Walter Tschinkel is not like you. If you're Walter Tschinkel, the animals you love are...ants. Yes, ants. And not just any ants--the type of ants that Walter Tschinkel loves are fire ants. Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta for the initiated) are called "fire ants" because they're red and they sting. Fire ants are not cute. And they don't just ruin picnics. Since arriving in the American South around 1930 (mainly aboard steamships from South America), they've gone on periodic rampages, leaving crops, irrigation systems and wildlife in their murderous wake.
Walter Tschinkel loves fire ants so much that he's written a 723-page book detailing everything he's learned during thirty-five years of studying them. But The Fire Ants is not your average scientific tome, for Tschinkel has a way with words that most myrmecologists (biologists who specialize in ants, but we bet you knew that) and indeed most scientists lack. What other book on pests could cause James Gorman of the New York Times to exclaim:
I have just had an epiphany while reading about ants, and I would like to thank Walter Tschinkel, distinguished research professor of biological science at Florida State University.
Gorman goes on:
Enlightenment came...as I read the "Interludes" that Dr. Tschinkel has sprinkled throughout the book. These are observations and anecdotes not about the ants, but about the scientists who study them, about the personal experience of myrmecology. My favorite, an economical two-page essay called "The Porter Wedge Micrometer: Mental Health for Myrmecologists," should be required reading for any scientist who wants to write for the public.
...
This brief essay is entertaining and significant, a real glimpse of what science is and how it is done by human beings, rational and un-, grappling with technique, nature and the gathering of information.
This is what the public needs to know about science, not just the results presented in the driest form possible. My epiphany came when I realized that all scientific journals should require interludes and asides--little stories to go along with methods, discussion and conclusions.
Don't just take Gorman's word for it, though. Consider this pithy little section from The Fire Ants entitled "You Call That Pain!?," which reads like a passage from Michael Crichton's The Hot Zone:
Many southerners grow hyperbolic when describing the pain of fire ant stings, but to the connoisseur of pain, the fire ant is less than ordinary. For example, have yourself stung by the Florida harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex badius) for comparison purposes. The worker will painlessly slip her stinger into your skin, and before you feel anything, will inject a proteinaceous venom that is, weight for weight, 20 times as toxic as rattlesnake venom. By the time you notice that you have been stung, it is too late. For at least 24 hours the skin will throb with a dull, chronic pain. The dampness you feel on your skin at the site of the sting is not sweat brought on by the inflammation; it is plasma leaking out through the skin as a result of an enzyme that unglues your cells from one another. The lymph nodes nearest the sting become painful, and the victim may suffer flu-like symptoms. Even so, the harvester ant is a mere tap on the forehead compared to a Central American ant fondly known as "the bullet" (Paraponera spp.). Following a sting from one of these giant ants, a person can enjoy blinding pain as the knees go weak and the hands tremble. Lying down is recommended. Now that's a sting!
The Fire Ants has plenty of scientific meat to it, but Gorman's right--it's passages like this that make scientific literature palatable, even enjoyable for a larger audience. This is just what Tschinkel has done, and the result is nothing short of remarkable. This is the only science book that has ever had us howling out loud.
Tschinkel recently sat down with an Associated Press reporter to explain his obsession and to mount a defense of his chosen object of affection. After all, he points out, fire ants are just doing what evolution tells them to do when they invade our farmland and eat the foundations out from under our roads. He's even capable of waxing philosophical about our unrelenting hatred of these awful creatures:
Most people hate fire ants without reservation, without reflection. Perhaps this is what the fire ant has to offer us--something we can all agree to hate, something about whose reprehensibility there is no argument, something we can blame and that won't argue back.
Fire ants can bring us all together--now that's positively utopian. Like we said, not your average science book. But then again, Walter Tschinkel is not your average scientist.
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