By James Barron
The office where Daniel Ksepka was working was overrun with ants. On the wall above the desk were army ants, bull ants, leaf-cutter ants and turtle ants. On a shelf were two honeypot ants that looked as if they had yellow balloons where their stomachs should have been.
Ksepka, the curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, did not call an exterminator.
There was no need to: None of the ants in the office were real. The ones on the wall were drawings. The honeypot ants were plastic models made on the museum’s 3D printer in preparation for an exhibition called ‘Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives’ that will open Nov. 13.
“I love ants,” Ksepka said. “They keep the world running.”
Let him count the ways.
“They are architects,” he said. “They are farmers.” They construct elaborate nests, stockpile food and tend fungal gardens. Some harvester ants in East Africa even collect bones — the remains of birds, lizards and pygmy mice. Some can snap their jaws shut in one-tenth of a millisecond.
But the ones waiting to ruin a picnic or parade across the kitchen floor are usually harmless. “If you take the food away, they’ll go away,” he said.
Almost every ant in ‘Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives’ is female. “We show a couple of males, but they’re kind of boring because, in almost every species, it’s like, ‘I mate, I die’.” The males have wings and fly off, hoping to mate with a queen. “Whether they do or not, that’s it,” he said. “They die within days or even hours after what is known as the nuptial flight.”
And there are many more ants than you will ever see crawling around your apartment or yard. An ant census from the University of Hong Kong in 2022 estimated that there are 2.5 million ants for every person.
All those ants together would weigh around 12 megatonnes. You would have to build 36 Empire State Buildings to equal that much poundage. Or, to paraphrase someone Ksepka mentioned admiringly at times in a conversation — legendary evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson — if we humans did not dominate Earth, alien visitors would probably call it “the planet of the ants”.
Ants even outnumber humans in species: There an estimated 20,000 of them to our one, Ksepka said. “There are islands and jungles where no one has gotten around to lifting every rock and turning over every log, or climbing into the tree canopy because there are ants that live up there, too. Basically everywhere but Antarctica.” Which, he noted with a laugh, “is the only continent that has ‘ant’ in its name”.
And, from the human perspective, they’re tiny — so small, he said, that “it’s hard to appreciate them.” The largest ant is shorter than the width of a postage stamp, he said. In the diminutive universe of ants, the Pharaoh ant (Monomorium pharaonis), a common household pest, is about half as long as a grain of rice. So are the thief ants (Solenopsis molesta), which subsist on food they swipe after taking up residence in the nests of larger ants.
To show them off, the museum is doing some scaling up. The passageway into the exhibition is a larger-than-life replica of an ant tunnel. At the end of the tunnel is a 5-foot-long model of an ant from the world’s largest species, Dinoponera gigantea. The model is 35 times the ant’s actual size, making the insect’s compound eyes and venomous stingers look far more menacing than they really are.
Size is always relative, as another much-enlarged replica makes clear. It’s of the smallest ant (Carebara atoma). Ksepka said that it is practically microscopic in real life — so small that it fits on the eye of D. gigantea, and D. gigantea, in turn, would fit on a fingertip.
There are smaller replicas of ‘the ant from Mars’ (Martialis heureka), discovered in the late 1990s in a Brazilian rainforest. It turned out to be one of the most primitive of living ants, lacking compound eyes, and it’s not the only dirt-digger among ants. Leaf-cutter ant nests can go almost 20 feet below the surface and can develop into formations as complicated as any apartment building. They are architectural marvels, Ksepka said, with main corridors, side entrances and blobby, roomlike spaces branching off.
To show how intricate nests are, Ksepka turned to scientist Walter Tschinkel, who is renowned among biologists for pouring liquids into ant nests — molten metals like aluminium. That sounds as if he is creating “an ant version of Pompeii,” as Ksepka put it, but Tschinkel excavates the hardened cast that is formed in the spaces filled by the liquid.
The result? A sculpture-like glimpse of an ant’s domain that is modern-looking, abstract and intriguing. The casts show the different shapes and sizes of nests, some simple, some twisting or spiralling their way down.
Ants fight for their territory, and one display in ‘Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives’ tracks the fighting. One colony can spot another and declare, in effect, “‘We’re stronger. We’re going in. We’re taking this over,’” Ksepka said. But some ant species use a subtler approach. He mentioned how the spiny ant “hijacks” carpenter ant colonies with what he called “the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ strategy”.
“First, the spiny queen kills the carpenter queen,” he said. “Then the spiny queen “covers herself with a scent, a pheromone that makes the carpenter ants think she’s one of them.” The worker carpenter ants raise her eggs, “and the colony slowly begins to be more and more spiny ants and less and less carpenters” as the older carpenter ants die off.
“Eventually, the last carpenter ant dies, and it’s just a spiny colony,” he said.
A conversation with Ksepka turned to the supersize model of those honeypot ants behind the desk, with their gasters — the bulbous parts of the abdomens — expanded “like a water balloon”, he said. “They fill it with a sweet, nutritious liquid, and basically they’re like a human water cooler or coffee machine or keg.” They serve as a refuelling station for other ants working in the nest. The ones with the bloated abdomens stay put, clinging to the walls of the tunnels, lest they scrape against something that would burst the gaster.
Ants largely communicate with each other through chemicals, and the exhibition will give people a sense of what ants smell like.
“Some of them are just beautiful, a kind of citronella-y smell,” Ksepka said. “Others create a stinky, blue cheese smell, or even a rotten egg smell.” That would be the odorous house ant, also known as the stink ant (Tapinoma sessile).
“They may use these chemicals to say, ‘Hey, I’m a friend, let me knot the next,’” he continued. “They may use them to say ‘Hey, back off’ to an enemy. They may use them to call for help.”
The Bruce is setting up tubes in the exhibition that will allow people to sample the scents of different species of ants, such as the “chocolate-y smell” of the trap-jaw ant, which can deter predatory fire ants.
But do not fear: No ants were harmed in distilling the chemicals that cause the odours. “We didn’t actually crush up the real ants,” Ksepka said.
The museum used artificial chemicals to replicate the scents, he said, “because otherwise, we’d basically have to crush up a bunch of ants every day.
“And I didn’t want to do that.”
-This article is part of a Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times – New York Times
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