Full moon rises. Dry grass rustles. Leaves crackle. Cars rush down Palm Drive. Jagged headlights distort trees to gnarled shadow. An owl cries the wind to silver. I walk through the Stanford Arboretum, my headlamp illuminating only a narrow strip of grass. The air smells of eucalyptus bark, asphalt. I pause in front of a massive oak, pressing my face close to its furrowed bark, searching. When I find the ants, there are thousands. I watch the velvety tree ants (Liometopum occidentale) stream up and down the bark. They ripple as a red-silver sheen, like a twilit river. I trace their progression up the tree until they disappear into the leaves and sky. Their musky aroma hangs in the air, an ephemeral poem of ant pheromones. The ants communicate by marking their foraging trails with pheromones, creating networks of these trails spanning from their nest tree to nearby trees. All without centralized leadership. The ant colony is a collective organism, fierce, wild, alive. Its heartbeat echoes deep in the cavities of oak. The worker ants pulse against bark and black dirt like thick, red arteries. Each worker ripples into the next, sharpened to blood drops in the moonlight.
That night, I was surveying ant biodiversity and abundance with the Gordon Lab at Stanford, a lab that studies ant collective behavior. As I stood in the Stanford Arboretum, the crisp smell of dry oak leaves pulled me back to last Tuesday, the election night. When the results on my dorm’s projector screen became too oppressive, I ran outside. The inky darkness swallowed me. Cool grass caressed my ankles. I leaned against a coast live oak. Its rough bark kneaded out the tension in my back. The streetlights swerved in dizzy fragments. They faded to abstract pulses as I closed my eyes. The wind tasted sweet with fresh cut grass. The sturdy trunk kept me from falling. Hares chewed the grass tips, their long ears alert to the deepening night. Their sleek brown bodies dipped in and out of shadow. I opened my mouth to scream, but only a quiet gasp came out. The waxing moon pulled me out of my nausea into the dark outlines of the oak leaves above me. If there were ants, I didn’t see them. Perhaps they streamed out of the cracks in the earth beneath my unsteady feet.
I scan the base of the colossal oak that held the velvety tree ants, looking for more species. Night thickens around the arboretum. Moonshafts twist, headlights swerve. I stand swept up in the ebb and flow of ants. I part the brittle grass with my hands to reveal a line of velvety tree ants bridging their network to the next tree. No single ant is crucial to the colony’s survival. Even the queen ant can be replaced. The colony is a democracy with each ant, participating in the decision-making process. Decisions are made with a touch of antennae, votes cast with the release of pheromones onto bark. A decentralized and collaborative dialogue of diverse individuals plays out in the notches of trees. I want to join them. I could cling to lichen-cragged bark and weave sonnets out of pheromones.
I am a small woman standing in a small patch of suburban woods as the rest of America pulses by dizzy, chaotic, fragmented, overwhelming. I am insignificant. I float driftless and disconnected from human society. I voted for Hillary Clinton. I helped friends get their absentee ballots. I criticized President Trump’s climate policy on social media. If I pitched a tent here amongst the dewdrops and acorn woodpeckers and ant streams, my carbon footprint would be zero, but so would my impact on net greenhouse gas emissions. The moon climbs higher, braiding trees with light. How much can I as an individual shape society? How much is society influenced by the collective? My uncertainty streams on through the darkness, through the rush of ants.
***
I am eight years old and lying in the hot, Chicago grass. I look up at the northern red oak tree that shadows my front lawn. The tree is massive, acorn-laden, infinite leaves layering on leaves. Heat fogs my glasses. Grass stains my pink t-shirt. Soil smears against my legs. Dogs bark. Birds sing. Wind chimes. Kids shout. The distant echo of an ice cream truck fades in the shimmery heat.
I press my face close to an anthill. A whole city-state of ant apartments made of fine ground gravel. I peer into the gateway of the ant republic. Shiny black carpenter ants move in and out of tunnels. Tunnels cross borders between the trimmed suburban grass and a subterranean society. I dream of shrinking, squeezing, stretching, crawling with them into the cool earth. Living amongst moon pale roots, lost coins, leaf litter. Perhaps some treasure—an arrowhead, a fossil fern—is down there that only the ants can see. Perhaps I step on it every day, unknowingly. The ants carry bits of bugs and leaves back into their holes. I worry about how the ants will find enough food. I must intervene. I crush mooseberries in my hand and feed them to the ants. Years later, I will learn that what I call mooseberries are actually the small, rounded fruit of the basswood tree. But back then they were mooseberries maybe because they were brown and velvety like moose fur. Or maybe just because.
I smile with pride as the ants carry the mooseberries into the dark wells of their nest chambers. I decide the ants must want a variety of food. After all, I get annoyed when my parents make me eat leftovers too many days in a row. The wind chime sings, twisting as a kaleidoscopic waterfall. I feed the ants crushed grass blades, bits of leaf, a bug, a flower petal. My hands brush the entrance to the ant country. The ants brush against the tips of my fingers. Borders between my open palms and the ants dissolve in loamy waves of soil. I listen to the heartbeat of the land, leaf crackle, the anthem of the ant republic.
Shadows grow long. The cicadas crescendo. The neighbor’s porchlights wink on. I want to stay out here, feeding the ants, but I am getting hungry. The ants cannot feed me to return the favor. I’d rather not drink beetle juice for dinner. I give the ants one last look—after all I can visit them tomorrow—before walking in for dinner. I enter my house with leaves unfolding out of my curls, my palms soiled smudged. Even after showering, the smell of fresh cut grass and bug spray lingers. At the dinner table, I tell my parents about how I was a patron to ant society at large.
“They’re pests,” my dad says. “You’re helping pests that invade our house and chew up the wood.”
I blush. I see myself sprawled awkwardly in the grass. I see the ant colony devouring my food and growing, flowing, chewing through the wooden foundation of my house until the wood disintegrates into dust. I don’t return to the anthill. The authority of my father’s words holds me back. I forget the rhythms of the ant republic. I resign from my role as diplomat to the ant embassy.
Another day not long after, I pour a bowl of Mickey Mouse cereal. I poke my spoon into the bowl. Small black ants erupt from the cereal. They crawl up my spoon. I drop the spoon. I scream and scream and scream. I scream while my dad smooshes ants. I scream when the napkin becomes greasy with ant juice. I scream until my dad buries the napkin under banana peels and old pasta in the garbage can, out of sight. The ants invade—aliens creeping over the boundaries of my home—small, unseen, foreign. The walls of my house isolate me from the ants. I build an even higher wall in my mind as vast and senseless as President Trump’s border wall. I squish ants on the bathroom counter, stomp them on the kitchen floor.
***
One spring afternoon, I lie in the arboretum grass at the base of an oak. I have forgotten about that screaming little girl. She is a ghost, a buried memory. Stick-tights cling to the muddy hem of my jeans, and tussock caterpillars inch up my back. This particular oak fascinates me because it has two different species on it. Parallel to a trail of velvety tree ants streams a trail of winter ants (Prenolepis imparis). The winter ants, with their obsidian bodies and teardrop-shaped abdomens, remind me of the smooth, black stones called Apache Tears that I collected in the desert as a child. When the sun hits the ants’ abdomens, I catch flecks of silver the way Apache Tears would glint as I worried them through my hands.
A river of velvety tree ants, a river of winter ants. Each flows past the other. The two species never fight each other, despite being separated by only a ridge of bark. They never communicate with each other. Watching them, I feel as if they are living on two separate trees. If a velvety tree ant wades into the river of winter ants, she quickly retreats and scurries back to her tree ant sisters. Each species can smell the other’s otherness, a chemical language in which I am illiterate. The boundaries between them are invisible currents of pheromones, but they share the same oaken home. Theirs is a fluid coexistence tangled in leaf litter. Snatches of my curls intertwine with bark and vine. My presence blurs into the collective landscape of tree, ant, and sky.
***
Anting is what I call searching for ants. It is not a noun, not a finite moment but an evolution of moments, an act of openness and patience. I am anting with my lab partner at the Stanford Arboretum. We have finished collecting data on ant walking speed by squatting near the bases of trees and timing ants with a stopwatch. We should head back to the lab, but the woods in early spring stop us. Buds unfurling and curling root us in place. Oaks burst with fresh spring growth. Green life twirling sky, shadow, cloud. Robin song rolls off wind, covering every leaf, every twig, every stone with golden, honeyed sound. Rivers of tree ants pour leafward. Red ants wave over blue lichen. I lean forward, sucked into the ant wave, pulled into the split bark, the treelight, the tree ant pheromones smelling of overripe banana peels. The ants pull me toward the tips of low hanging branches, where they converge in red pools the way the dew clings to the grass around my ankles. Ants drip onto branch tips, converging around small brown humps.
These bumps are not twigs. They are not soil. They are scale insects, hugging bark, a still vitality welled up inside. The ants farm these scale insects for honeydew, a nutritious substance that the scale insects secrete. I have read many papers about this sophisticated agricultural enterprise. The ants are communal farmers, not corporations. They don’t slash and burn forests to increase their honeydew yield. Nor do they drain the swamp, as President Trump would put it, to plant vast monocultures. I have never before seen the act itself, the confluence of ant and scale insect, the harvest of honeydew. I hold my breath. I lean closer. The ants bend forward. I go still. They drink from the scale insect. Drops of honeydew glisten on the tips of the ants’ mandibles. Honeydew, life-giver. The manna from heaven that saved the Israelites is said to be honeydew.
The ants drink and drink, until their abdomens are swollen with honeydew. The sight fills me. I float outside the boundaries of my finite self. I float through the spindly branches, the birdsong, into the sky. Deep, blue, clear infinity. Bottomless, eucalyptus-scented, windspun, clouddrifted. I float above the treetops glowing with light, the silver honeydew, the ant tributaries, the shining hulls of cars streaming down Palm Drive, the drivers unaware of this small miracle unfolding.
***
Walking into the lab, the walls are filled with ant pictures, scientific posters, ant comic strips, and ant-themed poetry. I pass the door to the ant room, which is filled with hundreds of ants living in plastic terrariums. I wave hello to Daniel Friedman, a PhD student in the lab. Daniel stands up from his desk. The bookshelf on his desk overflows with books and stacks of papers on entomology, neuroscience, and philosophy. I see a magnifying glass, a drawing of an ant, a red baseball cap that has a satirical message threaded in white lettering: “Ants make altruism great again”. Lab members created the hat to mock Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”. The hat shoves me back to the night of the election, the sweetness of oak, the dizzy streetlights, my own individual smallness. I look down at the list of questions scrawled in my notebook. I hope that Daniel’s answers will resolve my lingering feelings of insignificance. I pull up a chair and sit down.
Daniel runs a hand through his bushy brown hair. He pulls up an image that a friend created for him on his computer. The image features a red cartoon ant, casually shrugging, as she faces two mirrors. The mirrors reflect the image of the black Rosetta stone with its white hieroglyphics.
“Ants are like a mirror with a Rosetta Stone reflected in it,” Daniel explains, “They are too alien to empathize with but too human to ignore. They are similar to us in that they engage in democratic decision-making, agriculture, and build complex architecture. Apes, our closest relatives, don’t do those things. Yet at the same time ants are very different from us, very foreign. Most people don’t even know ants have brains.”
What Daniel is saying is that we see our own society mirrored in the democracies of ants, yet their language and culture is foreign, indecipherable without the biochemical equivalent of a Rosetta Stone.
“Is this part of why you study ants?” I ask.
“Yeah. But one of the main reasons I study ants is because children like them until they’re told not to.”
He glances at the ant drawing by his desk. In the reflection of the lab window, I see my eight-year old self screaming. Perhaps it’s not just ants that children are taught to hate but people too. Entire cultures. Hatred that rots invisible like fungus under bark. Until spores erupt to the surface, nurtured by rhetoric like that of President Trump’s harangues.
“Also,” Daniel adds, “ants are a simple system for studying group decision making. There are diverse individuals that act in a way that optimizes the group. Ants make foraging decisions based both on their own hunger as well as the perceived status of the colony. If an ant is full, she will still go out and forage for food if the rest of the colony is hungry.”
For people, the abstractness of issues like climate change prevents us from making decisions that collectively benefit us. The direct effects of climate change seem distant, far removed from my daily life. I look out the window of the lab. Below me Stanford’s campus sprawls, lush and suburban. Arched buildings, green manicured grass. Carbon dioxide rises invisible through the air.
I ask Daniel if he thinks there’s a causal relationship between individual and collective behavior. He says that causality is difficult to disentangle. The individual and collective flow together in cyclic feedback. Yet I have struggled to isolate the droplets of my own impact from the river of my culture and society.
***
On a warm May night, I walk through the Stanford Arboretum. I am completing the spring part of the ant survey I participated in this past November. People flow into the Eucalyptus Grove to participate in the Stanford Powwow, a Native American cultural event. Distant drumming rumbles. I hear laughter, people chanting. The oaks ripple with rivers of velvety tree ants. Grass up to my waist jingles. Trees creak. Twigs snap. A full moon, large and honey-colored, rises over the oaks. Stars pierce the tops of the eucalyptus trees. Camponotus carpenter ants, half the length of my pinkie finger, meander up bark. My headlamp catches a sweater abandoned in the crook of an oak, a discarded beer can, half buried in leaf litter. Cars honk. A siren echoes over the drums. Drumbeats, the beating of ants across bark. Networks flow in the scratchy grass underfoot in the voices of people at the Powwow rising to one voice, rolling as a wave on the night breeze. Yellow moonlight, yellow headlights. Ants growing and flowing like trees out of cracks in the concrete. The footfalls of the other ant researchers keep pace with the drums. I stumble over hidden ruts. Oak leaves snag in my curls. I swim through grass. In the drums, I hear the heartbeat of the land I walk on reverberating. The laugher of my childhood self echoes down ant tunnels. Tree ants pulse against a round knob of wood turning it into a beating red heart, a red-painted drum. I am connected to a network of distant stars, shifting soil, pulsating trees, the ant-musk breeze that dances the trees, the dancers at the Powwow, moon drifting upward as ants drift up bark as a dancer leaps from the earth with open arms. I am part of the arboretum woods as I stumble through the brush, disoriented, searching for trees to survey. The arboretum woods are a part of me. Plants cover me in sticky kisses. The milk of moth cocoons smears my hands. Ants crawl across my clipboard. My heart drums wild.
Webs of ants and people and soil ripple together to form a community, an ecosystem. I am one small part of this community. One individual among billions of ants and people and trees and cars and rocks and stars all flung together in this universe, this moment, this stanza in the epic poem of evolution. My individual actions are small. But if I tap into the collective power of the networks that surround me, I can make an impact. My previous doubts about my own efficacy to shape the world around me stemmed from my belief that individual and collective behavior formed a sharp dichotomy. Because people and land and ants are connected, the boundaries between the individual and the collective are blurred, messy, tangled with the leafy cucumber vines that shroud the arboretum trees. Networks are wild in the sense that we cannot control them, they grow together as the gnarled roots the ants walk over.
The drums pound. The ants rush. I open my palms to the moon. I will take individual responsibility. Embrace the collective forces that inspire me. Participate in social change. Plug in. Step outside myself. Have the courage to stumble in the long spring grass. Let my isolation dissipate. Be present. Hear the drums. Plunge into a river of networks, chaotic, pulsing, wild. Have faith in the drums, the ants, my own heartbeat. Believe that my actions plant acorns. Acorns that will someday grow into oaks. Believe that the oaks will tower, embrace the stars, cradle carbon, pulse with ants. Believe the oaks will comfort people with a caress of leaves, an echo of my voice.