Though he resisted the knowledge at first, later he would become perhaps the most important chronicler of this crisis-the nation’s first great post-naturalist.
#Battle islands achievements professional#
Wilson became a professional biologist just as it was becoming clear that the biosphere was unravelling. But he was fated to follow a different path. Wilson loved to explore places no entomologist had surveyed before, and once spent ten months collecting ants from New Caledonia to Sri Lanka. Wilson thought of himself as a naturalist in the venerable tradition of Joseph Banks, the English botanist who sailed with Captain Cook in 1768. The effort appears to have had the perverse effect of helping Solenopsis invicta spread, by exterminating any native ants that might have stood in its way. In the late nineteen-sixties, more than fourteen million acres were sprayed with Mirex, which is a potent endocrine disrupter. launched itself into a new battle, this time claiming that it was going to eliminate the ants entirely, using Mirex, yet another since-banned organochlorine. Tschinkel, an entomologist at Florida State University, has observed.) Undaunted, the U.S.D.A. (“The research basis of this plan was minimal, to put it mildly,” Walter R. The campaign killed countless wild birds, along with vast numbers of fish, cows, cats, and dogs. Department of Agriculture embarked on a campaign to spray heptachlor and dieldrin-two similar insecticides that are also now banned-over millions of acres of farmland. In an early skirmish, the state of Mississippi provided farmers with chlordane, an indiscriminate, organochlorine pesticide long since banned. He was, he later recalled, “exhilarated” by his first professional gig, which gave him the self-confidence to pursue his insect-driven dreams.īy 1953, the red imported fire ant had spread as far north as Tennessee and as far west as Texas, and the so-called Fire Ant Wars had begun.
Wilson found that the ants had already pushed west into Mississippi and east into Florida. Since no one knew much about the species, the teen-age enthusiast counted as an expert. In 1949, while Wilson was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, he was hired by the state’s Department of Conservation to conduct a study of Solenopsis invicta. The ants began to spread in a classic bull’s-eye pattern. When Wilson conducted his survey of the vacant lot, they had probably been in the city for several years but hadn’t ventured very far. Red imported fire ants were, almost certainly, introduced into the United States in cargo unloaded at the port of Mobile. Wilson once stuck his arm into one of these mounds and described the pain as “immediate and unbearable.” As he observed to his companions, “It was as though I had poured kerosene on my hand and lit it.” When a colony is disturbed, hundreds, even thousands of ants are dispatched, more or less instantaneously, to attack the intruder. They construct rigid mounds that damage harvesting equipment. Red imported fire ants have been known to kill fledgling birds, young sea turtles, and even, on occasion, baby deer. It has a voracious appetite and will consume anything from tree bark to termites to the seeds of crops like wheat and sorghum. Its sting produces first a burning sensation-hence the name-and then a smallpox-like pustule.
Native to South America, the creature has, from a human perspective, many undesirable characteristics. That species is now known formally as Solenopsis invicta and informally as the red imported fire ant.
But one of them turned out to be, as Wilson put it nearly eighty years later, “the find of a lifetime-or at least of a boyhood.” It was a species that Wilson had never seen before nor, it seems, had anyone else north of Brazil. This proved to be quick work, as there were only four species. He resolved to survey every species of ant that lived in an overgrown lot next door. That summer, Wilson was living with his parents in Mobile, Alabama, in a run-down house that had been built by his great-grandfather.
Insects were just about the only animals that submitted to this treatment. The lens had to be removed, and, following the surgery, to see something clearly he needed to hold it up near his face. One day, he jerked too hard on a fish he caught, and one of its needlelike spines lodged in his right eye. As a child, he’d been fascinated with marine life. He had already determined that he wanted to be an entomologist, a choice made partly out of interest and partly out of injury. In the summer of 1942, Ed Wilson, age thirteen, decided that it was time to get serious about research.
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