Scientist, page 2
His days fell into a routine: up at 6:00 a.m.; fruit, coffee, and bread for breakfast at a small French restaurant near his edge-of-town hotel; then off to what he called a “little patch of forest” at Le Chapeau Gendarme, a peak shaped like a French policeman’s cap in a ridge of mountains behind Nouméa, for a day’s work observing and collecting. Reviewing his life many years later, he celebrated his good luck: “At the time I entered college only about a dozen scientists around the world were engaged full-time in the study of ants. I had struck gold before the rush began. Almost every research project I began thereafter, no matter how unsophisticated (and all were unsophisticated), yielded discoveries publishable in scientific journals.” New Caledonia was only the beginning.
The highlight of his exploring there was a climb to the summit of Mount Mau, at 469 meters (about fifteen hundred feet) the third-highest peak in the country. The climb itself, he wrote Irene, was “a stiff little hike, very hot and wearisome,” but at the top he found cloud forest, “a weird and wonderful world of little twisted trees covered with thick moss and epiphytes [air plants], and various weird little plants growing on the moist, mossy forest floor.” Clouds limited his view—he could see no more than fifty feet in any direction—but what he saw was magical:
It was truly a lost world, hardly ever visited by humans, in its primeval state, and utterly unlike any other kind of forest you see in the lowlands. I picked up at least one new species of ant and saw a brilliant green parrot, who sat on a branch about 15 feet away and squawked at me…. In the West Indies this kind of forest is called “elfin forest” because of the funny little twisted, moss-covered trees.
Wilson continued day-collecting in New Caledonia through Christmas and New Year’s, adding to his list of new species and adjusting to the tropics. In Nouméa there were “absolutely no signs of Christmas decorations in the stores,” he marveled. For the French, Christmas was for children, New Year’s for adults. Santa Claus was supposed to arrive by French submarine, but could only muster an old tugboat; he was greeted anyway by an enthusiastic crowd of more than a thousand people, “including many children and fascinated New Caledonian natives and Indochinese and Malayans.” At the American consulate’s picnic on Christmas Day, everyone gathered around as the visiting young Harvard entomologist, whether sober or otherwise he doesn’t say, “tried to climb a coconut tree (nobody else would dare); I got halfway up and pooped out, and came down with only a couple of scratches for my troubles.” All in all, it had been “the strangest Christmas I ever hope to spend.”
Taking a break at the beach one afternoon, he noticed a few of the new bikini-style swimsuits, named after the site of the first postwar U.S. atomic-bomb tests, conducted twenty-three hundred miles north, on Bikini Atoll. He hastened to assure Irene that most “colonial French are extremely conservative in dress and manner.” He dived the reef, using a newfangled “snorkel” and fins, tried to catch a fish by the tail, hoped to see a shark one day, “but none of this riding-on-the-shark’s-back-for-sport for me.” He’d made a crowd of friends; he sent Irene for safekeeping a list of twenty-five names, ranging from three fellow entomologists, two French and one New Zealander, to the secretaries at the American consulate, to the workers at the little French restaurant where he ate his meals, to an Australian filmmaker. From their perspective, he was the exotic.
Early in the new year, investing a week on behalf of both “curiosity and opportunism,” Wilson diverted to what he called “just about the most remote spot on earth which you can reach by the usual airlines,” the island of Espiritu Santo, then an unusual jointly administered British-French condominium, 480 miles north-northeast of New Caledonia. “Santo is the real tropics,” the young traveler informed his fiancée, “and vastly different from New Caledonia. Hotter, wetter, lusher. And a more interesting place I have never seen.” Although the island was only about forty miles wide, its extensive and largely undisturbed rain forest would feed his curiosity; that ants had never before been collected there for scientific study would gratify his opportunism, since every data point he added to his notebook would be new.
Luganville, where he arrived, was the only town on the island, Wilson told Irene, “nothing more than a scattered string of stores & houses, mostly in old U.S. army Quonset huts.” He had arranged through a friend on New Caledonia to stay with a prosperous French planter family, one of the wealthiest of some two hundred families on Espiritu Santo who grew coconuts for their copra (the dried meat, from which coconut oil is pressed).
The Ratards—Aubert and Suzanne and their two teenage sons—welcomed Wilson to their substantial plantation. It was “something out of a storybook,” he wrote, conveniently located near virgin rain forest. “There are 70 natives here in a village next to Ratard’s house; they were brought from the Banks Islands, and though they are very well taken care of and of course completely free, the whole setup is like Tara out of Gone with the Wind.”
A Georgia plantation was an understandable association for a Southerner to make, but the book the Ratards had been celebrated in was a more recent fiction, James Michener’s 1947 novel Tales of the South Pacific, the basis for the hit 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Over dinner one evening, Ratard identified himself to Wilson as the model for Emile, the French planter in South Pacific who falls in love with the American navy nurse Nellie Forbush, and recalled Michener’s visits as a young navy officer during wartime. Michener himself, on a later return, would remember Madame Ratard’s roast chicken and good French wine and “a betel-chewing [Tonkinese] woman with a profane vocabulary [who] struck my fancy and became the character Bloody Mary in my novel.” Ratard, he added gratefully, “got me started as a writer.”
Ratard told Wilson that the real Bloody Mary still lived on a nearby island, Éfaté. Later, the planter walked Wilson down to the shore of his property to show him Bali-ha’i, “across the Segond Channel,” Michener had written, “in real life the island of Malo.” Madame Ratard served the best food Wilson had ever enjoyed in his life, he told Irene, “an experience to be remembered, from seafood entrees to delicious tropical fruit ice cream.”
The Ratards’ sons drove Wilson and a native assistant from the family plantation to the rain forest each morning and picked them up again for dinner and supper. The assistant chopped down trees so that Wilson could study the arboreal ants that lived in the forest canopy—“real rainforest,” he emphasized, “with giant trees, very dark floor, etc. Gorgeous little parrots and pigeons fly around in the treetops, and in the evening flying foxes, giant fruit-eating bats with wingspan about 3 ft., fly leisurely overhead. Flying foxes are considered a delicacy here and Mme. Ratard has promised to serve one up before I leave.” His collecting was going well, he ended the Saturday-evening letter, “new species right & left.”
Monday, 10 January, Wilson worked again in the rain forest, “picking up ants and batting off hordes of voracious mosquitoes and flies.” The insects would drive him “crazy,” he thought, if he had to spend more than a week working there. His first bout of tropical dysentery slowed him down that day; he “quickly drowned it in sulfaguanidine” and it was nearly over by evening. He was learning a little Melanesian Pidgin, the reduced regional language shared between natives and Europeans in an island world where hundreds of local languages were spoken, to mutual incomprehension. Pidgin for “piano,” he’d been told, perhaps facetiously, was “big box he got white teeth you hit he sing-sing.” The funniest he’d heard was the Pidgin for violin: “Little box you scratch him on belly he cry.”
However crazy the mosquitoes and flies might make him, Wilson retained enough wit to generalize from the ant varieties he found on Espiritu Santo to a larger understanding. The species he collected, he wrote later, were “Melanesian, as expected, Solomon Islands most likely, hence ultimately Asian. I made a general observation on the ecology of these insects that would find a place in my later synthesis of island evolution.” He had noticed the relative scarcity of ant species on Espiritu Santo; it was, he realized, “just too distant and geologically young to have received many immigrants.” As a result of this reduced competition, some species had greatly expanded their niches, densely populating “a wide range of local environments and nest sites.” This phenomenon he would later name “environmental release.” It was, he realized, “an important early step in the proliferation of biodiversity.”
Then a real tropical fever laid him low—“clobbered” him, he told Irene, with a sore throat and a temperature of 103 degrees. The fever broke on Wednesday, though he was “still a little wobbly” as he drafted the midafternoon letter. He doubted if he’d get any more fieldwork done, since the weekly flight to Nouméa left early Friday morning. “I’m discovering that ailments of the sort which give you minor distress in the States can knock you out in the tropics. While I was uncomfortably sick two things kept running through my mind,” he concluded gallantly—“You and the music of ‘Swan Lake.’ The thought of you made me feel quite happy and secure.” He enclosed an orchid he’d picked for her. Inevitably, it arrived in ruins, but the thought counted.
Wilson still hadn’t tasted flying fox, the big fruit-eating bat of the Santo rain forest. Locals had collected three of the animals on Sunday, and that evening, Wilson had helped clean them of parasites. Madame Ratard had put the local delicacy on the menu for Monday’s dinner, which he’d missed because of his fever. He tried warmed-over flying fox Wednesday night, but he was no South Pacific gourmet: “It was terribly rank and gamy,” he told Irene, “tasting just about what you’d expect from bat meat, and I couldn’t get down more than 2–3 bites.”
On Friday morning, 14 January 1955, feeling fit again, Wilson caught the return flight to Nouméa. He found a month of Irene’s “beautifully written” letters waiting for him, including a portrait photograph of her that he pledged to keep “sitting in front of me at all stops” and a collection of Li’l Abner comic strips, a favorite of his with its Southern setting and perhaps also its barefoot young hero, a hillbilly Candide.
And then, after a six-hour flight from Nouméa on Sunday, he arrived midafternoon in Sydney, Australia, “settled in a comfortable hotel in the downtown section near the Sydney Harbor Bridge,” and “at suppertime…went out and had my first Chinese dinner in 6 weeks.” (Chinese dinners, savory and inexpensive, had been a favorite of the dating couple in Boston.) The Sydney streets were filled with couples strolling hand in hand on that warm January night of antipodean summer, “and believe me,” he told Irene, “I ached for you.”
The first leg of Wilson’s South Pacific expedition had been a great success. “I mailed off the New Caledonian collection to Harvard this morning,” he’d written Irene on 5 January, “a real treasure house for future research, over 300 separate collections, all with field notes. I estimate I collected a minimum of 82 native species here, of which nearly half are new to science.”
He felt deep gratitude for the opportunity Harvard had given him: “Seldom does a biologist, and especially a young one, get to travel like this to all of the significant rainforest areas. I’m stacking in loads of valuable experience that will temper all of my future research and writing.” He elaborated on that theme later: “Ideas in science emerge most readily when some part of the world is studied for its own sake. They follow from thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence.”
To Irene from Sydney he reported successfully connecting with his Aussie counterparts, both professional and amateur. She had worried that his single-minded intensity could be socially isolating. “I have made friends faster during my Australian visit than ever before in my life,” he reassured her, “partly I think because I seriously wanted to make friends here, as many as possible.” He was, he added, “carrying through my threat to get along better with people.” With its touch of defensive irony, his “threat” sounds more like a pledge his fiancée had drawn from him.
Wilson’s primary purpose for visiting Australia was to find an ant of the greatest rarity, the dawn, dinosaur, or living-fossil ant, Nothomyrmecia macrops,* previously collected only once, in the winter of 1931–32, and never studied in the field. To that end, he would join a trio of collectors in the South Australian town of Esperance on the last week in January, to search the dense mallee-eucalyptus scrub eastward, where the ant had been found two decades earlier.
Ants (and wasps and bees) are believed to have evolved from parasitic wasps, which attack and paralyze hidden prey and lay their eggs in or near their preys’ hideouts as food for wasp offspring. (A more evolved modern form are the familiar mud-dauber wasps, which make the Pan’s-pipes-like mud tubes that show up attached to the exterior walls of buildings. Mud daubers paralyze prey, pack it into tubes to feed their larvae when they hatch, and cap each arrangement with an egg.) It’s easy to see how this behavior might evolve into the more complicated, specialized, and successful group behavior of the social insects, which lay eggs in subterranean channels or tubes of wax or paper and feed the larvae there, but with one or more queens doing all the egg laying, and specialized workers caring for queens and young while others defend the colony or collect food.
Nothomyrmecia, a genus with only one known species, was thought likely to be less specialized than more evolved types; its workers collect prey individually and return it to the colony individually rather than passing it back or carrying it back cooperatively: the dawn ant had not yet evolved trail laying. It was, Wilson wrote Irene, “the most primitive of all ants, and its rediscovery would be an important scientific event. We hope to be lucky enough to study it alive in the field.” If they were so lucky, they’d be far ahead of their most recent predecessor, Wilson’s Harvard mentor Bill Brown, who had searched the area around the town of Esperance and nearby Mount Merivale four years previously without luck. Wilson’s renewed hunt was a good example of his collection strategy: planning broad searches to amass a large number of new species, but going for the rare and spectacular as well when the opportunity arose.
After only a day and another night in Sydney, wasting no time, the eager young entomologist flew on to Adelaide, South Australia’s coastal capital, and from there to Kalgoorlie in the Australian Far West, a total distance of 1,747 miles (2,812 kilometers). Beyond Adelaide, “the vast…Nullarbor Plain over which the transcontinental railroad runs” impressed him, he wrote Irene, “very flat and very brown.” Kalgoorlie reminded him of a small town in Kansas or Oklahoma, pleasant and welcoming. From there he would travel by air and by train almost due south to Esperance, on the south coast, stopping halfway down, in Norseman, “a sunbaked little town,” to look for Nothomyrmecia alone.
But despite Wilson’s best efforts, and those of the three Australian colleagues who joined him in Esperance when he arrived there on 22 January 1955, they found no dawn ants in any of the places where they looked across the next weeks. In the Thomas River basin, their primary search area, they collected both by day and by night, excavated and swept, but Nothomyrmecia eluded them. Another twenty-two years would pass before an Australian team would find and study the rare species, a thousand kilometers (about six hundred miles) east of the Thomas River basin, in October 1977. It turned out to be active during the cool antipodean summer season rather than the hot winter season, when Wilson and his colleagues had sought it.
Returning from Esperance, Wilson serenaded his fiancée with an ode to Australia that celebrated his delight in wilderness:
What a country! Hundreds and hundreds of miles of rough little roads and byways without a habitation along them or even an advertising sign now and then, just tens of thousands of square miles of eucalypt forest and sandplain, from the coast inland to the central desert. Leaving Norseman and heading east, you don’t encounter another human (except for a rare passing car) for 186 miles, when you reach Balladonia, with three or four whites and a few aborigines. Then you can turn south, and go for 150 miles or thereabouts to the coast at Thomas River, passing only one lonely sheep station, whose owner is half aborigine and spends much time bush-roaming and tracking dingos. And this is not desert—most of it is covered with fairly tall timber. No wonder Australia is appealing for more immigrants. It’s great to see at least one country that isn’t overcrowded.
All in all, Australia had been “much more profitable experience-wise than I anticipated,” Wilson wrote Irene on 21 February from Perth, as he prepared to fly north, to the largest island in the Pacific. “But now I’m rarin’ to get to New Guinea, one of the last and greatest strongholds of stone-age man and the primeval forest and my premier destination on this trip.” He might have been traveling backward in time: he’d found no dawn ant in rapidly modernizing Australia, and though he’d looked all over for a boomerang, he couldn’t buy one anywhere.
Australia had administered much of long, bird-shaped New Guinea since 1949 as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea; a last-minute seat on a Qantas flight carried Wilson to its capital, Port Moresby, early in March 1955. He was struck immediately by the less Westernized conditions, he wrote Irene, even in the capital; nearly all the men had “ceremonial scars on their bodies, they stare at you in the street, and (ahem) the women are hardly dressed at all in some cases.” He told his fiancée he expected his fieldwork to be “the most exciting of my life.” The mountains were “real mountains, many towering over 10,000 ft., the forests are vast and primeval and largely unexplored on foot, and the people are almost a nation unto themselves, over a million strong, with many different customs and languages…. Just seen from Port Moresby, New Guinea has a quality of bigness, primitiveness, and natural savagery that I’ve never encountered before. It’s a world by itself, and you could spend a lifetime exploring it…. I think I’m going to like the place.”
