| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
|
|
|
Here at the Academy Fishing for Ants Scuttling in and out of his office carting supplies for an Academy expedition to Madagascar, Brian Fisher looks for all the world like the industrious ants he studies. Small, wiry, and bespectacled, the 36-year-old weaves between rows of tents and duffel bags, pausing here to get packing tips from a graduate student and there to bemoan the fact that a non-ant—a mere spider!—got top billing on a poster advertising the trip. Just one month later, Fisher’s beloved ants made national headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle to The New York Times. Soon after arriving in Madagascar, the Academy’s assistant curator of entomology stumbled upon a new species that could be the missing link between ants and their evolutionary ancestors, wasps. Inside the rotting log that housed the creatures lurked a darker surprise—severely scarred larvae, evidence that the adult ants suck blood from their own young for food. These kinds of discoveries, grisly though they may be, are what Fisher lives for. Before joining the Academy last year, the affable Illinois native spent five years sifting through leaf litter in Eastern Madagascar, and emerged with more than 600 ant species new to science plus a novel insect collecting device now used worldwide. What fuels Fisher’s ant-finding zeal is more than just scholarly interest. As development inches out wilderness, ecologists are increasingly turning to species inventories to determine the areas most critical to preserve. “It’s kind of like a rescue mission for biological information,” Fisher says. “We want to figure out what the amazing pieces of the diversity puzzle are before we lose them.” Many of these biodiversity surveys leave out insects, focusing instead on animals that are easier to spot and identify. It’s as if census takers in America tallied only families living along major highways—huge populations would go uncounted. In Madagascar, Fisher explains, the same bird species are found everywhere, so just one park could suffice to preserve their biodiversity. By contrast, protecting the island’s spectrum of ant life would require four or five parks. “We can’t just rely on vertebrate data to make decisions for all animals and plants—at least some insects need to be included. My goal is to get ants generally accepted as a tool for all biodiversity work in Africa,” he says. If past proves prologue, he will succeed. Fisher moves through life with antlike determination, setting his sights on a goal and doggedly pursuing it, whatever obstacles clutter his path. In high school, he decided to become a tropical biologist, so right after graduation, he boarded a plane to Europe with little more than a bicycle, determined to learn the languages he would need later. In France, he paid for room, board, and French classes by working as a carpenter, and earned his keep in Spain on a trout farm. Returning to the Midwest to enroll in the University of Iowa’s tropical biology program, Fisher eagerly volunteered to do plant research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Every day he collected plants and took them to a botanist, who immediately identified them by their Latin names. Such certainty about the classifications left him, well, antsy. “How boring,” laughs Fisher. “A driving thrill of my career is the discoveries I can make. So I started collecting ants, because, relatively, nobody could tell me anything about them.” Fisher’s had plenty of chances to encounter the unexpected. His first Academy expedition entailed exploring some of the remotest, unmapped regions of Gabon. He arrived weeks before the rest of the team to get the lay of the land. “On these reconnaissance trips, when you’re the first one walking through and you’re just walking quietly, you can see the most amazing things,” he says. “In the first 30 minutes I saw three bands of gorillas.” To get that far, he had to prove his good intentions to wary villagers. “It actually took three days of ceremonies with the local chiefs to gain their trust and to work with their elders to map out access to these mountains,” says Fisher. His father, Robert Fisher, is amused and mystified by his son’s nomadic ways. He chuckles that, until recently, Brian’s worldly belongings fit on a single shelf, but also recalls more distressing news: Brian detained by Noriega’s troops as he did research on an island in the Panama Canal; Brian delirious with malaria deep in the forests of Central Africa. “He’s been in a lot of places we never could have found him,” the elder Fisher says. Last fall, Brian Fisher brought six Malagasy students to the Academy to train them in biodiversity surveying techniques. They helped Fisher find the so-called “Dracula” ants in January. “I’m so proud of them,” he says. “They worked so hard.” Fisher himself regularly pulls 80-hour work-weeks to juggle research, student mentoring, and writing a book about Madagascar’s ants. He’s also developing a course on ants featuring luminaries such as Harvard biologist emeritus Edward O. Wilson. Just what makes Fisher believe he can accomplish all this? Perhaps, as Old Blue Eyes crooned, it’s the same thing that makes an ant think it can move a rubber tree plant: he’s got high hopes. Maggie McKee is a freelance science writer living in San Francisco. |
Spring 2001
|
