or two to put it right again.