E.O. Wison
A diagram of a fire ant now hovers in the skyline of downtown Mobile. Located only a few blocks from the port where the stinging insect first entered the U.S., the recently painted ant is part of a four-story mural honoring Dr. E.O. Wilson.
Wilson was a Mobile boy who discovered the first colony of fire ants almost 80 years ago and later became one of the world’s greatest biologists. He founded myrmecology, the study of ants, and discovered dozens of new species. He created the terms biodiversity and sociobiology and also won two Pulitzer Prizes.
In 1995, Wilson was named one of the 25 most influential personalities in America by Time magazine. A winner of the National Medal of Science, his portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
He may be the most famous Mobilian that most Mobilians never heard of.
Wilson’s work has been receiving more recognition here lately. The new science building at the Alabama School of Math and Science will be named in honor of him. Mobile artist April Livingston wants to educate about his discovery by making iron sculptures of fire ants.
The mural dedicated to Wilson, named “Discovery,” was painted on the Athelstan Club building on St. Francis Street. Sponsored by the Mobile Arts Council, the Downtown Mobile Alliance and other community partners, it celebrates Wilson “while he is still with us,” said Lucy Gafford, Executive Director of the Mobile Arts Council.
Wilson sent a note of appreciation to the Mobile Arts Council that read: “It means a great deal to me to be so honored by the city I love.”
Hummingbird Ideas created the sketch-book style design of ants and a portrait of Wilson. The mural was painted by Andy Scott.
“You don’t hear that much about Dr. Wilson in Mobile, but his legacy is all around us,” Scott said. “While I was painting, people stopped and asked about the ants and Dr. Wilson. Many didn’t know who he was.
“His quote on the mural is ‘There is no better high than discovery,’” Scott said, “I hope whoever sees this mural is inspired to look him up and do more for themselves and Mobile.”
Several attempts were made to contact Dr. Wilson for this story, but he did not reply. However, he has written about his life and work in more than 30 books. There is also a documentary, lectures, interviews and TED talks that he gave throughout his career.
“I wanted within all my dreams to be a professional naturalist,” Wilson wrote in his book, “Tales from The Ant World.”
“I never gave any other option a second thought. As a result, I paid little attention to classwork, sports and social activity.”
Wilson was born in Birmingham in 1929. His parents divorced in 1936, and he was an only child. Often moved between friends, family or living with his father, who preferred road assignments, Wilson attended 16 schools in as many towns and cities.
“A nomadic existence made nature my companion of choice because the outdoors was the one part of my world I perceived to be rock steady,” Wilson wrote in “The Naturalist.”
“Animals and plants I could count on; human relationships were more difficult.”
The summer of his parents’ divorce, 6-year-old Wilson was placed with a family living on Paradise Beach on the border of Florida and Alabama. He doesn’t remember the family but said he could never forget the jellyfish and rays.
While fishing that summer, Wilson pulled a pinfish from the water too fast. The needlelike spine of the dorsal fin blinded him in one eye. The limited vision made it difficult to watch birds, but the remaining eye was sharp, and his attention turned to insects on the ground.
“I would thereafter celebrate the little things of the world, the animals that can be picked up between thumb and forefinger and brought close for inspection,” he wrote.
At 7 years old, Wilson was briefly sent to the Gulf Coast Military Academy in Gulfport, then placed in the care of his grandmother in Pensacola. She let him do what he pleased as long as he “swore to love Jesus and never drink alcohol, smoke or gamble.”
With his grandmother’s encouragement, Wilson made a collection of every kind of insect he could find. His mother gave him a microscope for Christmas, and he spent hours watching rotifers, paramecia and other microscopic organisms found in pond water. He described the adventures as “a powerful influence on the rest of my life.”
In 1939, Wilson joined his father, who remarried and moved his family to Washington D.C. Living a few blocks from The National Zoo and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History provided new subjects and places to explore. Two years later, his father moved the family to Mobile, where his ancestors lived as early as the 1820’s, just after the town became a part of the United States.
Three of Wilson’s great-grandfathers fought for the Confederacy. James Joyner was among the 4,000 Confederates facing 16,000 Union soldiers at Ft. Blakeley in the last battle of the Civil War.
Another great-grandfather, known as Black Bill, was a bar pilot guiding ships back and forth from Ft. Morgan at the entrance of Mobile Bay. Black Bill became a Confederate blockade runner, slipping past Admiral David Farrugut’s Union ships until Black Bill was arrested for running supplies from Cuba into Mobile.
The third of his great-grandfathers, Henry Hawkins, moved to Mobile from Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1840s and built the first house on Charleston Street.
Big enough to accommodate three families, the house was “filled to capacity in the early years of the Great Depression,” Wilson wrote in “Why We Are Here,” his history of Mobile. Wilson’s father, Edward Osborne Wilson Sr., brought his wife and son to live here in 1939 to get through “temporary financial straits.”
Wilson was happy living in Mobile in the 1940s. He delivered 420 newspapers before school each morning for the Mobile Press-Register and was a cartoonist for the Barton Academy junior high school newspaper. Close to nature in all directions, he rode his bike to Dog and Fowl rivers, to Dauphin Island and on the Causeway, along the edge of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
Still collecting insects, he kept black widow spiders in jars on a table on the back porch of his house, close to the ice box and garden tools.
“The poisonous black widows were kept in large jars with holes punched in the lids to let in the air,” Wilson wrote. “All were adult females and territorial, so I could put no more than one in each jar.
“No one in the family or around the neighborhood questioned my menacing little collection,” he continued. “I benefited from the wide latitude generally given to eccentrics in the Deep South.”
As a 13-year-old Boy Scout in 1942, Wilson dreamed of leading expeditions to faraway jungles. He started an “All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory” in the vacant lot next to his family’s house. His goal was to identify all species of a selected group of organisms.
That summer, four species of ants lived in the lot next door.
“I know that number with certainty because I examined every cubic foot of the grubby, abandoned space, ground and rubbish,” he wrote. “Working with a sweep net and crawling on my hands and knees, I learned every bit of it.”
In a foot-high mound of excavated earth, Wilson found a colony of strange and unknown ants. He later called it “the find of a lifetime.”
“It was teeming with ants of a kind I had never seen anywhere else,” Wilson wrote. “It turned out to be the imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, the first on record in the northern hemisphere. For American history as a whole, it was a species of destiny.”
The species name invicta means “unconquered,” Wilson wrote. “It was an appropriate name for one of the most successful invasive organisms of all time.”
“Our house was an excellent place to look for the newly invasive species,” he continued. “It was within five city blocks of Mobile’s commercial docks. Much of the cargo came from Argentina and Uruguay, the homeland of the imported fire ant.”
In the early 1940s, while Wilson was exploring swamps and collecting ants, spiders and snakes, Mobile was changing around him. World War II created a boomtown with the buildup of a wartime shipping industry and Brookley Airfield. Almost 90,000 people moved into Mobile between 1940 and 1943 looking for work in the war industries.
“The bayside wildland, which I somehow envisioned as immortal, vanished soon thereafter,” Wilson wrote. “A few miles further south from the old city, where my father as a boy had walked and hunted rabbits with a .22 rifle, fighter planes and bombers now landed. The population was growing almost faster than the city could handle.”
During wartime, the teachers were overworked and distracted, and Wilson paid little attention in his classes at Murphy High School, he wrote in “Letters to A Young Scientist.” One day he captured and killed 20 houseflies “with a sweep of his hand.” He lined them up on his desk for the next hour's class to find.
“That is the only thing I remember about my first year at Murphy High School,” he wrote.
In the summer of 1945, Wilson’s father moved the family to Decatur, Alabama. A 16-year-old senior in high school, Wilson chose ants for his college specialty. The first of his family to attend college, he took his well-prepared beginner's collection with him to the University of Alabama.
In college, Wilson became a locally famous expert on ants and was asked to study the rapidly expanding populations in Alabama. Farmers complained there were 50 anthills per acre and that ants were eating the crop seedlings.
“By 1949, they (fire ants) had blanketed Mobile and Baldwin counties and were spreading outward at the rate of about five miles a year,” Wilson wrote. “Within three decades, the fire ant reached Tennessee, Texas and the Carolinas.”
Wilson transferred to Harvard in 1951 for doctoral studies and did field research overseas from Cuba to Sri Lanka. He joined the faculty and taught at Harvard for 40 years, from 1956 until 1996, when he retired as University Research Professor Emeritus. Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology has the world’s largest and most complete classified collection of ants due to Wilson’s work.
Traveling the world to research ants, Wilson discovered they communicate chemically by pheromones and can walk underwater to harvest the bodies of drowned insects. Ants have trapjaws that slam shut in the fastest animal movements ever recorded, and they can find their way home by memorizing the patterns of the canopy above them.
“All ants active in the social life of colonies are females,” Wilson wrote. “Females are in total control. All ants you see at work, all that explore the environment, all that go to war, are female. Males are nothing more than flying sperm missiles.”
Wilson has studied ants for 80 years. In speeches and interviews, he said the most common question he gets is what to do with ants in the kitchen. Instead of smushing or exterminating them, he suggests, “leave out cookie crumbs or whipped cream and watch their social behaviors.”
Wilson refers to ants and insects as the “little things that run the world.”
“If we were to disappear, the rest of life would flourish as a result,” he wrote. “If, on the other hand, the little invertebrates on the land were to disappear, almost everything else would die, including most of humanity.”
In the 1960s, Wilson helped found the then-controversial science of sociobiology. He argued that genes have a role in determining human behavior, from war to altruism. He created the concept of biodiversity, which shaped modern conservation. He also founded the “Encyclopedia of Life,” a free, online collaborative encyclopedia with data documenting almost 2 million living species.
Wilson, 91, lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and has described himself in interviews as a “Southerner who went North to find work.”
“As the years passed, I came to realize that I always was, and will remain in the years left to me, a Mobilian,” he wrote. “There my spirit chose to live. Rational ambition could never persuade it to leave.”
Wilson wrote in his acceptance speech for the 1999 Clarence Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Alabama journalism department that he thinks of himself as a Southern writer, who “got detoured into science.”
“That’s how I most like to celebrate natural history and scientific discovery - as a writer who wraps it all up,” he continued in his speech. “I’m obeying a certain regional instinct.”
Wilson continued to write and explore even after retiring from Harvard. He turned his attention to the E.O. Wilson Biological Foundation and the Half Earth Project. He believes “if we conserve half the land and sea, we can safeguard the bulk of our planet’s biodiversity.”
One of those areas of conservation is the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Wilson described it as a “unifying entity at work in Mobile, unappreciated by most of its own people.”
“The city sits in the middle of the biologically richest part of North America,” he wrote in “Why We are Here.”
“Hard by Mobile is one of the least disturbed and most beautiful of America’s wildlands, the delta that lies between the Mobile River on the west and the Tensaw River on the east,” he wrote. “Covering more than 500 square miles, this arborescent wetland is one of the largest surviving wildernesses in the Eastern United States.”
Naturalist Bill Finch has spent his career educating about the richness of nature on the Gulf Coast. The former garden columnist at the Press-Register and former Conservation Director at The Nature Conservancy now works with the E.O. Wilson Foundation to address conservation issues in Alabama.
“It is fortunate for Alabama that Ed is one of its sons,” Finch said. “He helped bring recognition to the biodiversity of Alabama in a way that no one else could. It is hard for the rest of the world to look past football and our history of injustice to see this incredible land that needs to be understood on its own merits.”
Wilson grew up looking at the Delta from the edges, but Finch took him deeper inside by boat.
“He snapped off slender reeds and found ant colonies,” Finch said. “He blew on those stems, like he was blowing out a pipe, to get the ants out. He put them in collection bottles. It was his birthday, and he had the best time.”
When Finch was director of the Mobile Botanical Gardens, he and Wilson once sat in Finch’s car sketching out how to preserve Alabama's biodiversity.
“We recognized the Alabama River is an incredibly important place from biodiversity and human history, and we had to do something about it with a mountains-to-sea approach,” Finch said. “The problem is how do you protect the environment in Alabama, where people feel like they can make more money exploiting it?”
Wilson and Finch started the Alabama River Diversity Network to help protect and promote the natural and human heritage of the region from the Gulf and Mobile Bay, through the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. It also includes the Alabama River, stretching 200 river miles inland.
“Understanding the diversity of the basin means understanding how the diverse people of this region interacted with the landscape,” Finch said. “Ed believes humans are part of our ecosystem. To preserve it, we must reconnect cultures with the land that inspired them.”
Ben Raines, former environmental reporter for the Mobile Press Register and author of the new book, “Saving America’s Amazon,” saw Wilson enjoy the highs of discovery.
Their friendship began after Raines won a journalism competition judged by Wilson.
“Ed invited me to join a bioblitz in the Claiborne Dam area, with scientists cataloging what they find,” Raines said. “I ran late and took a shortcut to the top of the hill, where I knew they would go. There was an old guy lying on the ground on his back. My first thought was, ‘Oh, no. E.O. Wilson is dead.’”
Wilson looked up, introduced himself as Ed, and invited Raines to lie down and look at the leaves and clouds.
“I lay down next to him, and we spent 15 minutes just looking and chatting.”
Wilson shows that a wild world exists in Alabama, even if most people don’t look or know that it’s here, Raines said.
“Alabama has always been 20 years behind the curve when it comes to appreciating and protecting the environment,” Raines said. “But the wonder is spreading. People are stunned to learn how special this is. Then they get excited and want to protect it.”
Ecotourism is also growing in Mobile. Raines gives boat tours into the delta.
“This wasn't happening 20 years ago,” Raines said. “Most of this interest ties back to Ed’s work. The rest of us are beginning to see Alabama through his eyes.”
Wilson told Raines the Mobile-Tensaw Delta is as little explored as the wilds of Borneo.
“I have traveled all over the world to some of the most exotic and remote places you can find,” Wilson told Raines. “But the most magnificent of all was right where I started in this delta in Mobile, Alabama.
(This story first ran in Lagniappe in March 2021)
