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Every so often,
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a giant emerges on the stage of science,
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someone who transcends the narrow boundaries of a particular line of research
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and alters our perspective of the world.
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Ed Wilson is such a man.
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His early fascination with ants
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launched a dazzling scientific career
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that led him to lift his eyes from the ground
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to explain the grand scheme of life itself.
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When he wrote his book Sociobiology,
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tracing the origins of animal social behavior from ants to humans,
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he had little idea of the controversy it would trigger.
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Not since Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species
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has evolutionary biology caused such heated debate.
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Undeterred by the furor,
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he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
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Today, he campaigns for biodiversity
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and fights to conserve the world's endangered species.
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Tonight on NOVA:
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Lord of the Ants.
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Ed Wilson believes human beings have an instinctive affinity
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for living things.
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He even invented a word for it:
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"biophilia."
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It's what draws us to places like Central Park.
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He also knows that human activity is a threat
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to life's incredible diversity.
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To monitor what's happening,
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these volunteers are taking part in a 24-hour "bio-blitz,"
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an audit of every living species in the park.
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Wilson is a pioneer of this activity.
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He encourages others to do what he's always done,
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to embrace the natural world.
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...small, gray swirl in here as well.
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Now, I want you to notice what appears to be, to you,
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just a flat surface, right?
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But this is not a flat surface to most of life on Earth.
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This is three-dimensional.
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We are sort of like the Godzillas of the world.
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We're gigantic organisms and we walk,
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crunch across this world like Godzilla over New York.
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But if you started digging down,
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you would see that you are passing through numerous layers
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of different microenvironments.
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Beneath the leaves, he imagines a subterranean labyrinth
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inhabited by micromonsters.
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An orabitid mite feeds off a fungal thread.
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A millipede is a lumbering giant in this world;
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tiny mites can hitch a ride on its back.
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Most of life on Earth is smaller than the eye can see.
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The soil contains thousands of different bacteria.
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Many are exotic species still unknown to science.
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And that's how so much of the diversity is created
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in an actual environment like this.
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It's at your feet. You never see it, but it's here.
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But the creature that has inspired Ed Wilson throughout his life
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is one of the most abundant and highly organized insects
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on the planet:
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the ant.
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Here is a nest of the infamous fire ant,
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a mound nest of something...
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with something like 200,000 vicious stinging little workers in it.
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And I'm going to demonstrate, now, why it's called the fire ant.
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Now, don't do this at home.
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First, I'll scrape this off and get them coming up.
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And pretty soon those ants are boiling out of there,
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fighting mad.
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They're ready to sting and defeat any enemy that comes in,
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and I'm going to make myself the enemy just for a few seconds.
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So here we go.
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All right, now, if you look,
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you'll see a lot of them beginning to pause and sting my hand.
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Each one of those stings feels like the touch of a hot needle.
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And now, pardon me. I'm going to get rid of these ants in a hurry.
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Is it a chemical?
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Yeah, it's a small molecule of venom.
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It is rough;
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my hand feels like it's on fire!
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I hope it'll go away, too.
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And I've done this, but not quite to that extent before.
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Okay.
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Ed Wilson is a magic name to many of us working in the natural world,
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for two reasons.
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First, he is a towering example of a specialist, a world authority.
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Nobody in the world has ever known as much as Ed Wilson about ants.
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But, in addition to that intense knowledge and understanding,
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he has the widest of pictures.
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He sees the planet and the natural world
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that it contains in amazing detail but extraordinary coherence.
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He's a scientist with over 400 published papers,
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but he writes like a poet.
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What sets him apart is his unified picture of life.
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He explores the continuum
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that extends from subatomic particles and chemical interactions
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to consciousness and culture.
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The wellspring for this unity of knowledge
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began with his boyhood adventures in Alabama.
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Nature soon cast an everlasting spell.
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I had the great good fortune of spending a large part of my boyhood
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wandering through beautiful mixed woods of south Alabama.
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You can see it's still rich in living creatures
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that I soon was picking up on,
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looking at every frog and lizard and kinds of plants
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and then insects that I could find.
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I got a lot of indirect encouragement from my parents,
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mainly because they gave me freedom.
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They didn't mind that I was going through
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what I like to call my "little savage" period.
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Well, I'm now grown up.
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I'm still, basically, a boy.
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But I'm a grown up naturalist now,
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and it takes a little effort for me to realize that I,
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and people like me, see the world in a different way from others.
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I see it as a universe of immense diversity.
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Ed Wilson's imagination thrives on chance discoveries.
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As a child he was always on the lookout for strange life forms.
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One day I saw a large jellyfish.
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I tried to figure out where it came from
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and what it was all about and why it was there.
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A little boy, I think, has an automatic interest in monsters.
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In my little boy's mind,
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I then saw the sea as something of great mystery
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of alien purpose and dark happenings
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��and wanted to know more.
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But a cruel act of fate would determine his future as a naturalist.
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Like many boys, he had a passion for fishing.
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One of my favorites was the pinfish,
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which has these sharp spines in the dorsal fin.
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Easy to catch,
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but I was enthusiastically yanking them up out of the water,
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one after the other, when one accidentally came in...
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the spine hit me in the eye.
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I subsequently became blind in that eye;
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but that, combined with my inability to hear
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very well in the upper register,
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so I can't hear bird song, meant that,
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well, I sure wasn't going to be an expert on birds when I got older.
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So I turned kind of automatically to looking at little things
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that I can see holding between my thumb and forefinger
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��insects and other small creatures.
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And I became an entomologist, a student of insects.
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There's the question of, why did I pick ants, you know?
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Why not butterflies or whatever?
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And the answer is that they're so abundant,
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they're easy to find,
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and they're easy to study,
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and they're so interesting.
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They have social habits that differ from one kind of ant to the next.
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You know, each kind of ant has almost the equivalent
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of a different human culture.
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So each species is a wonderful object to study in itself.
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In fact, I honestly can't...cannot understand
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why most people don't study ants.
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By choosing an insect with so many different species
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and such highly organized societies,
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he had unwittingly set off down a path
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that would determine his own evolution as a biologist.
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At the age of 13, he was the first person
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to identify a new invasive species in Alabama
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��the red fire ant from South America.
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Later, when he was still in college,
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the state of Alabama asked him to write a report
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on the fire ant invasion.
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In 1951, he came to study at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology,
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and he's been there ever since.
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The museum houses one of the biggest collections of beetles and ants
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in the world.
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For Ed Wilson this was paradise.
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He was fascinated by the vast diversity of species available to him.
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In 1953, I had the opportunity to begin serious travel
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anywhere I wanted to go in the world
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and told to do something outstanding.
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So what I did was to head out for the tropics
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��Mexico, Cub
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��and then to the great island systems of the South Pacific:
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to New Caledonia and New Guinea.
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For three years, he traveled around the world,
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collecting specimens from tropical islands,
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just as Charles Darwin had done in his early twenties.
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Today, Ed Wilson is visiting a cloud forest
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high in the Dominican Republic.
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Oh, wow, look at that.
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What have you got?
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That's my genus!
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Pheidole?
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Yeah. I've got to get a lot of these. Hold on.
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For decades, he's been collecting ants from one particular genus,
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a group of closely-related species called Pheidole.
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Can you...great. Good, good, good.
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Okay, fine, all right, that's enough.
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I think we have enough specimens now.
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Isn't that nice?
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You think it's a new species?
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Oh, yes, and not a little one either.
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Look at the size of this thing.
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I don't know how we could have missed this before.
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It's a big ant. Great!
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That's entomology!
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We should get a DNA bar code for that.
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Why not?
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Beautiful, just beautiful.
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It's amazing
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that about 20 percent of all of the known ant species
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from the western hemisphere belong to this genus.
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It's a genus that's characterized by having little skinny workers.
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But then, in addition, it has great big soldiers that do the fighting.
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And I have a soldier here,
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and that's the one that has the most traits
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that you look at in order to tell one species from another.
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Among the traits are these little striation,
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or scratches, on the head of the soldier,
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so this part being completely shiny,
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and then the smooth outline of this part of the body,
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and the shape and the length of this little spine
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that it's got back here.
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What's really interesting about this,
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you know, besides finding something completely new
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in nature��species that may have been there a million year
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��is that, gradually, we see patterns of distribution, you know?
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Certain kinds of species are found in certain habitats
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and others are found on different islands.
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And then, from that information,
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comes more and more certain knowledge
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about how these species of insects,
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in this case, ants, got there in the first place.
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Ed Wilson has discovered 344 of over 600 identified species
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in this single genus, Pheidole.
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It took over two decades to identify and compile
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all the specimens that make up this tombstone of a book.
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He drew each of the 5,000 meticulous illustrations himself.
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This is the culmination of a lifetime's devotion to ants.
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When he returned from his island adventures in the mid-'50s,
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he brought back hundreds of specimens to add to Harvard's collection.
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But the intrepid naturalist was about to have a rude awakening.
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The structure of DNA had just been discovered,
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and a new era of biology, decoding the chemistry of genes,
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was about to begin.
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Many molecular biologists dismissed Ed Wilson's approach
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as "stamp collecting."
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Leading the charge at Harvard was the newly appointed James Watson who,
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with Francis Crick, had deciphered the structure of DNA.
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Well, Jim Watson
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was a difficult person.
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He himself says that.
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He was rather rude.
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I described him as a "Caligula of biology"
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and��in my memoir��and "the most disagreeable person I'd ever me
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to that time,"
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and so on.
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And yet I admired enormously his achievement,
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and I wanted to try or encourage achievements similar
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to that in evolutionary environmental biology.
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Much later, they became friends,
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but even while they were enemies,
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Watson inspired Wilson to use chemistry
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to unravel complex evolutionary problems,
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such as how ants coordinate their activities.
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Was an ant colony like a giant super-organism with a collective brain?
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How did individual ants communicate?
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Was it learned or was it coded in their genes?
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I started thinking about how I would find the key
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to turn the lock and open up the code by which ants speak.
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It couldn't be a sound like a birdsong.
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It couldn't be vision.
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It had to be something else.
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Ants can't see very well. They can't hear very well.
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Of course it had to be chemical.
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He devised an artificial nest with Plexiglas? chambers and galleries,
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so he could observe the behavior of ants in a colony.
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The breakthrough came when he noticed the ants laid an invisible trail
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as they searched for food.
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He was about to decipher the chemical language of ants.
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What I'm doing in this experiment,
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out here in the field with a fire ant colony,
275
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is putting baits on a blank piece of paper,
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one next to the colony itself
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and then another bait at the end of our little platform of paper,
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a little distance from the nest so the ants can't find it right away.
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What I'm doing, here,
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is holding a fire ant
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that I've just taken out of the nest,
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and I'm going to squeeze the rear end of the abdomen
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where the sting is��that contains the trail substance
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that the ants use to lay down on the ground
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and guide other fire ants to food and new places for nesting.
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And I'm going to duplicate this
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by just taking out some of that material from the rear end of the ant,
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and then I'm going to lay my own trail
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and talk to the ants to lead them to where I want them to go.
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And beginning to work,
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and yes, it's going to work.
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And now, just a few minutes later,
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after I laid my trail,
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the ants themselves are laying their trail on top of that,
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and the result is a very strong trail.
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And quite a few ants now are going back and forth.
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And they'll do that for hours, until they collect all that food.
298
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Examples besides the trail substance include alarm;
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they can signal one another that there's danger,
300
00:20:10,900 --> 00:20:15,200
and some ants can even signal what the danger is,
301
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which kind of an enemy it is.
302
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There are signals that tell other ants about a new nest site,
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00:20:21,100 --> 00:20:24,000
you know, "where we don't... this is not such a hot dig,
304
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so we'll go somewhere else."
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00:20:25,200 --> 00:20:30,100
And then there are signals that indicate what caste you belong to,
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you know, like, "Hey, I'm a queen, you know. Take care of me.
307
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I lay the eggs around here."
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00:20:35,200 --> 00:20:38,100
And gradually, with chemists and biologists working together,
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we've worked out this vocabulary.
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In the case of fire ants,
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we found that they talk with between 10 and 20 of these signals.
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My favorite find was how ants tell us that a fellow ant is dead.
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It's not enough for the ant to be lying
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still with his legs sticking up in the air.
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It has to have a certain decomposition substance
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that it only gets after a couple of days.
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That turns out to be oleic acid.
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00:21:00,700 --> 00:21:03,300
Well, you can put oleic acid on a perfectly healthy ant
319
00:21:03,300 --> 00:21:08,700
and the other ants will take it out and dump it in the refuse pile.
320
00:21:10,600 --> 00:21:13,100
And it stays there until it cleans itself off
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00:21:13,100 --> 00:21:15,100
and then rejoins the living.
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This study of ants has shed a lot of light
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on how animals generally communicate by chemicals.
324
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And we now know that most kinds of animals do most of their communication
325
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with pheromones,
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talking with the use of chemicals that they taste and smell.
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00:21:38,100 --> 00:21:41,200
Ed Wilson realized that the code for the chemicals
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00:21:41,200 --> 00:21:46,100
that determined the ants' behavior must be written in their genes.
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00:21:46,100 --> 00:21:47,600
If this were true for ants,
330
00:21:47,600 --> 00:21:49,700
then perhaps the behavior of other animals
331
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might also have a genetic basis.
332
00:21:52,900 --> 00:21:55,600
The remarkable thing about him, about him, it seems to me,
333
00:21:55,600 --> 00:21:59,200
is that, not only does he do these acute studies
334
00:21:59,200 --> 00:22:03,500
and penetrating studies of a small group of insects,
335
00:22:03,500 --> 00:22:05,100
but he is able to step back,
336
00:22:05,100 --> 00:22:07,300
not just one pace but three paces,
337
00:22:07,300 --> 00:22:10,400
and see the entire panorama of,
338
00:22:10,400 --> 00:22:12,800
not just invertebrates but vertebrates,
339
00:22:12,800 --> 00:22:20,800
of the whole magic complex web of organisms, animals and plants.
340
00:22:25,900 --> 00:22:28,900
Ed Wilson set himself a daunting task:
341
00:22:29,300 --> 00:22:33,100
to investigate the origins of all animal behavior,
342
00:22:33,600 --> 00:22:36,000
from ants
343
00:22:36,000 --> 00:22:38,500
to monkeys,
344
00:22:38,500 --> 00:22:41,700
right through to the most social of all primates,
345
00:22:41,700 --> 00:22:43,600
humans.
346
00:22:46,500 --> 00:22:49,600
He even invented a name for this new discipline:
347
00:22:49,600 --> 00:22:51,900
"sociobiology."
348
00:22:56,100 --> 00:22:59,000
When he set out on this intellectual adventure,
349
00:22:59,000 --> 00:23:02,800
he had little idea of the trouble that lay ahead.
350
00:23:04,200 --> 00:23:07,900
The seed for this vision had been planted many years before,
351
00:23:07,900 --> 00:23:13,200
in 1956, when he visited a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico.
352
00:23:15,100 --> 00:23:19,400
What he witnessed here would change his view of life forever.
353
00:23:21,600 --> 00:23:22,900
Fifty years later,
354
00:23:22,900 --> 00:23:26,400
he is returning to the place the locals call Monkey Island
355
00:23:26,400 --> 00:23:30,300
with his former Ph.D. student, Stuart Altmann.
356
00:23:30,300 --> 00:23:32,400
The first rule that I learned from you
357
00:23:32,400 --> 00:23:34,700
was don't look at them.
358
00:23:34,700 --> 00:23:38,200
That is, I should say, don't stare at them.
359
00:23:38,200 --> 00:23:40,800
Don't stare at them. A direct stare to them is a threat.
360
00:23:40,800 --> 00:23:42,400
Oh yes, I learned that!
361
00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:43,700
The hard way.
362
00:23:43,700 --> 00:23:44,400
That's right.
363
00:23:55,100 --> 00:23:59,000
The island is home to over 900 rhesus macaques.
364
00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:01,100
They were introduced here, from India,
365
00:24:01,100 --> 00:24:05,400
in the 1930s, to provide a breeding colony for medical research.
366
00:24:06,100 --> 00:24:07,400
For Stuart Altmann,
367
00:24:07,400 --> 00:24:09,700
these monkeys offered a unique opportunity
368
00:24:09,700 --> 00:24:13,500
to study the social behavior of free living primates.
369
00:24:13,500 --> 00:24:16,400
This was a new kind of field research,
370
00:24:16,400 --> 00:24:18,000
rarely attempted before,
371
00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:22,700
so he had trouble finding someone to supervise his Ph.D. at Harvard,
372
00:24:22,700 --> 00:24:26,100
until he was told about a young entomologist.
373
00:24:26,100 --> 00:24:29,700
"There's this guy, Ed Wilson, who's a junior fellow at Harvard now,
374
00:24:29,700 --> 00:24:32,900
but he'll...95 percent sure he'll be a faculty member next year.
375
00:24:32,900 --> 00:24:34,000
Go talk to him."
376
00:24:34,000 --> 00:24:37,700
And I did. And Ed and I hit it off immediately.
377
00:24:37,700 --> 00:24:40,600
And it didn't take us very long to come to the realization
378
00:24:40,600 --> 00:24:46,500
that the two of us were respectively studying ants and primates,
379
00:24:46,500 --> 00:24:49,000
were studying the two groups of organisms
380
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:52,900
that have the most complex social systems in the animal kingdom.
381
00:24:52,900 --> 00:24:54,200
The question was,
382
00:24:54,200 --> 00:24:57,500
are there some commonalities that would lead one to say,
383
00:24:57,500 --> 00:25:01,000
"Well, possibly, one could have a unified theory
384
00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:03,200
of animal social systems?"
385
00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:09,100
She's got a nasty old wound there...
386
00:25:09,100 --> 00:25:10,600
Yeah, I see that.
387
00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:12,500
...on the right flank. Wonder what did that?
388
00:25:12,500 --> 00:25:14,700
Looks like she's got a swelling under there.
389
00:25:14,700 --> 00:25:17,300
I wonder if it's abscessed.
390
00:25:17,300 --> 00:25:18,700
It could be.
391
00:25:19,600 --> 00:25:20,400
Look at this.
392
00:25:20,400 --> 00:25:24,800
Now here's a case where this guy is picking around that wound, see?
393
00:25:26,100 --> 00:25:29,000
And it looks like he might be ready to clean that wound.
394
00:25:30,100 --> 00:25:33,800
So we're getting a little bit of monkey medicine going on there.
395
00:25:36,000 --> 00:25:36,800
They do.
396
00:25:36,800 --> 00:25:38,800
They have a propensity to, you know,
397
00:25:38,800 --> 00:25:43,200
to groom and pick out skin and extra tissue.
398
00:25:43,200 --> 00:25:46,700
He's been removing some of the source of the infection?
399
00:25:47,200 --> 00:25:48,700
Presumably so, yeah.
400
00:25:48,700 --> 00:25:51,700
Yeah, that's right, yeah. That's interesting.
401
00:25:54,700 --> 00:25:57,400
The males sometimes do what we call pump priming.
402
00:25:57,400 --> 00:25:59,600
They'll go over to a female,
403
00:25:59,600 --> 00:26:03,000
groom her very vigorously for a few minutes,
404
00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:04,700
a few seconds sometimes,
405
00:26:04,700 --> 00:26:07,100
and then present for grooming
406
00:26:07,100 --> 00:26:10,100
and expect a half hour's worth of reciprocity.
407
00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:14,700
You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
408
00:26:14,700 --> 00:26:15,900
Literally.
409
00:26:19,800 --> 00:26:22,800
Field studies like this revealed the complex behavior
410
00:26:22,800 --> 00:26:24,700
of non-human primates.
411
00:26:24,700 --> 00:26:26,300
When he was here in the '50s,
412
00:26:26,300 --> 00:26:30,600
Ed Wilson began to make comparisons among insect societies.
413
00:26:30,600 --> 00:26:34,400
He found the island was home to some large termite colonies.
414
00:26:35,500 --> 00:26:37,600
That's about as big as they get.
415
00:26:38,300 --> 00:26:42,300
Good lord! Now that is a termite metropolis.
416
00:26:43,100 --> 00:26:46,500
If I can get in through the wall with this stick here
417
00:26:46,500 --> 00:26:48,400
��I don't have the proper equipmen
418
00:26:48,400 --> 00:26:51,900
��we'll see how it's organized a little bit.
419
00:26:51,900 --> 00:26:55,400
If I can't, we'll just get another instrument. You ready?
420
00:26:58,400 --> 00:26:59,300
Here they come.
421
00:26:59,300 --> 00:27:03,200
Yeah, okay, here they come, now.
422
00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:06,500
The ones that are coming out now are soldiers.
423
00:27:06,500 --> 00:27:10,100
I don't see any of the white workers that are inside.
424
00:27:10,100 --> 00:27:13,100
What's swarming out here are the soldier caste.
425
00:27:13,100 --> 00:27:16,800
And what's really remarkable is you'll notice in this immense thing,
426
00:27:16,800 --> 00:27:20,100
there were soldiers massed here.
427
00:27:20,100 --> 00:27:22,600
They didn't know I was going to poke in here.
428
00:27:22,600 --> 00:27:23,800
They are like that all over.
429
00:27:23,800 --> 00:27:24,700
So they're in there all the time.
430
00:27:24,700 --> 00:27:27,400
Yeah, they're there all the time, and they're annoying to me.
431
00:27:27,400 --> 00:27:31,600
Now, within a matter of hours, very cautiously,
432
00:27:31,600 --> 00:27:32,800
they are going to be coming out,
433
00:27:32,800 --> 00:27:34,800
and they're going to be slowly repairing it,
434
00:27:34,800 --> 00:27:37,500
and building it out and restoring that wall.
435
00:27:37,500 --> 00:27:40,100
They build the nest out of carton,
436
00:27:40,100 --> 00:27:43,300
which is chewed up wood and saliva.
437
00:27:43,300 --> 00:27:47,000
Then they forage down along these covered trails.
438
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:48,800
You can see one along the trunk there.
439
00:27:48,800 --> 00:27:50,000
Oh, look at this.
440
00:27:50,000 --> 00:27:52,900
This must have been broken a little bit earlier
441
00:27:52,900 --> 00:27:56,200
...that opening, which is so precious to the colony
442
00:27:56,200 --> 00:27:58,200
because that's the food line
443
00:27:58,200 --> 00:28:02,600
where the termites go to collect food off the floor of the woods.
444
00:28:02,600 --> 00:28:04,200
And these soldiers...look at this.
445
00:28:04,200 --> 00:28:06,000
They are not patrolling now.
446
00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:08,900
They have pulled in and circled the wagon.
447
00:28:08,900 --> 00:28:14,100
The entire gap is closed with soldiers standing guard.
448
00:28:14,800 --> 00:28:16,300
It was on this island
449
00:28:16,300 --> 00:28:18,600
that Ed Wilson first began to wrestle with the question
450
00:28:18,600 --> 00:28:22,200
of why these creatures acted as they did.
451
00:28:23,200 --> 00:28:26,600
Why did monkeys look after each other's interests?
452
00:28:26,600 --> 00:28:31,200
And why would a termite put itself at risk to protect the nest?
453
00:28:31,200 --> 00:28:34,200
This type of altruism did not seem compatible
454
00:28:34,200 --> 00:28:36,400
with the theory of natural selection,
455
00:28:36,400 --> 00:28:38,200
where only the fittest survived.
456
00:28:42,300 --> 00:28:46,900
After 20 years of observing and recording animal behavior in the wild,
457
00:28:46,900 --> 00:28:50,600
Ed Wilson finally published a book, outlining his conclusions,
458
00:28:50,600 --> 00:28:53,300
called Sociobiology.
459
00:28:53,300 --> 00:28:57,000
But he did not restrict himself to wildlife.
460
00:28:57,000 --> 00:29:01,200
In the final chapter he treated humans as animals,
461
00:29:01,200 --> 00:29:05,400
suggesting genetic traits play a role in our behavior, too.
462
00:29:06,100 --> 00:29:08,400
This provoked a storm of protest.
463
00:29:09,300 --> 00:29:13,000
I could not publish this book without including human.
464
00:29:13,000 --> 00:29:19,200
After all, we are...no matter how highly evolved, we are animals.
465
00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:22,500
And we have remarkable similarities, in many ways,
466
00:29:22,500 --> 00:29:26,400
to our closest living relatives, the monkeys and the apes.
467
00:29:28,300 --> 00:29:30,600
What I didn't realize at the time
468
00:29:30,600 --> 00:29:31,900
was this is a no-no
469
00:29:31,900 --> 00:29:37,100
because most of the social scientists had already come to an agreement,
470
00:29:37,100 --> 00:29:39,800
incorrect as it turns out,
471
00:29:39,800 --> 00:29:42,800
that the human brain is a blank slate;
472
00:29:42,800 --> 00:29:46,000
that human behavior, including social behavior,
473
00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:52,300
is determined by the accidents of cultural evolution
474
00:29:52,300 --> 00:29:54,300
and by learning, alone;
475
00:29:54,300 --> 00:29:57,900
and that there was no such thing, for the most part, as human nature;
476
00:29:57,900 --> 00:30:03,300
that instincts do not exist, except in the most basic,
477
00:30:03,300 --> 00:30:05,800
primitive manner;
478
00:30:05,800 --> 00:30:09,300
and the human brain is absolutely unique in this respect.
479
00:30:09,300 --> 00:30:11,000
That was the dogma.
480
00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:13,400
Back in the '70s,
481
00:30:13,400 --> 00:30:16,400
the received wisdom was that human behavior was a product
482
00:30:16,400 --> 00:30:21,200
of how we were reared, a purely environmental phenomenon.
483
00:30:21,200 --> 00:30:26,100
To suggest it was in some way genetically programmed was heresy.
484
00:30:27,100 --> 00:30:30,700
Some of the fiercest criticism came from Ed Wilson's own department
485
00:30:30,700 --> 00:30:31,600
at Harvard.
486
00:30:31,600 --> 00:30:34,600
Richard Lewontin, a leading evolutionary biologist,
487
00:30:34,600 --> 00:30:37,200
was one of several influential scientists
488
00:30:37,200 --> 00:30:41,000
who wrote a highly critical letter to the New York Review of Books.
489
00:30:41,700 --> 00:30:45,100
They feared Wilson's ideas might set the stage
490
00:30:45,100 --> 00:30:47,700
for a new kind of eugenics movement.
491
00:30:47,700 --> 00:30:52,700
After all, if bad behavior were a result of bad genes,
492
00:30:52,700 --> 00:30:57,800
then perhaps people might argue for "cleansing" the gene pool.
493
00:30:57,800 --> 00:31:05,000
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology do provide a kind of justification
494
00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:12,500
for certain behaviors, including, not genocide, perhaps,
495
00:31:12,500 --> 00:31:14,500
but certainly eugenics and so on.
496
00:31:14,500 --> 00:31:18,100
And I think it's important to point that out
497
00:31:18,100 --> 00:31:20,300
because many people who are eugenicists
498
00:31:20,300 --> 00:31:24,400
use genetic determinism as an argument, saying,
499
00:31:24,400 --> 00:31:26,000
"We must do this
500
00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:28,800
because the genes have made these people the way they are,
501
00:31:28,800 --> 00:31:30,000
and there's no way to change it.
502
00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:31,900
And if this is bad for society,
503
00:31:31,900 --> 00:31:34,300
then we better get rid of this behavior."
504
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:39,200
Ed Wilson's closest colleague, fellow ant man Bert H?lldobler,
505
00:31:39,200 --> 00:31:40,700
leapt to his defense.
506
00:31:41,700 --> 00:31:43,900
I mean, everyone who reads this last chapter
507
00:31:44,900 --> 00:31:49,800
cannot see that Ed pursues a political rightist agenda.
508
00:31:50,600 --> 00:31:52,800
This is just ridiculous.
509
00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:57,600
Either they belittle the horror what the Nazi did
510
00:31:57,600 --> 00:32:01,800
or they make a monster out of their colleague
511
00:32:01,800 --> 00:32:03,200
and put them in the same line.
512
00:32:03,200 --> 00:32:06,300
And this upsets me, even today.
513
00:32:07,300 --> 00:32:11,900
I had protestors show up at my lectures in the late '70s.
514
00:32:11,900 --> 00:32:16,300
And, in one case, a group of protesters took over the stage,
515
00:32:16,300 --> 00:32:20,400
and they held banners up condemning sociobiology
516
00:32:20,400 --> 00:32:22,100
and condemning me and so on.
517
00:32:22,100 --> 00:32:25,100
And I could have...that would have been okay, I guess,
518
00:32:25,100 --> 00:32:29,700
but then one of them dumped a pitcher of ice water on my head.
519
00:32:29,700 --> 00:32:32,900
And I took immediate pride in that.
520
00:32:32,900 --> 00:32:35,000
I said...I went on and gave my talk
521
00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:36,800
...while I was getting ready to give my talk,
522
00:32:36,800 --> 00:32:37,900
I got it dumped on me.
523
00:32:37,900 --> 00:32:40,000
I said to myself, immediately,
524
00:32:40,000 --> 00:32:42,200
"This is interesting and,
525
00:32:42,200 --> 00:32:45,000
also, it's a bit of history to reflect on later.
526
00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:48,200
I believe I'm going to be able to claim
527
00:32:48,200 --> 00:32:51,000
that I was the only scientist in modern times
528
00:32:51,000 --> 00:32:53,300
to be physically attacked for an idea."
529
00:32:54,500 --> 00:32:56,800
That they disagree with him, all right.
530
00:32:56,800 --> 00:32:58,200
Ed and I, we often disagreed.
531
00:32:58,200 --> 00:33:01,500
You know, on human nature, we had our arguments.
532
00:33:02,400 --> 00:33:06,300
But that they didn't come up knocking on Ed's door and saying,
533
00:33:06,300 --> 00:33:09,100
"Ed, we disagree with you," and then discussed it.
534
00:33:09,100 --> 00:33:14,400
No, they launched this unbelievable, horrible, nasty letter.
535
00:33:16,300 --> 00:33:18,100
Undeterred by these attacks,
536
00:33:18,100 --> 00:33:22,700
Ed Wilson continued to develop his ideas on human sociobiology
537
00:33:22,700 --> 00:33:26,400
in another provocative book, On Human Nature.
538
00:33:27,200 --> 00:33:30,600
Today, most scientists acknowledge genes play some role
539
00:33:30,600 --> 00:33:31,700
in human behavior,
540
00:33:31,700 --> 00:33:36,900
but exactly how genes and the environment interact is still unknown.
541
00:33:51,700 --> 00:33:55,200
The sociobiology controversy forced Ed Wilson,
542
00:33:55,200 --> 00:33:57,900
reluctantly, into the limelight.
543
00:33:57,900 --> 00:34:00,900
He learned to use his celebrity status
544
00:34:00,900 --> 00:34:03,400
to alert the world to another passion:
545
00:34:03,400 --> 00:34:06,700
his growing concern about the state of the planet.
546
00:34:06,700 --> 00:34:09,300
The TED 2007 Prize winners:
547
00:34:09,300 --> 00:34:14,500
James Nachtwey, E.O. Wilson, Bill Clinton. Cheers! Bravo!
548
00:34:14,900 --> 00:34:17,200
I realized that I had to be more public.
549
00:34:17,800 --> 00:34:21,800
I saw, clearly, that the world that I loved,
550
00:34:21,800 --> 00:34:27,600
the natural world with countless millions of kinds of plants and animals
551
00:34:27,600 --> 00:34:30,500
in it was disappearing,
552
00:34:30,500 --> 00:34:35,200
not because people were deliberately out to destroy the natural world,
553
00:34:35,200 --> 00:34:38,100
but because in their own self-interest
554
00:34:38,100 --> 00:34:41,500
they were taking their own part of it
555
00:34:41,500 --> 00:34:43,700
and converting it.
556
00:34:43,700 --> 00:34:49,400
So one has, in cases like that, to become an activist and a spokesman.
557
00:35:04,500 --> 00:35:06,600
Sixty-five million years ago,
558
00:35:06,600 --> 00:35:11,300
a mass extinction occurred of life around the planet.
559
00:35:11,300 --> 00:35:18,300
Biologists agree that today we are beginning a new mass extinction,
560
00:35:18,300 --> 00:35:22,000
but this time it's caused by us, by human activity.
561
00:35:23,200 --> 00:35:28,000
In order to contribute to the understanding of just what is occurring,
562
00:35:28,700 --> 00:35:32,600
I came down here to the Florida Keys, 40 years ago,
563
00:35:32,600 --> 00:35:39,900
to set up some very miniature mass extinction of my own.
564
00:35:47,000 --> 00:35:48,500
Back in 1965,
565
00:35:48,500 --> 00:35:52,000
Ed Wilson teamed up with a mathematician-turned-biologist,
566
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:55,300
Daniel Simberloff, to carry out an experiment.
567
00:35:57,400 --> 00:35:58,500
They wanted to work out
568
00:35:58,500 --> 00:36:02,100
how the number of species an isolated island could support
569
00:36:02,100 --> 00:36:06,400
depended on the island's size and distance from the mainland.
570
00:36:06,400 --> 00:36:09,700
Using a mangrove island as a simple model,
571
00:36:09,700 --> 00:36:13,700
the plan was to make an inventory of every living species,
572
00:36:13,700 --> 00:36:16,400
and then wipe them all out.
573
00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:23,700
We set out to observe the re-colonization, the rebirth of life,
574
00:36:23,700 --> 00:36:26,100
animal life, we didn't want to kill the island;
575
00:36:26,100 --> 00:36:27,700
we didn't want to kill the plants;
576
00:36:27,700 --> 00:36:30,000
but we wanted to watch to see what happened.
577
00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:35,200
And, basically, that's how the whole thing got rolling.
578
00:36:35,200 --> 00:36:39,800
And now we had to figure out how to do it.
579
00:36:41,300 --> 00:36:44,900
One day I received a phone call from Dr. Wilson,
580
00:36:45,800 --> 00:36:48,000
and he said he was from the university of Harvard,
581
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:52,500
wanting to talk to me about fumigating islands in the Florida Keys.
582
00:36:52,500 --> 00:36:54,400
I thought it was a prank call.
583
00:36:54,400 --> 00:36:56,600
And I even said,
584
00:36:56,600 --> 00:36:59,900
"I don't have time to...for this stuff. I'm busy," you know?
585
00:36:59,900 --> 00:37:02,000
But he just kept talking and talking,
586
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:05,400
and finally I said, "Well, maybe this really is Dr. Wilson."
587
00:37:05,400 --> 00:37:10,400
So I said, "Well, I'll try it, and we'll see what happens."
588
00:37:13,600 --> 00:37:18,600
So we ended up with a system with a tower in the middle of the island.
589
00:37:18,600 --> 00:37:22,900
And, in turn, we would take these large tents and,
590
00:37:22,900 --> 00:37:25,000
and, and put it over this tower
591
00:37:25,000 --> 00:37:29,400
and take guide wires and put sea anchors into the water,
592
00:37:29,400 --> 00:37:31,500
and then put the gas in.
593
00:37:31,500 --> 00:37:34,500
And after two hours of fumigation,
594
00:37:34,500 --> 00:37:36,500
we'd open up the tents
595
00:37:36,500 --> 00:37:40,000
so that the fumigant would leave the island.
596
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:43,800
Anyone in a boat that would go by and see what we were doing
597
00:37:43,800 --> 00:37:46,200
would almost have a boating accident.
598
00:37:48,100 --> 00:37:50,100
After fumigating the island,
599
00:37:50,100 --> 00:37:52,600
they returned every couple of weeks
600
00:37:52,600 --> 00:37:55,600
to check which species had come back.
601
00:37:57,000 --> 00:38:01,700
Today the old buddies return to the site of their mini-apocalypse.
602
00:38:01,700 --> 00:38:04,500
Often, you could not take the boat right up to the island
603
00:38:04,500 --> 00:38:06,400
because it was too shallow.
604
00:38:06,400 --> 00:38:07,800
So you'd anchor the boat
605
00:38:07,800 --> 00:38:10,000
and wade through the water to the island.
606
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:13,700
The problem here is that there are blacktip sharks, lemon sharks
607
00:38:13,700 --> 00:38:17,000
and nurse sharks that hang out around these mangrove islands.
608
00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:20,500
So we developed a method of hitting them on the head
609
00:38:20,500 --> 00:38:23,100
with an oar when they come near you.
610
00:38:23,100 --> 00:38:24,700
And that keeps them away,
611
00:38:24,700 --> 00:38:26,400
although the blacktip sometimes come back
612
00:38:26,400 --> 00:38:27,500
and you have to hit them twice.
613
00:38:27,500 --> 00:38:29,000
I think this is just about...
614
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:31,200
I would say this is a six-ant-species island.
615
00:38:31,200 --> 00:38:33,000
I hope so. I hope so.
616
00:38:33,800 --> 00:38:36,800
You get to the island��and some of them are quite dense,
617
00:38:36,800 --> 00:38:38,100
especially on the outside,
618
00:38:38,100 --> 00:38:41,000
so you have to crawl up into the roots
619
00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:43,200
from the little moat of water around it
620
00:38:43,200 --> 00:38:46,500
��and you have to look over the entire island
621
00:38:46,500 --> 00:38:47,800
to see what insects are on them.
622
00:38:49,200 --> 00:38:52,400
I see my vision isn't what it was 40 years ago.
623
00:38:53,400 --> 00:38:57,500
Aha! Here's the silent bush cricket, Tapaliscalurida Okay, Ed,
624
00:38:58,200 --> 00:39:04,100
here's this branch, and you'll see the antennae sticking out.
625
00:39:04,100 --> 00:39:07,300
There's the insect right there in front of you.
626
00:39:13,800 --> 00:39:15,400
Ah, Xenomermex.
627
00:39:15,400 --> 00:39:18,100
No kidding? Good. Bring it over here.
628
00:39:18,900 --> 00:39:21,300
I'm going to get it under a magnifying glass.
629
00:39:21,300 --> 00:39:23,700
After several years of experimenting,
630
00:39:23,700 --> 00:39:26,500
they were able to answer some fundamental questions
631
00:39:26,500 --> 00:39:28,400
about life on islands.
632
00:39:29,400 --> 00:39:32,100
If you start out with a certain number of species
633
00:39:32,100 --> 00:39:34,900
and then you remove them, all of them,
634
00:39:34,900 --> 00:39:37,200
and then you let other species come back in,
635
00:39:38,200 --> 00:39:41,300
would they return to an equilibrium
636
00:39:41,300 --> 00:39:44,700
��that is, back to the same level, and stay ther
637
00:39:44,700 --> 00:39:49,000
��that they were at before you removed the old fauna?
638
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:53,200
The answer to that was they do.
639
00:39:53,200 --> 00:39:55,800
They come back at that level.
640
00:39:55,800 --> 00:39:59,000
The second question we asked was,
641
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:01,300
"Would it be the same species?"
642
00:40:01,300 --> 00:40:05,600
For the most part, no, they were different species.
643
00:40:06,300 --> 00:40:09,200
This work provided important scientific evidence
644
00:40:09,200 --> 00:40:11,200
to back Ed Wilson's campaign
645
00:40:11,200 --> 00:40:15,500
to preserve habitats for the world's endangered species.
646
00:40:15,500 --> 00:40:18,600
It confirmed that the smaller the area of land,
647
00:40:18,600 --> 00:40:21,700
the fewer the number of species it could support,
648
00:40:21,700 --> 00:40:24,500
and the higher the risk of extinction.
649
00:40:24,500 --> 00:40:27,100
It's very relevant to conservation.
650
00:40:27,100 --> 00:40:31,700
Before this work, I think people had this illusion that
651
00:40:31,700 --> 00:40:34,300
if we set aside a little bit of habitat
652
00:40:34,300 --> 00:40:38,000
with three pairs of some endangered species
653
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:39,700
everything would be fine.
654
00:40:39,700 --> 00:40:43,700
I think it's captured very nicely when Ronald Regan said, famously,
655
00:40:43,700 --> 00:40:47,400
"Well, you know, it's a redwood. How many redwoods do you need?"
656
00:40:47,400 --> 00:40:49,200
And after this work was done,
657
00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:53,900
we could give some indication of how many individuals we need.
658
00:40:53,900 --> 00:40:56,400
It doesn't matter on any one of these islands
659
00:40:56,400 --> 00:40:59,900
because the same species occurs on other islands
660
00:40:59,900 --> 00:41:02,100
or on mainland mangrove habitat,
661
00:41:02,100 --> 00:41:05,000
and sooner or later will re-colonize that site.
662
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:08,800
But when we're talking about national parks and other reserves,
663
00:41:08,800 --> 00:41:12,000
often there is no other site where the population's present,
664
00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:14,500
so after that population goes extinct,
665
00:41:14,500 --> 00:41:16,500
that's the end of it, the end of the lineage.
666
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:27,900
One of what's been called the "iron laws" of ecology
667
00:41:27,900 --> 00:41:34,500
is that with every tenfold increase in habitat
668
00:41:34,500 --> 00:41:36,700
made available to species,
669
00:41:36,700 --> 00:41:42,700
you double the number of species that can live there indefinitely,
670
00:41:42,700 --> 00:41:44,300
you know, "sustainability."
671
00:41:44,300 --> 00:41:46,000
So this is one of the reasons
672
00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:51,600
why conservationists have a sound scientific basis
673
00:41:51,600 --> 00:41:54,400
for trying to get larger reserves.
674
00:41:54,400 --> 00:41:56,000
It's good insurance.
675
00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:00,800
I mean, we can save more species over the long term.
676
00:42:03,300 --> 00:42:06,800
The world's species are not spread out evenly.
677
00:42:06,800 --> 00:42:11,400
Around 50 percent are found on just two or three percent
678
00:42:11,400 --> 00:42:13,400
of the Earth's surface.
679
00:42:15,100 --> 00:42:17,700
Some places, like the Dominican Republic,
680
00:42:17,700 --> 00:42:21,000
are rich in species found nowhere else in the world
681
00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:24,800
and have been designated biodiversity hotspots.
682
00:42:25,400 --> 00:42:29,100
A random sweep along a ridge in this tropical cloud forest
683
00:42:29,100 --> 00:42:31,600
yields all manner of surprises.
684
00:42:31,600 --> 00:42:35,800
It's estimated there are thousands of undiscovered insect species
685
00:42:35,800 --> 00:42:37,600
on this island alone.
686
00:42:38,300 --> 00:42:45,700
Whoa, that is a big roach!
687
00:42:45,700 --> 00:42:47,300
You smell that?
688
00:42:49,000 --> 00:42:51,000
To maintain such biodiversity,
689
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:54,300
Ed Wilson has become an active campaigner
690
00:42:54,300 --> 00:42:59,300
to protect what's left of the world's endangered ecosystems.
691
00:42:59,300 --> 00:43:01,200
It's a cloudy day today, yeah?
692
00:43:02,300 --> 00:43:03,500
I hope you like it.
693
00:43:04,200 --> 00:43:05,600
I'm not sure I like it,
694
00:43:05,600 --> 00:43:08,400
but I know a lot of the animals and plants like it.
695
00:43:12,300 --> 00:43:16,200
The Dominican Republic has been successful in creating reserves.
696
00:43:16,200 --> 00:43:20,500
The same is not true of its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola.
697
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:29,200
Viewed from space, the human footprint is clearly visible.
698
00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:32,300
To the east is the Dominican Republic;
699
00:43:32,300 --> 00:43:34,800
to the west is a brown wasteland,
700
00:43:34,800 --> 00:43:37,800
almost completely devoid of trees.
701
00:43:39,700 --> 00:43:41,900
This is Haiti,
702
00:43:41,900 --> 00:43:43,800
a country so poor
703
00:43:43,800 --> 00:43:47,800
that many people flock across the border in the hope of a better life.
704
00:43:48,700 --> 00:43:51,500
Some refugee families have settled illegally
705
00:43:51,500 --> 00:43:54,200
in Dominican nature reserves near the border.
706
00:43:54,200 --> 00:43:56,800
Ed Wilson is about to confront the reality
707
00:43:56,800 --> 00:44:00,700
of economic versus environmental survival.
708
00:44:03,300 --> 00:44:06,700
This family has chopped down trees to grow vegetables.
709
00:44:06,700 --> 00:44:08,400
Their plight is desperate.
710
00:44:09,800 --> 00:44:10,900
Hello. How are you?
711
00:44:11,200 --> 00:44:12,100
Fine, and you?
712
00:44:12,400 --> 00:44:13,900
Glad to meet you.
713
00:44:19,900 --> 00:44:22,300
I suppose this is really a tragedy,
714
00:44:22,300 --> 00:44:27,600
and that they have become what are called ecological refugees,
715
00:44:27,600 --> 00:44:30,200
that is, that things are so tough in Haiti
716
00:44:30,200 --> 00:44:33,000
that almost any solution that they can find,
717
00:44:33,000 --> 00:44:37,800
including coming over here, is going to be good for them.
718
00:44:37,800 --> 00:44:41,000
And I think, basically, from what they've told us,
719
00:44:41,000 --> 00:44:45,000
they understand that it's wrong to be cutting down the forest.
720
00:44:45,000 --> 00:44:47,500
But they say, you know, "It's just a little bit."
721
00:44:47,500 --> 00:44:50,300
That's, of course, the problem with the world as a whole:
722
00:44:50,300 --> 00:44:52,900
we each want to take just a little bit.
723
00:44:52,900 --> 00:44:55,800
And they can't...they're in a poverty trap.
724
00:44:55,800 --> 00:44:57,800
They can't solve this problem themselves.
725
00:44:57,800 --> 00:44:59,900
They need a little bit of help to get out of that trap.
726
00:44:59,900 --> 00:45:03,000
This has to be nipped in the bud, though, because,
727
00:45:03,000 --> 00:45:06,300
unopposed, it will just go on and on and on,
728
00:45:06,300 --> 00:45:08,000
and there won't be any forest left.
729
00:45:08,000 --> 00:45:11,000
And we're too near the end of what's left of the natural world.
730
00:45:14,100 --> 00:45:18,800
The islands of the Caribbean are among 34 biodiversity hotspots
731
00:45:18,800 --> 00:45:20,200
around the world
732
00:45:20,200 --> 00:45:24,800
that represent the most threatened reservoirs of plant and animal life.
733
00:45:25,600 --> 00:45:29,900
Ed Wilson believes that saving species from extinction in these places
734
00:45:29,900 --> 00:45:33,400
is an easily solvable problem.
735
00:45:33,400 --> 00:45:39,500
In his view, it just needs rich countries to subsidize these reserves,
736
00:45:39,500 --> 00:45:42,600
a relatively small price to pay.
737
00:45:42,600 --> 00:45:48,800
All of $50 billion spread across the industrialized world
738
00:45:48,800 --> 00:45:50,500
��maybe some of the developing countries
739
00:45:50,500 --> 00:45:54,200
who would benefit the most adding a little of their own
740
00:45:54,200 --> 00:45:58,100
��one payment��and it could be spread out over several yea
741
00:45:58,100 --> 00:46:00,200
��that's chump change.
742
00:46:01,100 --> 00:46:04,100
He'll go down as the man who opened the eyes
743
00:46:04,100 --> 00:46:09,300
of millions round the world to the glories, the values,
744
00:46:09,300 --> 00:46:13,600
the importance of, to use his term, biodiversity.
745
00:46:35,200 --> 00:46:37,600
I've always been disturbed
746
00:46:37,600 --> 00:46:41,900
that we know so little about the diversity of life on the planet.
747
00:46:43,000 --> 00:46:46,700
We know about 1.8 million species
748
00:46:48,700 --> 00:46:51,400
�� given a scientific name like homo sapien
749
00:46:52,700 --> 00:46:56,000
��but we know that the number could easily be 10 million
750
00:46:56,000 --> 00:46:57,700
and it could be as high as 100 million.
751
00:46:57,700 --> 00:46:59,000
We don't know.
752
00:46:59,000 --> 00:47:03,400
Like nematode worms, microorganisms or fungi,
753
00:47:03,400 --> 00:47:06,400
the vast majority of species we know, full well,
754
00:47:06,400 --> 00:47:07,700
have never been discovered.
755
00:47:08,600 --> 00:47:11,600
It's almost as though you were a doctor
756
00:47:11,600 --> 00:47:14,700
and you were trying to make a diagnosis and a prognosis
757
00:47:14,700 --> 00:47:17,400
and so on about someone's illness,
758
00:47:17,400 --> 00:47:20,300
and you only knew 10 percent of the organs in the body.
759
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:24,800
So there's a compelling need to explore the planet.
760
00:47:24,800 --> 00:47:27,300
And there are lots of other reasons, too:
761
00:47:27,300 --> 00:47:30,200
all the various new products that we could find,
762
00:47:30,200 --> 00:47:32,900
the new principles of biology that would emerge.
763
00:47:32,900 --> 00:47:34,800
But how can we do this?
764
00:47:35,800 --> 00:47:38,400
For some 10 years now,
765
00:47:38,400 --> 00:47:39,800
I've been preaching
766
00:47:39,800 --> 00:47:43,100
��if I might use that good Southern Baptist expressio
767
00:47:45,100 --> 00:47:49,100
��the need to have a single access system
768
00:47:49,100 --> 00:47:52,800
for collecting the information and organizing it.
769
00:47:52,800 --> 00:47:55,400
And I finally gave it a name in 2003.
770
00:47:55,400 --> 00:47:57,000
It was the Encyclopedia of Life.
771
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That would be an electronic encyclopedia,
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which would consist of one page, indefinitely extensible,
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for each and every one of the species of organisms on Earth
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��even if it goes to 100 millio
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��into which everything we know about that species,
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everything, would be collected.
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And as new knowledge accumulated, that would be added.
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Ed Wilson's dream of listing every living species on the planet
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is now starting to be realized.
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The Smithsonian, Harvard University and several other institutions
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are pooling their resources to create a complete Encyclopedia of Life,
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with over 1.8 million entries.
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Naturalists will be able to compare minute differences
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and to establish the evolutionary pedigrees of any form of life.
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For Ed Wilson, it is the culmination of a lifetime's fascination
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with the vast diversity of life,
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the "macroscope" that he always wanted to go with his microscope.
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What's that?
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That's a carpenter ant. Ouch!
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He bit me! How dare him
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I feel very fortunate to have reached 78 and to have spent
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�� since I began, really, as a 16 year old, doing serious science.
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You know, actually collecting, identifying and getting information
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that was actually usable as science.
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I've watched it go through the molecular period
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of a good part of half a century
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in which biology was revolutionized,
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but in the course of which higher levels of biology,
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dealing with organisms and ecosystems and classification and biodiversity,
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were sidelined.
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Now, partly because of the developments in molecular biology,
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it's bought me around full-circle.
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So that now, in my superannuated years,
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I'm witnessing a tremendous surge upward of the fields
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that I began with.
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Ed Wilson has lived through several revolutions in biology.
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Now, it seems, the DNA demons that haunted him in the '60s,
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have been transformed into guardian angels,
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as genetics helps unravel evolutionary history.
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You know, if I could have my time again,
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I think I would be a microbial ecologist.
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I would spend my time studying micro-organisms
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in their natural environment.
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I'd cut my way through forests of bacteria on a grain of sand.
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I would imagine myself in a submarine in a drop of water
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that seemed as large as a lake,
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and for one more turn around,
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I would be an explorer naturalist in a new world.
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On NOVA's Lord of the Ants Web site,
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hear from E.O. Wilson on how a pivotal childhood experience
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helped shape his career.
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Find it on PBS.org.
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