17
BECAUSE HE'D COME to Florida State University, I was Raphael Semmes Cody's ready-made first college mentor. He acquired his second mentor when he audited the beginning undergraduate course in entomology. William Abbott Needham was a world authority on beetles. That was no mean accomplishment, because four hundred thousand kinds are known to science, and possibly twice that number remain undiscovered. He was also the leading authority on the boll weevil, ravager of the South's cotton fields in the early 1900s. Because of his passion for the subject and scholarly reputation, he was surrounded by a cadre of dedicated graduate students. He was addressed as Professor Needham to his face, and Uncle Bill behind his back. He didn't mind the latter at all.
Bill Needham, in his late forties at the time, had the lean hawklike looks one expects to find in a veteran field biologist but almost never actually does. He spoke in a low, carefully modulated voice, and enjoyed pronouncing scientific names in the exact original Greek or Latin. His imperturbably calm, measured manner hid a passion within.
When outdoors, Needham always wore a porkpie hat made to his specifications. The top was a mesh that allowed air in to cool his head. Under the brim was a neatly folded mosquito net that could be dropped at the pull of a string to protect his face and neck from the bloodsuckers. Needham was, he explained, allergic to mosquito bites. He carried a bright orange book bag that held, in addition to notes and manuscript pages, bottles for insect specimens, and a tightly folded butterfly net, another of his inventions. The net could be taken out in an instant and opened like an umbrella. Anywhere Needham spotted a flying insect that interested him, even in a crowd of people, he pulled out the "Needham net" to ensnare the specimen for close inspection.
Needham was a genuine eccentric, by which I mean his peculiarities were not affectations but simply a way of enjoying the world as he saw it. Every place, including the busiest parts of downtown Tallahassee and the campus of Florida State University, was to him a habitat teeming with insects. He knew the names and habits of most of what he saw and he was alert to any newcomer that crossed his path. He was often assisted by his third wife, a former graduate student who--by necessity, and at last, after the first two had departed--shared his entomological obsession.
This genial scientist and Southern gentleman was adored by the students closest to him. Most college teachers merely take pride in their subject and are eager to convey it, then go home for dinner and unrelated diversions. Needham was consumed by his work. His acolytes could not help but be drawn into the world he occupied around the clock. They learned to see human artifacts as but a matrix within which insects lived in countless numbers, pursuing their missions in mysterious ways. Few students ever entered his world completely, and then only for a few semesters. But for the rest of their lives all would retain at least a basic knowledge of entomology and remember the spirit of the scholar who had taught it. He was an ornament to his profession, a Gold Medalist of the Entomological Society of America and named the 1994 Teacher of the Year by the Association of Southeastern Universities.
Each Wednesday at four in the afternoon Needham opened up his office to all in order to preside over a freewheeling seminar popularly known as the Bug Bash. He served hot tea poured into Styrofoam cups along with supermarket cookies shaken out of cardboard containers. The conversation typically began with some current event in the news or major report in the latest weekly issue of Nature or Science. Then it skipped about erratically, not avoiding more sensational topics of university and national politics. Invariably and soon, however, it drifted back to the vast and arcane world of entomology. Needham always started and often led the conversation, but he preferred to listen. He liked to say it was an important part of his own education.
He would prod the Bashers in his response, not always politely. "You got a reference for that?" Or, "That sounds like some kind of an answer to me. So what's the question?" Or, "I've got a dryinid wasp here. Anybody ever seen a dryinid? I bet you all will think it's some kind of an ant when you see it." Then he would shake the dryinid out of a glass tube onto the table in front of him, and all would watch as the little wasp scurried across the surface and jumped off the edge.
He was also kindly. He liked to draw timid students out. "Hey, George, didn't you get one of those blind cave beetles last summer up in Cave Springs? I think it's a species of Pseudanophthalmus. It was amazing to see one alive. You still got any in your terrarium, and can we look at it?"
As a student in the Honors Program, Raff was allowed to take entomology while only a second-semester freshman. He also insinuated himself into the Wednesday afternoon Bug Bashers, simply by showing up and sitting on a chair at the edge of the group. Soon he was asking questions, and he was able to offer a few frissons of entomology from his life at Nokobee. He had a stock of bug war stories to tell: an outbreak of giant rhinoceros beetles, winged dogfights among cardinal butterflies, the arrival of a honeybee swarm at an abandoned woodpecker nest.
Raff had enough such anecdotes to hold his own with the older students. But his ace was an account of the anthills of Dead Owl Cove. He'd mapped all the nests he could find, as part of the requirements for the Boy Scout merit badge in insect life. He had taken notes as well on the denizens of two of the anthills. He'd also recorded prey that their foraging workers brought home. Finally, he'd had the good luck to witness a late summer wedding flight in which winged queens and males flew up from the scattered anthills simultaneously and mated in midair.
Needham was especially drawn to the ants, as I had been.
"I'm pretty sure I've seen that species in other parts of the longleaf savanna," he said. "It might be a new species. Hills like that are pretty rare in this part of the country, but as I recall it, where you do find them they're densely crowded. My guess is that each hill is a nest for a separate colony, but I'm not sure about that at all."
Raff responded eagerly. "I think they're separate. I've seen workers from different nests fighting a couple of times."
"Hey. Why don't we go over to Nokobee some Saturday soon and take a look?" Needham said. "We could get a few of the guys together and make an expedition of it."
Two Saturdays later the expedition to Nokobee was launched. Raff was home that weekend. He'd given Needham instructions and a hand-drawn map to get to the lake.
Early that morning Ainesley drove him to the Nokobee trailhead so he could be waiting for the others when they came in from Tallahassee. As soon as Needham and six of the Bug Bash students arrived, Raff led them on a tour of the anthills around Dead Owl Cove. They then took a walk along the west shore of the lake, looking for more of the nests. Several were found, but none as densely grouped as the population at Dead Owl Cove. All of the students carried nets, and dropped ants and other kinds of insects in killing jars and vials of alcohol for later study.
On the way out Raff lingered with Needham at the anthills, observing a bit more of whatever activity could be seen on their surfaces. Then all drove back together to Tallahassee and the Florida State University campus. Needham asked Raff to sit next to him during the return trip.
"I've got a suggestion that you shouldn't feel obligated to take if you're not interested. I'm sure this species of ant has never been studied before. If you were to start a complete study and add that to the notes you already have, it seems to me it might make a very good honors thesis. You could do it pretty conveniently because you live so close."
Raff nodded enthusiastically. "Yessir," he said.
"I know your senior year is still a long way off," Needham continued, "but believe me, you can never have too much time to do a good honors thesis. You might even be able to publish a paper in one of the entomology journals. I'd be glad to advise you if you give it a try. But of course that's just a suggestion. There are a hundred things you might want to do more, at Nokobee, or around here, or anywhere. But does that sound at all interesting to you?"
Raff said, "Yessir, you bet it does, it really does. I think I'd like to keep working on the anthills."
When they met later in his office, Needham pressed his earlier suggestion. "This is an interesting species. We're really just beginning to study ants properly. And don't let anybody tell you they aren't important. Keep in mind that ants not only rule the insect world, but societies like the ones at Nokobee are the most complicated on earth next to humans."
In effect, Needham had said to Raff, like a prince of old to an explorer, Go out and search. Everything you find will be important. Record it. Then come back here and report it, to me, and to all.
Needham knew what he was doing. He understood that nothing propels the postadolescent mind more powerfully than to be told by someone in authority, You do this well, you like doing it, it is interesting and important. So I hereby commission you to take charge. Pursue this as far as you are able. Make it your special mission.
Such was the spirit, Needham knew, that has driven much of the history of biology. Carl Linnaeus, the great eighteenth-century Swedish botanist and founder of biological classification, profited by it. He instructed his best students--his "Apostles," he called them--to be his eyes and hands as they visited foreign lands. And so seventeen gifted young men went forth variously to the Levant, Japan, South America, and the North American colonies, to be the first to collect the plants, to study them, and to bring specimens back to Europe for further research by all generations into the future.
When Charles Darwin was twenty-two years old, he was told, in effect, Charles, we know you love natural history. There's a job open, as naturalist on HMS Beagle. You can have it. We want you to travel on this ship to South America and learn all you can about the geology, plants, animals, and people. Then come back and tell us what you found. In the following five years the great naturalist deduced the geological origin of atolls, he collected countless new species of plants and animals, and not least, and to the immense benefit to science, he invented the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Raff's parents knew nothing of this principle of apprenticeship when he told them he would be studying ants at Nokobee. Indeed, Marcia was baffled by his choice of subject.
"I don't understand it, Scooter. I know it's for your education, and I'm very happy that Fred Norville and Dr. Needham have taken you under their wings. But what good are ants? Wouldn't it be better to take some subject connected to medicine, or maybe agriculture?"
"There are a whole bunch of reasons, Mom. I want to do real research out at Nokobee. I know the place real well--you know that. I've been watching those ants at Dead Owl Cove. Uncle Fred said he wanted you and Dad to know that the research is going to be important. Ants may be small, people laugh at them and all, but you know, they're a huge part of the environment. They're the most social animals in the world. Anybody who knows anything knows we learn a lot about social behavior in people by studying things like that."
"Well, now," Marcia said, "I guess the professors know what they're talking about. If they don't, who does? And it's just wonderful that you're going to be able to do your study right here at home."
Ainesley didn't much care what Raff did. What mattered to him was that his son was a college student and had a real future ahead of him.
"Hell, Scooter, I don't know what this is all about, but I'll even go out to Nokobee and help you if you want me to, whenever I get a little time off from the store. I'll bring along a shovel."
Soon after Raff began the actual studies, his new friends at the Bug Bash began calling them the Anthill Chronicles. Bill Needham's engagement in the project increased with time, as he lent his own expertise and insights to the events unfolding in the population at Dead Owl Cove. Month by month, whenever Raff brought in new observations, Needham helped him piece them together with whatever was known of the social behavior of other kinds of ants.