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Later, in the Costa Rican rain forest, I found an even more remarkable response by another species (Pheidole cephalica) to rain or rising water that threatens to flood their nests. When I placed as little as a drop or two at the entrance of a nest, minor workers quickly mobilized the colony, and the whole emigrated within minutes to another location.
Discoveries like these, whether minor or important—and who is to say at first which it will be?—can be made only rarely without a thorough advance knowledge of the organisms studied. This precon...
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It makes urgent the lesson of knowing where you are and what to look for when doing field research.
Invasive species are the second most important cause of extinctions of native species, exceeded only by the destruction of habitats through human activity. To learn more of the details of the great invasive threat, and to find solutions before it has reached catastrophic levels, will require far more science and science-based technology than we now possess. Humanity needs more experts who have the passion and breadth of knowledge to know what to look for in the first place. That’s where you come in, and why I have told you this story of New Caledonia’s threatened bull ant.
