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.
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