September 24, 2002, Tuesday
SCIENCE DESK
INTO THE WOODS WITH: EDWARD O. WILSON; A Wild, Fearsome World Under Each
Fallen Leaf
By JAMES GORMAN (NYT) 1960 words
CONCORD, Mass. -- Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino university research
professor and honorary curator in entomology of the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard University, winner of two Pulitzer prizes and scientific
honors too numerous to recount, is on his hands and knees, pawing in the
leaf litter near Walden Pond.
He eases into a half-sitting, half-reclining position and holds out a
handful of humus and dirt. ''This,'' he says, ''is wilderness.''
Just a dozen yards from the site of Thoreau's cabin Dr. Wilson is delving
into the ground with a sense of purpose and pleasure that would instantly
make any 10-year-old join him. His smile suggests that at age 73, with a
troublesome right knee, he still finds the forest floor as much to his
liking as a professor's desk.
These woods are not wild; indeed they were not wild in Thoreau's day. Today,
the beach and trails of Walden Pond State Reservation draw about 500,000
visitors a year. Few of them hunt ants, however. Underfoot and under the
leaf litter there is a world as wild as it was before human beings came to
this part of North America.
Dr. Wilson is playing guide to this micro-wilderness -- full of ants, mites,
millipedes and springtails in a miniature forest of fungal threads and plant
detritus in order to make a point about the value of little creatures and
small spaces. If he wrote bumper stickers, rather than books, his next might
be ''Save the Microfauna'' or ''Sweat the Small Stuff.''
He begins his most recent book, ''The Future of Life,'' with a ''Dear
Henry'' letter, talking to Thoreau about the state of the world and the
Walden Pond woods.
''Untrammeled nature exists in the dirt and rotting vegetation beneath our
shoes,'' he writes. ''The wilderness of ordinary vision may have vanished --
wolf, puma and wolverine no longer exist in the tamed forests of
Massachusetts. But another, even more ancient wilderness lives on.''
In their world, centipedes are predators as fearsome as saber-toothed
tigers, ants more numerous than the ungulates of African plains. And, in
contrast to the vast preserves required by the world's most revered
megafauna -- grizzlies and elephants, jaguars and condors -- maintaining
biodiversity among the little creatures, shockingly rich in unexplored
behavior and biochemistry, can be done on the cheap, in relatively tiny
patches, as small as a few acres, around the world.
Dr. Wilson is by no means turning from the grand plans for conservation.
Indeed, he has suggested that 50 percent of the globe ought to be reserved
for nonhuman nature. But he is a realist, and, as he describes himself, ''a
lover of little things.''
He has been turning over logs and rocks looking into the world of insects
and other tiny creatures since he was a boy in Alabama and Florida. And he
has not stopped. During the walk, he talks enthusiastically about a coming
field trip to the Dominican Republic to investigate ants there, and about
the publication this fall of a book-length monograph on the genus Pheidole
describing all 625 species of ants, including 341 new to science.
Researchers tend to share a kind of acquisitive passion to see, touch, grasp
the world. Nothing passes without comment. As he strolled along the shore of
Walden Pond, on the way to the woods, Dr. Wilson spotted a butterfly and
interrupted his discussion of the sizes of reserves needed for mammals,
reptiles and amphibians, complete with references and citations to
scientific studies.
When the butterfly landed on the beach, Dr. Wilson stopped, leaning forward
like a heron on the hunt, and peered at it. ''It's hard to identify,'' he
said. ''It's a very beat-up little butterfly,'' probably the variety called
a question mark, because of the design on its wings.
Having reached the woods and having begun to talk about what lay under the
surface of the forest floor, he held the crumbled leaf litter and humus in
his hand as if he were savoring what lovers of certain wines call the ''goût
de terroir,'' or taste of the soil, a certain earthy specificity that the
wine owes to the ground, not the grape.
''When I go on a field trip,'' he said, ''providing you can get me up to the
edge of a natural environment, I usually don't go more than a hundred yards
or so in, because when I settle down immediately I start finding interesting
stuff.''
''This ground,'' he said, ''we see it as two-dimensional because we're
gigantic, like Godzilla. When you just go a few centimeters down, then
you're in a three-dimensional world where the conditions change dramatically
almost millimeter by millimeter. In one square foot of this litter you're
looking at into the tens of thousands of small creatures that you can still
spot with your naked eye.''
The ground was drier than usual, and Dr. Wilson speculated that the drought
might have affected insects. Some he had hoped to see were not there. ''If
we looked long enough,'' he said, breaking open several rotting acorns, ''we
would find entire colonies of very small ants living in an acorn.''
As he moved on, from log to log, he uncovered relatives of cave crickets,
predatory rove beetles, termites, several varieties of ants, spiderlings,
beetle larvae -- not quite in the abundance he had hoped for. Still, the
small wilderness was teeming.
''The exact perception of wilderness is a matter of scale,'' he writes in
''The Future of Life,'' going on to say that ''microaesthetics'' is ''an
unexplored wilderness to the creative mind.'' But he also notes that while
microreserves are ''infinitely better than nothing at all, they are no
substitute for macro- and megareserves.'' He continues, ''People can acquire
an appreciation for savage carnivorous nematodes and shape-shifting rotifers
in a drop of pond water, but they need life on the larger scale to which the
human intellect and emotion most naturally respond.''
Dr. Wilson is no sentimentalist, about nematodes or people. His proposals
for microreserves are practical and hard-headed. The idea is fairly simple.
While areas of nearly 25,000 acres are needed to have a good chance at
preserving most large forms of life, plants and insects can sometimes be
preserved in plots of 25 or even 2.5 acres.
In the Amazon, for instance, Dr. Wilson said, where the land is being
savaged, ''You'll see hanging on the side of a ravine somewhere a patch a
farmer hasn't farmed, one hectare, to maybe 10.'' Such a small area may not
catch the eye of most conservationists, he said, but, he added, ''The
entomologist and the botanist is likely to say, hold on a minute.''
A researcher, he said, may find species not found anywhere else, and such
plots can grow, with care and reseeding of the surrounding area. ''You can
do this in most parts of the world, in most developing countries, where a
farmer or village elders would happily take a thousand bucks for you to set
aside 10 or 100 hectares and even hire them to help with the reseeding,'' he
said.
But it is not just the developing world where biodiversity can be preserved,
bit by bit. City parks may hold small wonders. Even at Walden Pond, in the
midst of the Massachusetts suburbs, he said: ''Many of the species you find
here are new to science. The basic biology of most of these things is poorly
known or not known at all.''
In the Walden woods live two relatively unknown ant species in the genus
Myrmica. ''They've been noticed, but not named or described,'' he said. As
to the nematodes and mites, he said, lifetimes can be spent and careers can
be made studying them.
It is not, of course, entomologists, or even weekend naturalists, who need
convincing about the richness of the forest floor. And there are many
reasons to try to preserve biological diversity at the near-microscopic
level and below. There is always potential economic value in new biochemical
discoveries. There is real and present economic value in clean air and
water, to which the plants and insects and microbes contribute. In fact, Dr.
Wilson points out, the life of the planet is built on a foundation of tiny
creatures. In ecological systems it is the giants that stand on the
shoulders of mites.
Finally, there is the simplest argument of all, that life itself, in all its
variations, is astonishing and mysterious, and that humans have a
responsibility to preserve it.
Under one log turned over on our walk, the environment was moist enough to
provide a widely varied selections of insects. Dr. Wilson picked up a gooey
white worm without a trace of discomfort. ''That is a fly larva, a maggot
actually,'' he said. ''I don't know the kind of fly. It's very slimy.''
Asked if he might be demonstrating the very reason many people do not like
to turn over logs and dig under leaves, he laughed. ''I'll admit it's an
acquired taste,'' he said. ''Don't mistake me, I don't expect legions of
people, particularly Americans, going out and seeing how many different
kinds of oribatid mites or fly larvae they can find.''
''But,'' he continued, ''they can get a feel, one way or the other, that
what's at their feet is not dead leaves and dirt, but a living world with a
diversity of creatures, some of which are so strange to the average
experience that they beat most of the things you see in Star Wars.''
It is not so hard to imagine. Butterfly fanciers are legion. Dragonflies are
now attracting watchers with binoculars. ''But mainly,'' he said, ''there's
got to be some sense of the beauty and integrity and the extreme age of
these areas.''
At the next and last log, he pointed out a predatory rove beetle, a
millipede (a detritovore), a spiderling, a nematode he caught only a glimpse
of (''like a very tiny silvery strand''), more ants and a wood cockroach. As
he began to describe the thousands of inoffensive species of cockroach
throughout the world, a siren went off on a nearby street, a reminder of
where he was.
Dr. Wilson looked up from the timeless environment under the log, ''That's
sure a sound that Thoreau never heard.''
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
posted by John A Perazzo, Las Vegas, Nevada who purchased a copy for this
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Received on Tue Feb 11 2003 - 20:07:48 EST