When I was a sixteen-year-old senior in high school, I decided the time had come to choose a group of animals on which to specialize when I entered college the coming fall. I thought about spear-winged flies of the taxonomic family Dolichopodidae, whose tiny bodies sparkle like animated gemstones in the sun. But I couldn’t get the right equipment or literature to study them. So I turned to ants. By sheer luck, it was the right choice.
