1 00:00:05,800 --> 00:00:06,800 Every so often, 2 00:00:06,800 --> 00:00:09,800 a giant emerges on the stage of science, 3 00:00:10,500 --> 00:00:15,700 someone who transcends the narrow boundaries of a particular line of research 4 00:00:15,700 --> 00:00:19,000 and alters our perspective of the world. 5 00:00:22,500 --> 00:00:25,200 Ed Wilson is such a man. 6 00:00:25,200 --> 00:00:27,600 His early fascination with ants 7 00:00:27,600 --> 00:00:30,600 launched a dazzling scientific career 8 00:00:30,600 --> 00:00:33,000 that led him to lift his eyes from the ground 9 00:00:33,000 --> 00:00:36,700 to explain the grand scheme of life itself. 10 00:00:39,100 --> 00:00:41,500 When he wrote his book Sociobiology, 11 00:00:41,500 --> 00:00:46,200 tracing the origins of animal social behavior from ants to humans, 12 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:51,000 he had little idea of the controversy it would trigger. 13 00:00:52,600 --> 00:00:56,300 Not since Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species 14 00:00:56,300 --> 00:01:00,700 has evolutionary biology caused such heated debate. 15 00:01:02,200 --> 00:01:03,800 Undeterred by the furor, 16 00:01:03,800 --> 00:01:07,800 he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 17 00:01:08,200 --> 00:01:11,500 Today, he campaigns for biodiversity 18 00:01:11,500 --> 00:01:15,600 and fights to conserve the world's endangered species. 19 00:01:16,700 --> 00:01:19,000 Tonight on NOVA: 20 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:21,000 Lord of the Ants. 21 00:02:00,500 --> 00:02:04,700 Ed Wilson believes human beings have an instinctive affinity 22 00:02:04,700 --> 00:02:06,400 for living things. 23 00:02:06,400 --> 00:02:08,700 He even invented a word for it: 24 00:02:08,700 --> 00:02:10,300 "biophilia." 25 00:02:10,300 --> 00:02:14,100 It's what draws us to places like Central Park. 26 00:02:15,500 --> 00:02:19,700 He also knows that human activity is a threat 27 00:02:20,200 --> 00:02:23,600 to life's incredible diversity. 28 00:02:24,200 --> 00:02:25,800 To monitor what's happening, 29 00:02:25,800 --> 00:02:30,000 these volunteers are taking part in a 24-hour "bio-blitz," 30 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:33,600 an audit of every living species in the park. 31 00:02:33,600 --> 00:02:37,200 Wilson is a pioneer of this activity. 32 00:02:38,800 --> 00:02:42,700 He encourages others to do what he's always done, 33 00:02:42,700 --> 00:02:45,000 to embrace the natural world. 34 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:47,300 ...small, gray swirl in here as well. 35 00:02:47,300 --> 00:02:50,500 Now, I want you to notice what appears to be, to you, 36 00:02:51,700 --> 00:02:54,100 just a flat surface, right? 37 00:02:54,100 --> 00:02:59,500 But this is not a flat surface to most of life on Earth. 38 00:02:59,500 --> 00:03:00,700 This is three-dimensional. 39 00:03:00,700 --> 00:03:03,600 We are sort of like the Godzillas of the world. 40 00:03:03,600 --> 00:03:06,100 We're gigantic organisms and we walk, 41 00:03:06,100 --> 00:03:09,500 crunch across this world like Godzilla over New York. 42 00:03:09,500 --> 00:03:12,500 But if you started digging down, 43 00:03:12,500 --> 00:03:16,100 you would see that you are passing through numerous layers 44 00:03:16,100 --> 00:03:20,000 of different microenvironments. 45 00:03:20,800 --> 00:03:24,200 Beneath the leaves, he imagines a subterranean labyrinth 46 00:03:24,200 --> 00:03:27,100 inhabited by micromonsters. 47 00:03:27,700 --> 00:03:31,700 An orabitid mite feeds off a fungal thread. 48 00:03:31,700 --> 00:03:36,100 A millipede is a lumbering giant in this world; 49 00:03:36,100 --> 00:03:39,500 tiny mites can hitch a ride on its back. 50 00:03:40,300 --> 00:03:44,800 Most of life on Earth is smaller than the eye can see. 51 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:49,600 The soil contains thousands of different bacteria. 52 00:03:49,600 --> 00:03:54,300 Many are exotic species still unknown to science. 53 00:03:55,700 --> 00:03:59,100 And that's how so much of the diversity is created 54 00:03:59,100 --> 00:04:01,300 in an actual environment like this. 55 00:04:01,300 --> 00:04:04,000 It's at your feet. You never see it, but it's here. 56 00:04:06,100 --> 00:04:09,800 But the creature that has inspired Ed Wilson throughout his life 57 00:04:09,800 --> 00:04:13,900 is one of the most abundant and highly organized insects 58 00:04:13,900 --> 00:04:15,100 on the planet: 59 00:04:15,700 --> 00:04:17,500 the ant. 60 00:04:17,500 --> 00:04:20,600 Here is a nest of the infamous fire ant, 61 00:04:22,300 --> 00:04:24,000 a mound nest of something... 62 00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:29,300 with something like 200,000 vicious stinging little workers in it. 63 00:04:29,300 --> 00:04:32,300 And I'm going to demonstrate, now, why it's called the fire ant. 64 00:04:32,300 --> 00:04:35,300 Now, don't do this at home. 65 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:38,900 First, I'll scrape this off and get them coming up. 66 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:44,200 And pretty soon those ants are boiling out of there, 67 00:04:44,700 --> 00:04:45,800 fighting mad. 68 00:04:45,800 --> 00:04:51,500 They're ready to sting and defeat any enemy that comes in, 69 00:04:51,500 --> 00:04:55,000 and I'm going to make myself the enemy just for a few seconds. 70 00:04:55,000 --> 00:04:56,400 So here we go. 71 00:05:01,500 --> 00:05:03,300 All right, now, if you look, 72 00:05:03,300 --> 00:05:07,400 you'll see a lot of them beginning to pause and sting my hand. 73 00:05:07,400 --> 00:05:12,400 Each one of those stings feels like the touch of a hot needle. 74 00:05:12,400 --> 00:05:16,900 And now, pardon me. I'm going to get rid of these ants in a hurry. 75 00:05:18,600 --> 00:05:19,700 Is it a chemical? 76 00:05:19,700 --> 00:05:22,800 Yeah, it's a small molecule of venom. 77 00:05:24,400 --> 00:05:25,700 It is rough; 78 00:05:27,800 --> 00:05:29,500 my hand feels like it's on fire! 79 00:05:30,900 --> 00:05:32,100 I hope it'll go away, too. 80 00:05:32,100 --> 00:05:35,200 And I've done this, but not quite to that extent before. 81 00:05:35,800 --> 00:05:36,700 Okay. 82 00:05:37,400 --> 00:05:43,300 Ed Wilson is a magic name to many of us working in the natural world, 83 00:05:43,300 --> 00:05:44,300 for two reasons. 84 00:05:44,300 --> 00:05:50,300 First, he is a towering example of a specialist, a world authority. 85 00:05:50,400 --> 00:05:56,400 Nobody in the world has ever known as much as Ed Wilson about ants. 86 00:05:57,600 --> 00:06:02,000 But, in addition to that intense knowledge and understanding, 87 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:05,400 he has the widest of pictures. 88 00:06:05,400 --> 00:06:09,500 He sees the planet and the natural world 89 00:06:09,500 --> 00:06:15,400 that it contains in amazing detail but extraordinary coherence. 90 00:06:16,200 --> 00:06:19,900 He's a scientist with over 400 published papers, 91 00:06:19,900 --> 00:06:22,200 but he writes like a poet. 92 00:06:22,200 --> 00:06:26,200 What sets him apart is his unified picture of life. 93 00:06:26,200 --> 00:06:28,100 He explores the continuum 94 00:06:28,100 --> 00:06:32,200 that extends from subatomic particles and chemical interactions 95 00:06:32,200 --> 00:06:35,200 to consciousness and culture. 96 00:06:36,300 --> 00:06:38,800 The wellspring for this unity of knowledge 97 00:06:38,800 --> 00:06:42,500 began with his boyhood adventures in Alabama. 98 00:06:42,500 --> 00:06:45,800 Nature soon cast an everlasting spell. 99 00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:51,300 I had the great good fortune of spending a large part of my boyhood 100 00:06:51,300 --> 00:06:56,100 wandering through beautiful mixed woods of south Alabama. 101 00:06:57,800 --> 00:07:01,100 You can see it's still rich in living creatures 102 00:07:01,100 --> 00:07:03,600 that I soon was picking up on, 103 00:07:03,600 --> 00:07:09,300 looking at every frog and lizard and kinds of plants 104 00:07:09,300 --> 00:07:12,300 and then insects that I could find. 105 00:07:14,600 --> 00:07:19,100 I got a lot of indirect encouragement from my parents, 106 00:07:19,100 --> 00:07:21,200 mainly because they gave me freedom. 107 00:07:21,800 --> 00:07:23,600 They didn't mind that I was going through 108 00:07:23,600 --> 00:07:26,900 what I like to call my "little savage" period. 109 00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:30,700 Well, I'm now grown up. 110 00:07:31,500 --> 00:07:33,800 I'm still, basically, a boy. 111 00:07:34,900 --> 00:07:37,700 But I'm a grown up naturalist now, 112 00:07:37,700 --> 00:07:43,100 and it takes a little effort for me to realize that I, 113 00:07:43,100 --> 00:07:48,300 and people like me, see the world in a different way from others. 114 00:07:48,300 --> 00:07:54,100 I see it as a universe of immense diversity. 115 00:07:58,600 --> 00:08:02,600 Ed Wilson's imagination thrives on chance discoveries. 116 00:08:02,600 --> 00:08:07,400 As a child he was always on the lookout for strange life forms. 117 00:08:08,200 --> 00:08:13,100 One day I saw a large jellyfish. 118 00:08:15,400 --> 00:08:18,300 I tried to figure out where it came from 119 00:08:18,300 --> 00:08:21,000 and what it was all about and why it was there. 120 00:08:24,200 --> 00:08:28,500 A little boy, I think, has an automatic interest in monsters. 121 00:08:29,800 --> 00:08:31,400 In my little boy's mind, 122 00:08:31,400 --> 00:08:36,300 I then saw the sea as something of great mystery 123 00:08:36,300 --> 00:08:39,800 of alien purpose and dark happenings 124 00:08:39,800 --> 00:08:42,900 ！and wanted to know more. 125 00:08:45,400 --> 00:08:50,700 But a cruel act of fate would determine his future as a naturalist. 126 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:55,400 Like many boys, he had a passion for fishing. 127 00:08:57,600 --> 00:08:59,800 One of my favorites was the pinfish, 128 00:08:59,800 --> 00:09:04,100 which has these sharp spines in the dorsal fin. 129 00:09:04,100 --> 00:09:06,300 Easy to catch, 130 00:09:06,300 --> 00:09:10,100 but I was enthusiastically yanking them up out of the water, 131 00:09:10,100 --> 00:09:13,200 one after the other, when one accidentally came in... 132 00:09:14,200 --> 00:09:16,000 the spine hit me in the eye. 133 00:09:16,600 --> 00:09:18,600 I subsequently became blind in that eye; 134 00:09:19,300 --> 00:09:23,100 but that, combined with my inability to hear 135 00:09:23,100 --> 00:09:24,300 very well in the upper register, 136 00:09:24,300 --> 00:09:26,500 so I can't hear bird song, meant that, 137 00:09:26,500 --> 00:09:30,500 well, I sure wasn't going to be an expert on birds when I got older. 138 00:09:30,500 --> 00:09:36,500 So I turned kind of automatically to looking at little things 139 00:09:37,100 --> 00:09:41,400 that I can see holding between my thumb and forefinger 140 00:09:41,400 --> 00:09:43,600 ！insects and other small creatures. 141 00:09:43,600 --> 00:09:48,800 And I became an entomologist, a student of insects. 142 00:09:57,000 --> 00:10:00,300 There's the question of, why did I pick ants, you know? 143 00:10:00,300 --> 00:10:02,800 Why not butterflies or whatever? 144 00:10:02,800 --> 00:10:06,500 And the answer is that they're so abundant, 145 00:10:06,500 --> 00:10:07,800 they're easy to find, 146 00:10:07,800 --> 00:10:09,800 and they're easy to study, 147 00:10:09,800 --> 00:10:11,400 and they're so interesting. 148 00:10:11,400 --> 00:10:15,800 They have social habits that differ from one kind of ant to the next. 149 00:10:15,800 --> 00:10:18,500 You know, each kind of ant has almost the equivalent 150 00:10:18,500 --> 00:10:20,200 of a different human culture. 151 00:10:20,200 --> 00:10:24,100 So each species is a wonderful object to study in itself. 152 00:10:24,100 --> 00:10:27,300 In fact, I honestly can't...cannot understand 153 00:10:27,300 --> 00:10:30,200 why most people don't study ants. 154 00:10:31,800 --> 00:10:34,700 By choosing an insect with so many different species 155 00:10:34,700 --> 00:10:37,700 and such highly organized societies, 156 00:10:37,700 --> 00:10:40,300 he had unwittingly set off down a path 157 00:10:40,300 --> 00:10:44,100 that would determine his own evolution as a biologist. 158 00:10:44,700 --> 00:10:47,700 At the age of 13, he was the first person 159 00:10:47,700 --> 00:10:51,500 to identify a new invasive species in Alabama 160 00:10:51,500 --> 00:10:55,100 ！the red fire ant from South America. 161 00:10:56,800 --> 00:10:58,700 Later, when he was still in college, 162 00:10:58,700 --> 00:11:01,700 the state of Alabama asked him to write a report 163 00:11:01,700 --> 00:11:03,800 on the fire ant invasion. 164 00:11:05,300 --> 00:11:10,800 In 1951, he came to study at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, 165 00:11:10,800 --> 00:11:13,400 and he's been there ever since. 166 00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:18,700 The museum houses one of the biggest collections of beetles and ants 167 00:11:18,700 --> 00:11:20,000 in the world. 168 00:11:21,400 --> 00:11:25,000 For Ed Wilson this was paradise. 169 00:11:25,500 --> 00:11:30,200 He was fascinated by the vast diversity of species available to him. 170 00:11:34,400 --> 00:11:40,400 In 1953, I had the opportunity to begin serious travel 171 00:11:41,300 --> 00:11:44,500 anywhere I wanted to go in the world 172 00:11:44,500 --> 00:11:48,600 and told to do something outstanding. 173 00:11:48,600 --> 00:11:54,200 So what I did was to head out for the tropics 174 00:11:54,200 --> 00:11:56,400 ！Mexico, Cub 175 00:11:56,400 --> 00:12:00,200 ！and then to the great island systems of the South Pacific: 176 00:12:00,200 --> 00:12:04,400 to New Caledonia and New Guinea. 177 00:12:06,500 --> 00:12:08,500 For three years, he traveled around the world, 178 00:12:08,500 --> 00:12:11,300 collecting specimens from tropical islands, 179 00:12:11,300 --> 00:12:15,200 just as Charles Darwin had done in his early twenties. 180 00:12:18,000 --> 00:12:21,600 Today, Ed Wilson is visiting a cloud forest 181 00:12:21,600 --> 00:12:23,500 high in the Dominican Republic. 182 00:12:23,500 --> 00:12:24,900 Oh, wow, look at that. 183 00:12:31,800 --> 00:12:33,800 What have you got? 184 00:12:35,100 --> 00:12:36,800 That's my genus! 185 00:12:36,800 --> 00:12:37,500 Pheidole? 186 00:12:37,500 --> 00:12:40,300 Yeah. I've got to get a lot of these. Hold on. 187 00:12:40,300 --> 00:12:44,900 For decades, he's been collecting ants from one particular genus, 188 00:12:44,900 --> 00:12:48,800 a group of closely-related species called Pheidole. 189 00:12:48,800 --> 00:12:51,500 Can you...great. Good, good, good. 190 00:12:51,500 --> 00:12:55,000 Okay, fine, all right, that's enough. 191 00:12:55,000 --> 00:12:56,900 I think we have enough specimens now. 192 00:12:57,900 --> 00:12:58,800 Isn't that nice? 193 00:13:00,400 --> 00:13:01,800 You think it's a new species? 194 00:13:01,800 --> 00:13:04,200 Oh, yes, and not a little one either. 195 00:13:04,200 --> 00:13:06,100 Look at the size of this thing. 196 00:13:06,100 --> 00:13:07,700 I don't know how we could have missed this before. 197 00:13:08,800 --> 00:13:11,200 It's a big ant. Great! 198 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:15,000 That's entomology! 199 00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:17,800 We should get a DNA bar code for that. 200 00:13:17,800 --> 00:13:19,100 Why not? 201 00:13:40,300 --> 00:13:44,100 Beautiful, just beautiful. 202 00:13:46,900 --> 00:13:48,100 It's amazing 203 00:13:48,100 --> 00:13:51,000 that about 20 percent of all of the known ant species 204 00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:53,300 from the western hemisphere belong to this genus. 205 00:13:54,000 --> 00:13:58,900 It's a genus that's characterized by having little skinny workers. 206 00:13:58,900 --> 00:14:03,000 But then, in addition, it has great big soldiers that do the fighting. 207 00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:04,700 And I have a soldier here, 208 00:14:04,700 --> 00:14:07,000 and that's the one that has the most traits 209 00:14:07,000 --> 00:14:10,200 that you look at in order to tell one species from another. 210 00:14:11,100 --> 00:14:14,300 Among the traits are these little striation, 211 00:14:14,300 --> 00:14:16,300 or scratches, on the head of the soldier, 212 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:19,300 so this part being completely shiny, 213 00:14:19,300 --> 00:14:23,400 and then the smooth outline of this part of the body, 214 00:14:23,400 --> 00:14:26,800 and the shape and the length of this little spine 215 00:14:26,800 --> 00:14:28,300 that it's got back here. 216 00:14:29,700 --> 00:14:32,300 What's really interesting about this, 217 00:14:32,300 --> 00:14:35,300 you know, besides finding something completely new 218 00:14:35,300 --> 00:14:39,100 in nature！species that may have been there a million year 219 00:14:39,100 --> 00:14:45,100 ！is that, gradually, we see patterns of distribution, you know? 220 00:14:46,200 --> 00:14:49,200 Certain kinds of species are found in certain habitats 221 00:14:49,200 --> 00:14:51,400 and others are found on different islands. 222 00:14:51,400 --> 00:14:53,800 And then, from that information, 223 00:14:55,800 --> 00:14:58,000 comes more and more certain knowledge 224 00:14:58,000 --> 00:15:01,300 about how these species of insects, 225 00:15:01,300 --> 00:15:03,800 in this case, ants, got there in the first place. 226 00:15:05,800 --> 00:15:11,200 Ed Wilson has discovered 344 of over 600 identified species 227 00:15:11,200 --> 00:15:14,100 in this single genus, Pheidole. 228 00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:18,300 It took over two decades to identify and compile 229 00:15:18,300 --> 00:15:22,100 all the specimens that make up this tombstone of a book. 230 00:15:22,600 --> 00:15:28,300 He drew each of the 5,000 meticulous illustrations himself. 231 00:15:28,300 --> 00:15:33,500 This is the culmination of a lifetime's devotion to ants. 232 00:15:40,500 --> 00:15:44,300 When he returned from his island adventures in the mid -'50s, 233 00:15:44,300 --> 00:15:49,200 he brought back hundreds of specimens to add to Harvard's collection. 234 00:15:49,200 --> 00:15:54,900 But the intrepid naturalist was about to have a rude awakening. 235 00:15:56,200 --> 00:15:59,700 The structure of DNA had just been discovered, 236 00:15:59,700 --> 00:16:03,700 and a new era of biology, decoding the chemistry of genes, 237 00:16:04,000 --> 00:16:06,000 was about to begin. 238 00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:11,500 Many molecular biologists dismissed Ed Wilson's approach 239 00:16:11,500 --> 00:16:13,800 as "stamp collecting." 240 00:16:14,800 --> 00:16:19,600 Leading the charge at Harvard was the newly appointed James Watson who, 241 00:16:19,600 --> 00:16:23,900 with Francis Crick, had deciphered the structure of DNA. 242 00:16:25,200 --> 00:16:29,200 Well, Jim Watson 243 00:16:29,200 --> 00:16:33,000 was a difficult person. 244 00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:34,600 He himself says that. 245 00:16:35,500 --> 00:16:39,000 He was rather rude. 246 00:16:39,000 --> 00:16:42,400 I described him as a "Caligula of biology" 247 00:16:43,400 --> 00:16:47,900 and！in my memoir！and "the most disagreeable person I'd ever me 248 00:16:47,900 --> 00:16:49,500 to that time," 249 00:16:49,500 --> 00:16:51,300 and so on. 250 00:16:51,300 --> 00:16:55,200 And yet I admired enormously his achievement, 251 00:16:55,200 --> 00:17:01,400 and I wanted to try or encourage achievements similar 252 00:17:01,400 --> 00:17:04,800 to that in evolutionary environmental biology. 253 00:17:07,500 --> 00:17:10,100 Much later, they became friends, 254 00:17:10,100 --> 00:17:12,400 but even while they were enemies, 255 00:17:12,400 --> 00:17:15,400 Watson inspired Wilson to use chemistry 256 00:17:15,400 --> 00:17:18,400 to unravel complex evolutionary problems, 257 00:17:18,400 --> 00:17:21,800 such as how ants coordinate their activities. 258 00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:27,500 Was an ant colony like a giant super-organism with a collective brain? 259 00:17:28,600 --> 00:17:31,600 How did individual ants communicate? 260 00:17:31,600 --> 00:17:35,300 Was it learned or was it coded in their genes? 261 00:17:37,600 --> 00:17:40,500 I started thinking about how I would find the key 262 00:17:40,500 --> 00:17:46,500 to turn the lock and open up the code by which ants speak. 263 00:17:46,900 --> 00:17:50,800 It couldn't be a sound like a birdsong. 264 00:17:50,800 --> 00:17:53,100 It couldn't be vision. 265 00:17:53,100 --> 00:17:55,000 It had to be something else. 266 00:17:55,000 --> 00:18:00,000 Ants can't see very well. They can't hear very well. 267 00:18:00,000 --> 00:18:02,800 Of course it had to be chemical. 268 00:18:04,500 --> 00:18:09,700 He devised an artificial nest with Plexiglas? chambers and galleries, 269 00:18:09,700 --> 00:18:13,800 so he could observe the behavior of ants in a colony. 270 00:18:16,100 --> 00:18:20,200 The breakthrough came when he noticed the ants laid an invisible trail 271 00:18:20,200 --> 00:18:22,500 as they searched for food. 272 00:18:24,100 --> 00:18:28,500 He was about to decipher the chemical language of ants. 273 00:18:29,600 --> 00:18:31,600 What I'm doing in this experiment, 274 00:18:31,600 --> 00:18:33,900 out here in the field with a fire ant colony, 275 00:18:33,900 --> 00:18:38,300 is putting baits on a blank piece of paper, 276 00:18:38,300 --> 00:18:41,700 one next to the colony itself 277 00:18:41,700 --> 00:18:47,700 and then another bait at the end of our little platform of paper, 278 00:18:48,000 --> 00:18:51,200 a little distance from the nest so the ants can't find it right away. 279 00:18:51,200 --> 00:18:53,200 What I'm doing, here, 280 00:18:53,200 --> 00:18:56,600 is holding a fire ant 281 00:18:56,600 --> 00:18:58,700 that I've just taken out of the nest, 282 00:18:58,700 --> 00:19:02,400 and I'm going to squeeze the rear end of the abdomen 283 00:19:02,400 --> 00:19:05,500 where the sting is！that contains the trail substance 284 00:19:05,500 --> 00:19:08,400 that the ants use to lay down on the ground 285 00:19:08,400 --> 00:19:13,600 and guide other fire ants to food and new places for nesting. 286 00:19:13,600 --> 00:19:16,100 And I'm going to duplicate this 287 00:19:16,100 --> 00:19:21,900 by just taking out some of that material from the rear end of the ant, 288 00:19:21,900 --> 00:19:25,500 and then I'm going to lay my own trail 289 00:19:25,500 --> 00:19:30,000 and talk to the ants to lead them to where I want them to go. 290 00:19:34,400 --> 00:19:37,500 And beginning to work, 291 00:19:38,000 --> 00:19:40,000 and yes, it's going to work. 292 00:19:44,800 --> 00:19:46,700 And now, just a few minutes later, 293 00:19:46,700 --> 00:19:48,200 after I laid my trail, 294 00:19:48,200 --> 00:19:52,500 the ants themselves are laying their trail on top of that, 295 00:19:52,500 --> 00:19:55,000 and the result is a very strong trail. 296 00:19:55,000 --> 00:19:57,200 And quite a few ants now are going back and forth. 297 00:19:57,200 --> 00:20:01,200 And they'll do that for hours, until they collect all that food. 298 00:20:04,200 --> 00:20:08,300 Examples besides the trail substance include alarm; 299 00:20:08,300 --> 00:20:10,900 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 00:20:15,200 --> 00:20:16,800 which kind of an enemy it is. 302 00:20:16,800 --> 00:20:21,100 There are signals that tell other ants about a new nest site, 303 00:20:21,100 --> 00:20:24,000 you know, "where we don't... this is not such a hot dig, 304 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:25,200 so we'll go somewhere else." 305 00:20:25,200 --> 00:20:30,100 And then there are signals that indicate what caste you belong to, 306 00:20:30,100 --> 00:20:33,200 you know, like, "Hey, I'm a queen, you know. Take care of me. 307 00:20:33,200 --> 00:20:34,700 I lay the eggs around here." 308 00:20:35,200 --> 00:20:38,100 And gradually, with chemists and biologists working together, 309 00:20:38,100 --> 00:20:39,200 we've worked out this vocabulary. 310 00:20:39,200 --> 00:20:40,600 In the case of fire ants, 311 00:20:40,600 --> 00:20:45,200 we found that they talk with between 10 and 20 of these signals. 312 00:20:45,200 --> 00:20:49,600 My favorite find was how ants tell us that a fellow ant is dead. 313 00:20:49,600 --> 00:20:52,400 It's not enough for the ant to be lying 314 00:20:52,400 --> 00:20:54,100 still with his legs sticking up in the air. 315 00:20:54,100 --> 00:20:57,100 It has to have a certain decomposition substance 316 00:20:57,100 --> 00:20:58,600 that it only gets after a couple of days. 317 00:20:58,600 --> 00:21:00,100 That turns out to be oleic acid. 318 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 321 00:21:13,100 --> 00:21:15,100 and then rejoins the living. 322 00:21:19,300 --> 00:21:22,300 This study of ants has shed a lot of light 323 00:21:22,300 --> 00:21:26,700 on how animals generally communicate by chemicals. 324 00:21:26,700 --> 00:21:30,800 And we now know that most kinds of animals do most of their communication 325 00:21:30,800 --> 00:21:32,400 with pheromones, 326 00:21:32,400 --> 00:21:37,100 talking with the use of chemicals that they taste and smell. 327 00:21:38,100 --> 00:21:41,200 Ed Wilson realized that the code for the chemicals 328 00:21:41,200 --> 00:21:46,100 that determined the ants' behavior must be written in their genes. 329 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 00:21:49,700 --> 00:21:52,900 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 00:47:57,800 --> 00:48:01,600 That would be an electronic encyclopedia, 772 00:48:02,300 --> 00:48:07,100 which would consist of one page, indefinitely extensible, 773 00:48:07,100 --> 00:48:11,900 for each and every one of the species of organisms on Earth 774 00:48:11,900 --> 00:48:14,100 ！even if it goes to 100 millio 775 00:48:14,800 --> 00:48:18,100 ！into which everything we know about that species, 776 00:48:18,100 --> 00:48:21,100 everything, would be collected. 777 00:48:21,100 --> 00:48:25,100 And as new knowledge accumulated, that would be added. 778 00:48:26,700 --> 00:48:31,000 Ed Wilson's dream of listing every living species on the planet 779 00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:33,000 is now starting to be realized. 780 00:48:33,000 --> 00:48:37,900 The Smithsonian, Harvard University and several other institutions 781 00:48:37,900 --> 00:48:43,400 are pooling their resources to create a complete Encyclopedia of Life, 782 00:48:43,400 --> 00:48:46,400 with over 1.8 million entries. 783 00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:51,800 Naturalists will be able to compare minute differences 784 00:48:51,800 --> 00:48:56,700 and to establish the evolutionary pedigrees of any form of life. 785 00:48:57,600 --> 00:49:02,000 For Ed Wilson, it is the culmination of a lifetime's fascination 786 00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:04,300 with the vast diversity of life, 787 00:49:05,500 --> 00:49:09,800 the "macroscope" that he always wanted to go with his microscope. 788 00:49:28,200 --> 00:49:29,400 What's that? 789 00:49:29,400 --> 00:49:31,800 That's a carpenter ant. Ouch! 790 00:49:32,400 --> 00:49:35,300 He bit me! How dare him 791 00:49:36,100 --> 00:49:42,300 I feel very fortunate to have reached 78 and to have spent 792 00:49:42,300 --> 00:49:47,100 ！ since I began, really, as a 16 year old, doing serious science. 793 00:49:47,100 --> 00:49:50,400 You know, actually collecting, identifying and getting information 794 00:49:50,400 --> 00:49:53,300 that was actually usable as science. 795 00:49:53,300 --> 00:49:57,900 I've watched it go through the molecular period 796 00:49:57,900 --> 00:50:00,700 of a good part of half a century 797 00:50:00,700 --> 00:50:03,700 in which biology was revolutionized, 798 00:50:03,700 --> 00:50:07,300 but in the course of which higher levels of biology, 799 00:50:07,300 --> 00:50:12,100 dealing with organisms and ecosystems and classification and biodiversity, 800 00:50:12,100 --> 00:50:13,900 were sidelined. 801 00:50:13,900 --> 00:50:18,200 Now, partly because of the developments in molecular biology, 802 00:50:18,200 --> 00:50:20,100 it's bought me around full-circle. 803 00:50:20,100 --> 00:50:24,000 So that now, in my superannuated years, 804 00:50:24,000 --> 00:50:32,000 I'm witnessing a tremendous surge upward of the fields 805 00:50:32,100 --> 00:50:33,200 that I began with. 806 00:50:37,200 --> 00:50:41,000 Ed Wilson has lived through several revolutions in biology. 807 00:50:41,900 --> 00:50:46,100 Now, it seems, the DNA demons that haunted him in the '60s, 808 00:50:46,100 --> 00:50:49,700 have been transformed into guardian angels, 809 00:50:49,700 --> 00:50:54,700 as genetics helps unravel evolutionary history. 810 00:50:55,800 --> 00:50:58,500 You know, if I could have my time again, 811 00:50:58,500 --> 00:51:02,100 I think I would be a microbial ecologist. 812 00:51:02,100 --> 00:51:06,400 I would spend my time studying micro-organisms 813 00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:09,300 in their natural environment. 814 00:51:10,000 --> 00:51:14,700 I'd cut my way through forests of bacteria on a grain of sand. 815 00:51:14,700 --> 00:51:20,400 I would imagine myself in a submarine in a drop of water 816 00:51:20,400 --> 00:51:22,700 that seemed as large as a lake, 817 00:51:22,700 --> 00:51:25,700 and for one more turn around, 818 00:51:25,700 --> 00:51:31,500 I would be an explorer naturalist in a new world. 819 00:51:57,200 --> 00:51:59,300 On NOVA's Lord of the Ants Web site, 820 00:51:59,300 --> 00:52:02,700 hear from E.O. Wilson on how a pivotal childhood experience 821 00:52:02,700 --> 00:52:04,300 helped shape his career. 822 00:52:04,300 --> 00:52:06,700 Find it on PBS.org.