In the summer of 1942, thirteen-year-old Ed Wilson decided it was time to begin his research in earnest. I had already made up my mind that I would become an entomologist when I grew up. One of the triggers was that I was interested, and the other was that I was injured.
As a child, he was fascinated by sea creatures. However, one day, as he was catching a fish, the needle-like thorn pierced his right eye. I had no choice but to have the crystalline lens of my eye removed by surgery, after which I had to bring it in front of my face in order to see clearly. Only insects could be observed in that way.
And in the summer of thirteen, Wilson, who lives with his parents in his great-grandfather's dilapidated Mobile, Alabama house, decides to investigate the overgrown land next door for ants of all kinds. rice field. After all, there were only four kinds of ants, so the investigation was finished immediately. But one of them, nearly 80 years later, has become, in Wilson's words, "one of the greatest discoveries of my life, or at least of my boyhood." The ants were new to Wilson—and apparently new to anyone north of Brazil.
Following the Dream of Insect Research
This species is now known by the scientific name Solenopsis invicta, or by the common name fire ants. For us humans, this South American native has a number of undesirable traits. The sting first causes a burning pain (hence the name), followed by smallpox-like pustules.
The voracious ants will eat tree bark, termites, and even the seeds of crops such as wheat and sorghum. They have also been known to kill baby birds, baby sea turtles, and even baby deer.
Also damages harvesting equipment by creating hard anthills. If the nest is disturbed, hundreds to thousands of them will instantly jump out and attack the intruders. Wilson once stuck his arm in a fire ant mound and told a colleague of the pain he felt at the time. "I immediately felt excruciating pain. It was like pouring kerosene on my hand and setting it on fire."
Fire ants were almost certainly brought to the United States in cargo that was unloaded at the port of Mobile. It may have been in the city a few years before Wilson surveyed the vacant lot, but it hadn't traveled very far at the time.
Things quickly changed, however, and fire ants began to expand their range in concentric circles. In 1949, while an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, Wilson was hired by the state's Department of Conservation to conduct fire ant research. Since no one knew much about the species, he was counted as an expert despite being only a teenage enthusiast. Wilson discovered that the ants had already spread westward to Mississippi and eastward to Florida. He later said he was "thrilled" at his first professional job. This job gave him the confidence to pursue his dream of insect research.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Rain of Destruction
By 1953, fire ant distribution had expanded from as far north as Tennessee to as far west as Texas, and the so-called "fire ant wars" had begun. . As a prelude, Mississippi provided farmers with chlordane, an organochlorine insecticide that is effective against a wide variety of insects. Banned for many years, the pesticide had little effect on fire ants.
Next, the US Department of Agriculture launched a campaign to spray millions of acres of farmland with the now-banned pesticides heptachlor and dieldrin. However, countless wild birds, as well as fish, cattle, cats, and dogs died as a result. But the fire ant march didn't stop.
Undaunted, the Department of Agriculture has launched the next battle, vowing to wipe out fire ants with the now-banned organochlorine pesticide Mirex. Then, in the late '60s, more than 14 million acres were sprayed with the endocrine-disrupting Mirex. This is thought to have exterminated native ants that might have been in the way of the fire ants, and instead promoted the expansion of the fire ant's habitat.
While the USDA was raining destruction, Wilson's career skyrocketed. After earning his Ph.D. at Harvard University, he received an offer for a biology faculty position there. At first, the post was for a fixed term, but by the time he was 29, he was already tenured for life.
Wilson considered himself an orthodox naturalist in the tradition of English botanist Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook in 1768. A lover of exploring places unexplored by other entomologists, he spent 10 months collecting ants from New Caledonia to Sri Lanka.
But his destiny took a different path. Wilson became a professional biologist at a time when it was becoming clear that the biosphere was collapsing. Initially unwilling to admit it, he would later become one of the leading figures in the chronicle of the crisis – the birth of America's first great post-naturalist.
E.O. Wilson and James Watson
Wilson, now 92, lives in a seniors' neighborhood in Lexington, Massachusetts. Died December 26, 2021]. Journalist Richard Rose recently published his biography, Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature. Rose, who has authored more than 20 books, including The Birth of the Atomic Bomb, visited him many times and switched to telephone interviews when the novel coronavirus began to spread.
During a visit to Wilson, Rose ran into an old friend, Victor McEllenie. McEllenie, also a journalist, had written a biography of James Watson, a resident of the seniors' quarters who happened to be Wilson's nemesis. "It's a small world," says Rose.
The rivalry between Wilson and Watson was as much more than a turf war in academia. In 1953, Watson and his collaborator Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA—the famous double helix. Three years later, Watson became a professor of biology at Harvard University. Although he was only 28 when he arrived, he was brusque and arrogant to the other 20 or so faculty members of the department. He also said that collecting specimens is a hobby. In the future, a true scientist will study life by examining molecular structures.
The greatness of Watson's discoveries and his arrogant behavior stunned many of his older colleagues. Wilson, who was enrolled at Harvard University that same year, once described Watson as "the Caligula of biology." When Wilson got tenure at Harvard before Watson after receiving an offer from Stanford University, Watson spit out "Shit, shit!" (There is also a testimony that it was a more foul language).
Ultimately, the differences between traditionalists and molecularists were deemed insurmountable, and in a sort of speciation of the discipline, the biology department at Harvard University split in two.
After that, Wilson continued collecting ants. He also used his sabbatical to do field work in Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname. But he was, in his own words, ferociously ambitious and desperate to contribute more to science—more like Watson did.
So I came to the conclusion that math was a hindrance for me. He had never even taken an advanced course in mathematics. Thus, at the age of 32, Wilson took a calculus course, awkwardly lectured, surrounded by undergraduates, some of whom he was teaching.
"There is nothing more romantic than biogeography"
At this time, Wilson began working with a Princeton University professor named Robert MacArthur. MacArthur had all the mathematical skills he lacked. In 1967, they published The Theory of Island Biogeography. What this book tries to elucidate is the birth of the ecosystem on the island. A mystery that fascinated both Charles Darwin and his rival Alfred Russell Wallace.
This book combines field observations with complex mathematical formulas to explain why large islands have more species than small islands, and why islands far from the mainland have fewer than similar-sized islands closer to the mainland. Explain whether only seeds live. Wilson et al. propose that the key to understanding island biogeography is the rate at which new species migrate to (or evolve on) islands and the rate at which established species become extinct. “There is nothing more romantic than biogeography,” Wilson once told author David Quamen.
While Wilson and MacArthur boldly labeled their island biogeography study "theory", it was still only a theory. As a field biologist, Wilson wanted to test this theory in the field. But finding a suitable island was difficult at first. This is because the island must be free of life in order to conduct rigorous experiments.
So Wilson had the idea to take advantage of some of the mangrove islets north of Key West, Florida. Only about 12 meters in diameter, these islets were teeming with insects, spiders and the occasional woodlice. Wilson persuaded the National Park Service to allow six of the islets to be fumigated. And his graduate student, Daniel Cimberloff, now a professor at the University of Tennessee, spent a year observing those desolate islets.
It was a lot of muddy work, but at least it paid off for Wilson. Islets closer to the coast soon recolonized. As Wilson and MacArthur's theory predicts, species diversity rose and then leveled off. Islets farthest from the coast took longer to recolonize, and fewer species eventually settled there—another confirmation of the theory.
Although some of the theories were later dismissed, The Theory of Island Biogeography is still considered an authoritative classic. A paper published to mark the book's 50th anniversary says it remains one of "the world's most influential textbooks on ecology and evolutionary biology."
As many of Wilson's colleagues soon realized, the importance of this theory extended far beyond the actual island. Logging, mining, and widespread sprawl have increasingly carved the world into 'islands' of habitat. The smaller and more isolated the “islands” of forests, tundra, grasslands, etc., the fewer species will end up on them.
Wilson was embarking on a new research project at the time, and was initially less concerned about the possible impact of his research. But when deforestation research began to take place in the Amazon, Wilson said he "became more active" himself. In an article published in Scientific American in 1989, he combined deforestation data and predictions from MacArthur's theory to estimate that as many as 6,000 species disappear from the earth each year. bottom. "This is about 10,000 times faster than the rate of background extinction that occurred naturally before humans appeared," he said.
"Terrifying" Findings
In the same year that Wilson's article was published in Scientific American, a group of insect enthusiasts decided to study several nature reserves in Germany. installed what is called a "Murrays trap". This trap, which looks like a wind-blown tent, is designed to catch almost anything that flies into it.
The Krefeld Entomological Society, or the group, was interested in insect habitats in various types of parks and reserves. Since then, the Society has set up new traps and investigated them every summer. It was basically set up in a different reserve each year, but in 2013 it was collected again at some of the sites collected in 1989. The contents of the trap at that time were incomparably small compared to the time of the first collection.
Over the next three summers, the Society re-collected at additional locations. The results were exactly the same. In 2017, with the help of outside experts, the Society published a paper stating that “total biomass of flying insects” had decreased by 75% in surveyed locations. announced. These lands were exactly the type of places that Wilson's theory was destined to lose.
Still, the findings were shocking. In 2019, another group conducted a more rigorous and extensive study, and the results were even more dismal. In just the last decade, grasslands in Germany have lost an average of one-third of their arthropod species and two-thirds of their biomass (terrestrial arthropods include insects as well as insects). including spiders and centipedes). In forested areas, the number of arthropod species decreased by more than a third and biomass decreased by 40%. Wolfgang Weisser, a biologist at the Technical University of Munich, one of the paper's authors, described it as "horrifying."
Avoiding the End of the Insect Kingdom
Since then, many papers have been published showing similar findings. It has revealed severe population declines of mayflies in the Midwestern United States and butterflies in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and a significant decline in the diversity of caterpillars in northern Costa Rica.
Many species seem to be living without problems—for example, the Spotted Lantern Fly, an invasive species from Asia, was first discovered in Pennsylvania around 2014 and has since inhabited at least 10 states, including New York. ``There is good reason for concern,'' as the preface to a recent special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the current state of the insect world puts it.
Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex, was one of the experts contacted to analyze the data collected by the Krefeld Entomological Society. Like Wilson, Goulson is a naturalist-turned-post-naturalist. He began his research after being fascinated by insects, and is currently investigating the causes of their plight.
「ボルネオ島のぬかるんだ川岸で鉱物を吸うトリバネアゲハの大群や、夜のタイの湿地で何千ものホタルが互いにシンクロしてお尻を光らせるのを見たことがある」と、グールソンはIn his book Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse. 「心から楽しい経験をしてきた。しかし、そんな生き物たちが減り続けているという事実にひどく頭を悩ませてもきた」。
Gulson laments that many people regard insects as pests. Wanting readers to understand how wonderful insects really are, he introduced the ecology of six-legged creatures at the beginning of each chapter.
For example, male earwigs of many species have two penises, and if disturbed during copulation, they detach the one they are using and quickly leave the area. Female emerald cockroaches sting their prey, large cockroaches, into a zombie-like trance. Then, after biting off the tip of the faint cockroach's antennae, pulling the remaining antennae and luring them into their burrows, they lay eggs inside their bodies. Older termites develop a copper-rich protein-encapsulated mantle around their abdomen. If the invaders gain the upper hand in battle, the aged muhei termites will, in effect, self-destruct to defend the colony. This act is called altruistic suicide. The protein then reacts with chemicals stored in the salivary glands to form highly toxic compounds.
Without insects, the environment would collapse
Of course, insects are also extremely important creatures. The majority of the animal species on Earth are insects, and about one million species with scientific names, and perhaps four times that number, are still awaiting identification. (Mei once said, "To the first approximation, all species are insects.")
Insects support most of the terrestrial food chain, serve as the major pollinators on Earth, and also important decomposers of organic matter. Goulson quotes Wilson as follows: "If all humans are gone, the world will return to the rich equilibrium of 10,000 years ago and regenerate. If insects are gone, the environment will become disorganized and collapse."
Like the insects themselves, the threats to insects are many and varied. The first is habitat loss. Since 1989, when Wilson's article was published in Scientific American alone, South America has lost at least 300 million acres of tropical forest, and Southeast Asia has lost The situation is similar for tropical deforestation in South Africa. In places like the United States and the United Kingdom, where deforestation has been going on for generations, strenuous farming practices continue to erode even the hedgerows and weeds that once served as a haven for insects.
For insects, fertilizer use also contributes to habitat destruction, Gulson points out. Fertilizer runoff from fields encourages the growth of certain plants, while hindering the growth of others. The plants that are sacrificed in this way support the ecology of many insects.
In addition, climate change, light pollution, and the presence of alien species are also threats. Varroa mites have evolved to parasitize and feed on the body fat of the eastern honeybee, which is smaller than the western honeybee. But when the European honeybee was introduced to East Asia, the mite changed hosts there and piggybacked on the European honeybee when it was transported to a new location. The mite is thought to have devastated Western honeybees by vectoring diseases such as the Chijirebane virus, possibly wiping out hundreds of thousands of colonies.
In the United States (and many other countries as well), honeybees are treated like small livestock. They are carted back and forth as pollinators for crops such as apples and almonds, and their health is carefully monitored. But how are other bees, and of course ants, beetles, crickets, dragonflies, moths, thrips, and wasps affected by imported parasites and pathogens? "We don't know anything about 99.9 percent of insect species," laments Goulson.
"Carson hasn't won yet"
And pesticides. After the fire ant war featured in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, many pesticides disappeared from the market. However, a number of new pesticides have appeared instead. Gulson is particularly concerned about a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids.
The substance, also called neonics, is in some ways even more toxic than Mirex or Chlordane. After the start of sales in the 1990s, by 2010 more than 3 million pounds (about 1,360 tons) were used annually in the United States and nearly 200,000 pounds (about 90 tons) in the United Kingdom. Because neonics are water soluble, they can run off into soil and ponds and be taken up by other plants. There is also much debate about the dangers to non-target insects such as bees.
In 2018, the European Union decided that the evidence of their harm was compelling enough to ban the outdoor use of three major neonic pesticides (although these pesticides were classified as "emergency It is still used in many European countries under "approval"). Meanwhile, the use of neonics continues in other countries around the world, including the United States. "Carson may have won a war, but he hasn't won the war itself yet," Goulson said.
In the final chapter of Silent Earth, Goulson suggests dozens of actions you can take to "change our relationship with the little creatures that live around us." Among them, he is involved in the maintenance of his home garden, such as "thinking of 'weeds' such as dandelions as 'wild grasses'."
On the other hand, there are some things that reach the scale of the region and the country, such as ``planting wild trees with flowers in the streets and parks'' and ``introducing pesticide and fertilizer taxes''. There are so many suggestions out there that anyone could find something to do if they wanted to, but most of these focus on reducing pesticide use. As the book makes clear, pesticides are just one of many threats facing insects.
Dubbed the "Father of Biodiversity," Wilson has bigger plans. In his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, he argues that to protect the world's insects (and, by extension, everything else) It claims that 50% of the planet must be reserved as an "inviolable protected area." He explains that he arrived at that figure based on the principles of island biogeography -- a calculation that if we saved 50% of the planet, we could save about 85% of the planet's species.
He admits that preserving half of the planet's habitat (many of which will require regeneration) is a very daunting task. But unless you do, it's like turning your back on the world as it continues to burn and growing dandelions. "The only hope for species still surviving is human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem," says the book.