Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson

sand-plain heath of Western Australia. In the 1950s this vast area, stretching from the small coastal town of Esperance in the west to the edge of the desertlike Nullarbor Plain in the east, and covering over ten thousand square miles in area, was entirely devoid of people. Two decades before my own visit, a party of adventurers had traveled on horseback through this heath from the transcontinental highway south to an abandoned homestead on the coast called the Thomas River Farm, thence about a hundred miles west to Esperance. The terrain they crossed is one of the biologically richest in the world. In the seemingly barren scrubland lived large numbers of plant species found nowhere else on Earth. The insects were mostly unknown to science.
    With the group in 1931 was a young woman who had agreed to collect ants along the trail for John S. Clark, an entomologist at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne and the sole expert on ants in Australia at that time. The collector carried a jar of alcohol into which she dropped ants wherever she found them. When Clark examined the specimens he was startled to find two belonging to a previously unknown ant species, primitively wasplike in form. It appears to be closest in anatomy among all known living ants to what may have been the ancestor of all ants. Unfortunately, the collector kept no records during the trek of where particular ant species had been found. The Australian dawn ant might have been picked up anywhere along a hundred-mile line.
    By the time I arrived in 1955 to study Australian ants, I was obsessed with the idea of rediscovering this enigmatic species. It was already a legend among naturalists. I wanted to know whether it was fully social, with well-organized colonies of queens and workers, or less so—perhaps just partway to the advanced condition of all other known ants. Biologists of the time otherwise had no idea of how advanced ant social life had originated, or why.
    Still young at twenty-five and charged with energy and optimism, I invited two fellow enthusiasts to join me in the effort to rediscover Nothomyrmecia macrops . One was Vincent Serventy, a famous Australian naturalist and authority on the Western Australian environment. The other was Caryl Haskins, a longtime ant expert and at that time the newly appointed president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. We rendezvoused in Esperance, loaded up on supplies, and headed east in an old army flatbed truck along a dirt track to the Thomas River Farm. The flat plain, clothed in flowering shrubs and herbaceous plants, was beautiful to behold and blessedly empty—we saw only one other vehicle during the entire trip. From this base we searched outward in all directions, night and day, for the better part of a week. Dingoes prowled around our camp at night, the summer sun dehydrated us, and our footsteps turned huge meat ant nests into boiling masses of angry red-and-brown, viciously biting defenders. Was I afraid? Never. I loved every minute of it.
    We devoted one day of our search to a trip northward to Mount Ragged, a prominence on whose barren sandstone slopes the dawn ants might have been collected. The only water source, for the 1931 party and ourselves, was a moist spot on the roof of a shaded ledge, from which enough water dripped to fill one cup each hour. No dawn ants were located there either.
    Our overall effort yielded many new species of ants, but not a single specimen of the dawn ant. Because of my high expectations, the failure was one of the greatest disappointments of my scientific life.
    Our failed expedition was nevertheless widely publicized in the Australian press, and it stimulated further searches in the sand-plain heath by entomologists. There was a widespread feeling among the local scientific cognoscenti that if this special insect was to be rediscovered and studied, it should be by Australians and not by Americans, of whom more than enough had already visited the continent.
    One such