18
THREE YEARS PASSED as Raff commuted between Clayville and Tallahassee. When he turned in his senior thesis, two months before graduation, the Anthill Chronicles had matured into an epic of miniature civilizations. The foibles of ants, Raff learned, are those of men, written in a simpler grammar. Compared with those of humans, the anthill cycles are short in duration, instinct-driven, and hence truly ordained by fate. The ant societies proved different in most fundamental ways from those of humans--of course--yet also convergent to them in other, also important ways.
The half dozen committee members of the Department of Biological Science who reviewed the thesis judged it as one of the best they had ever seen--in conception, in originality, and in execution. Raff dedicated it to the two sponsors of the research.
For Professors William A. Needham and Frederick Norville, whose generous help and dedication made this study possible.
Bill Needham and I both valued that simple acknowledgment as much as any we'd received in books and journals from our fellow professional scientists.
What Raff found deserved to be preserved, and I set out to do so, with Bill Needham's assistance, shortly after Raff's graduation. We omitted Raff's measurements and tables, and translated his sometimes stiff language into less technical form. The merit of this account, to follow, is that it describes what actually occurs in such anthills during their remorseless struggles and wars. It presents the story as near as possible to the way ants see such events themselves.
At another level, in my experience, nothing expresses better than the anthill epics the energy and dynamics of all life in the Nokobee tract, and for that matter other fragments of the living natural world left for us to observe.
At the very start of the study Raff had fixed his attention on the large colony at the Lake Nokobee trailhead. This was the first anthill encountered upon arrival at the lake, and the one on which he had taken the most notes in earlier years. Naming it the Trailhead Colony, Raff decided to make it the prototype for his thesis studies. He chose wisely to record its habits and social behavior as thoroughly as possible without digging it up or disturbing it in any other way. Needham suggested further that these observations would serve as a baseline for later studies, including those of other colonies scattered over Dead Owl Cove. A more nearly complete picture might then be drawn for the whole species.
Among Raff's earliest childhood memories was the Trailhead Colony as a dominant presence in the open space of the picnic area. On every warm rainless day, its foragers patrolled ten yards or more from the nest mound. And several times an hour, some of them returned to the nest entrance bearing various fresh prey, fragments of scavenged dead insects, nectar from plants, and the sugary excrement of sap-sucking insects.
When Raff began a more than casual study late in the previous year before coming to Florida State University, he noticed that the activity of the Trailhead Colony had declined sharply from the high intensity of its past. Many fewer foragers ventured out of the nest, and proportionately less food was coming in. When Raff went so far as to prod the mound surface with a trowel, only a small number of defenders rushed out to mount a defense. Something was wrong with the mighty Trailhead Colony.
"I think it's sick, and it's getting worse," he said at a Bug Bash, "and I have no idea why."
Bill Needham nodded. "Sounds like the queen has died on you. No queen, no eggs, no more larvae. The colony doesn't need as much food, so the workers are staying at home. Sort of like old folks at a retirement community."
"But why should the whole colony quit like that?" Raff said. "Are they having a memorial service or something?" That brought approving laughter from the Bashers, a rare tribute to a beginner like Raff.
"Well," Needham said, "you've got to understand what a powerful stimulus a queen is to all the workers. When she goes, they're less responsive. Something goes out of their spirit--so to speak."
Circling an index finger in the air, as he often did when he was about to introduce a new idea, Needham asked, "How long have you been watching that colony anyway?"
"Well, believe it or not," Raff replied, "since I was a little kid, I'd say ten years or so. It's hard to miss when you first get to the trailhead."
Needham reached for a volume on the shelf next to his desk, searched the index, opened to a page, and pointed to an entry. He said, "That's no surprise. In ants similar to your species, we have records of the mother queen living over twenty years."
"Twenty years? That's older than I am."
"Yep. I'll admit that's an amazing life-span for an insect," Needham said. "It's longer even than for the seventeen-year locust. But it does occur in the queens of a few kinds of ants. My guess is that it's a world record for insects. On the other hand, very few of the workers live more than two or three years. That's true even though they're all the queen's daughters, and all have her same heredity. Now, that's a real strange situation. Longer than that must seem like an eternity for them. They exist, you might say, in a mental world that's got no beginning or end. They have no concept of their mother queen dying. She's just always there. Even when it finally happens, even the retinue that takes care of the old girl doesn't realize at first that she's dead. I suggest you keep a close eye on that colony."
The death of the Queen was to have consequences critical to the fate of the Dead Owl Cove ants, across the five seasons their history was recorded by Raphael Semmes Cody. For that reason Needham and I chose to place this event at the opening of the Anthill Chronicles.