This is an interview I conducted a few weeks ago in April with Dr. E.O. Wilson during the occasion of his visit to Monroeville, where he received the Harper Lee Award at the Alabama Writer's Symposium. I was asked to introduce and interview him for the benefit of a packed house in the historic courthouse in the town square. The crowd filled the main seating area in the courthouse, and the gallery upstairs. Laughter was plentiful as he regaled the audience with tales of his life, and his insights. At 87, Dr. Wilson can still charm and captivate a room talking of nothing but science. This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

Ben Raines: I have had the great pleasure over the last 16 years to spend a great deal of time with Dr. Wilson, who insists you call him Ed once you talk to him, out in boats, out in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, here in the Red Hills. I've gotten to talk to him a lot, and ask him a lot of questions not only naturalists would ask, but any fan of his writing would ask. I always return to this theme of how do you become E.O. Wilson, to my mind, one of our greatest living scientists, but also, to my mind, one of the only rock stars of the scientific world. Hopefully we can tease a little of that out today... With that said, I am going to start asking Ed questions and we will get to hear him answer. I want to start in the beginning with this idea of how you become E.O. Wilson. I want you to talk a little bit about your family's property on Dog River. Talk about your early experiences around Mobile, your early explorations and what propelled you forward.

E.O. Wilson: It was, I guess, a rather unusual childhood. My father was rather itinerant. He was a traveling auditor for the government. I went to 16 different schools, mostly in Alabama, in 11 years. It dawned on me when I heard about Truman Capote that he had a similar childhood. I don't know whether that had anything to do with it, but it well might have, because I was an only child. When you are growing up as a boy, especially a boy in Alabama, although it might be true elsewhere, you get in with a bunch of boys of that age, and the first thing you have to do is have a fistfight. It was often that I didn't get fully adjusted.

So from the very beginning, I was taking an interest in my environment and exploring, and I have a lot of impetus that came from spending part of that time in Washington. I would go out to Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo, which was just a couple blocks away from where we lived at the time. I decided then, I was going to explore jungles. I remind you that I was only nine or ten at the time, and I had plenty of time to go through my jet pilot age, my fireman age, and so on. But I stuck with my dream of being an explorer in distant jungles. It was a boyhood dream. That is very important I think in the formation of any person's character.

By the time we returned to Mobile, and the old family home in Mobile, I was a boy of 11 or 12, and I just would take field trips with my bike all over. One of the places was a relative's home on Dog River. To get there, you would take a two lane road that led to Cedar Point. Halfway down, it turned into a dirt road, and you had wilderness all around you. And by the time you got to Cedar Point, you really were in this great marsh. You could see Dauphin Island, just a line on the horizon. Nobody much lived there at the time. That cemented my interest in natural history.

But the big difference was the Boy Scouts of America. I became a tenderfoot when I was 12, and I just ate it up. I really made friends then. I earned all the merit badges I could think of, by then living in Brewton. Because it was in the war years, all the young men who would have been counselors at Camp Pushmataha. The camp leader asked me if I would like to be the nature counselor. I liked that. By this time, I had developed a craze for hunting snakes. I was out of my ant period, primarily, during which I identified all of the ant species in the vacant lots around our home in Mobile.

I thought to myself, 'how am I going to be a nature counselor?' I had taken no courses and so on. My solution, I announced to each incoming group of scouts that what we would be doing was finding each and every kind of snake that existed in and around Camp Pushmataha. And so each day, they enthusiastically spread out and looked for snakes. When anybody found a snake, the shout would go out around the campground, "Snake! Snake! Snake!" And everybody would rush there and I would catch it.

Ben Raines: Now, these are poisonous snakes right? Rattlesnakes, water moccasins, I noticed you said "I would catch it," not, they would catch it.

E.O. Wilson: Oh yeah! (Laughter) These were poisonous. I developed a technique. I'll share it with you if you'd like to pick up this hobby yourself. (Laughter) All you need is a broom handle and a sack. This is for poisonous snakes, and we had lots. Pygmy rattlers and so on.

What you do is you come on the snake, and you push down on its neck with the stick and hold it. Then you come behind that with your hand, and slowly roll the stick forward as you move your hand up just behind the poison sacks. Then you've got it!

So, we caught every kind of snake in the Boy Scouts and I loved it. That's where I got my education, thankfully, earning merit badges. I didn't answer your question, but I thought people would like to hear the snake story. (Laughter)

Ben Raines: You mentioned that you identified all the ants. We are talking about before the internet. This would have been in the forties. So, two questions: How were you identifying the ants as a kid in Mobile, Alabama, and everywhere else you did it? And two, that natural curiosity about the natural world that you had, What is this? What does it do? Where does it live? Is that something you think people are just born with? I guess I'm asking, are scientists just born that way?

E.O. Wilson: That's an interesting question. Actually, I was just behaving like a primitive. (Laughter) That is, I think most people do, men and women, but I think little boys more than little girls, have a hunter's instinct. They want to find lost treasure and catch interesting insects and things. I could identify the snakes because I had a little guide on the snakes in this part of the country.

Ants, I didn't know the name, but I could tell them apart, one species from another. When I was 13 years old, in the vacant lot next to our house, I made a project for myself of finding every kind of ant that lived on that vacant lot. And to this day, later I knew the names because I remembered all the fine details. (Here he lists various ant species by scientific name.)

And, there was one strange-looking mound right near the sidewalk. I poked it, and outpoured these angry middle-sized to small ants, and I couldn't see anything like it close by. I remember it vividly. I had found the first fire ants in the United States. They had been introduced into Mobile, unquestionably, in the cargo of a ship. By the time I was 15 or 16, Bill Zyback, he was the linotype operator at the Mobile Press-Register, had taken a real interest in this ant, because they were extremely abundant, and were spreading rapidly in all directions from Mobile. I am sure there was more than the one mound in my lot when I discovered them.

He heard about this kid who was interested in ants and natural history. He and I got together. He wrote about the fire ants and said they were going to be a real problem for the South if they keep spreading. Now, people were complaining about them, farmers were complaining about them. They were building up as many as 15 mounds to an acre. Two hundred thousand ants per colony. I went around with him and found out a lot of things about them. I did finally identify them. I can't recall how I did that.

By the time of my senior year at Alabama, I graduated at 19, the state of Alabama was getting really concerned because they'd now become a major pest. The fire ants, they are bad now, I know that. But when they first spread, we had what's called a real plague phenomena. Invasive species like that, that are going to be successful, they often have a major burst at first when they arrive. The fire ants were like that. They were everywhere. In people's homes out in the countryside. There were actually ants getting in people's kitchens and stinging them. The state of Alabama and the Department of Conservation hired me for three months, just before I graduated from the University, to do the first study of fire ants. So I became very familiar with them.

Later, when I was a young professor at Harvard, I decided to use fire ants in our study. I knew exactly how to get big colonies of them. What you do, is you dig up a colony, and you throw the nest onto a nearby pond or pool of some kind. The ants all come up to the surface with the queen and they form a raft. You just scoop up the raft, and you have the whole colony.

This ant occurs in swampy areas, and marshy habitats. They have this remarkable habit, those of you who spend your time studying ants know it well, they have this remarkable habit, if in their flood plain environment, the water starts coming up, the workers gather in a single, large raft formation. They get the queen in the middle, and all the young grubs and larvae, they come up as a raft. And the entire colony floats until they come up against something dry, it could be a branch or whatever. They climb up on that, and then find somewhere new to nest. It's a unique habit.

Ben Raines: So, Bill the linotype operator, I would call him one of your earliest mentors. And you've spent your life teaching, and through your classroom and books, who were the profound teachers in your life who had a real influence on you, and guided you?

E.O. Wilson: Yeah. That's good. I haven't answered your first two questions, because I enjoyed telling those stories. But now I'll give you a serious answer.

I arrived at the University of Alabama along with an enormous number of veterans. It was 1946 and they were arriving on the G.I. Bill, one of the greatest pieces of legislation in the history of America. It transformed the country. It certainly transformed the south. Many, certainly some sitting here, benefitted from it. It lifted them into professions they certainly wouldn't have been in just as returning veterans.

Among veterans whom I met at Tuscaloosa was a little group who had heard about a charismatic professor of entomology who had just gotten his PhD at Cornell University and had come to the University of Alabama to teach entomology. These veterans, one was from Alabama, there was me, and there were three others, one from Canada, one from Ohio, and one from Texas. They came explicitly to work with this one mentor. His name was Ralph Chermock.

He was a perfect mentor. He encouraged us. One of us had a car. He was from New York. His mother was the founding editor of Teen Magazine. (Laughter) So, he had a car. We all piled into this car, weekend after weekend, day after day, when we could get away. A large part of our education was talking with Shermock. Then, when when we could get away from Tuscaloosa, launching out in all directions. To the north, east, west, and south all the way down to the Florida Panhandle, collecting reptiles, insects that were interesting to us. Learning.

We would walk through the streets of Tuscaloosa together at night -- we called ourselves the Chermockians -- checking all the lights for insects. Those were the days when insects came in great numbers to the lights, these were the days before the pesticides. We learned together how to identify every kind of insect we saw.

Every one of those men, they were all combat veterans, each one. One, who later became director of the Alabama Natural History Museum, Dr. Herb Boschung, he just died recently. He was local. He had a full run of B-24 flights over Germany. The one who was closest to me in age arrived in Okinawa in the final days of the fighting at the age of 17. He had some horrific experiences. Another had come ashore in an amphibious vehicle in the second wave at Tarawa. He had been badly injured and was partly disabled.

These were the kind of guys I associated with and it was a tremendous experience.

Now, I'm going to answer your second question. To have a mentor, to have friends who are enthusiastic with you about achieving something, about learning a subject, about becoming something different, about growing up who are in college, and they are attracted to a future that is exciting, that's the best way to educate a kid, boy or girl.

If you wanted me to have a tag line or a lesson, it is that we are not teaching enough or in the right way. We need to find a way to get little kids into what they do well at, what they seem to innately want to do. And there are differences. They are probably hereditary in part. Somehow, in addition to their basic education, you give them that outlet.

You encourage them to do what they seem to want to do. You never know when that idiosyncrasy, that certain kind of play, or obsession, might be a foretelling of a wonderful life or great career.

I had one of the great cellists tell me once that his parents, seeing his early musical ability, put him on cello at a very early age. Being Chinese, they instructed him that he would play for 10,000 hours over the period of his childhood. He did, and he is almost without equal today.

In other words, each kid probably has that potential. I certainly had the great good fortune of developing mine. I certainly was lucky.

Ben Raines: You've talked about ants, and learning. Being out in the woods with you, I've watched you pick up ants, and snakes, and butterflies, and dragonflies, and flowers and identify them down to the species, rattling off the scientific names, like nothing. You did it a minute ago with the ants. Do you have a photographic memory for things like that?

E.O. Wilson: No. (Great laughter). I have a selective memory. What did you say your name was? (Great laughter). No, Ben. If you have a passion about something, I think you have a selective memory for it.

Ben Raines: You've talked often about coming back to Alabama in what you've termed your later years to do the exploring you wanted to do as a kid. Visiting Alabama as if it were an unknown land, full of unknown things. You talked about doing that at the University of Alabama. Why do you think it took so long for Alabama to emerge in the national mind, the global mind, as this place with such diversity? And why did it take you so long to come back here as a scientist?

E.O. Wilson: When I was at Harvard as a graduate student, I was elected a member of what was called the Society of Fellows. This was set up by Mr. Lowell, the president. And it was incredible. When I was admitted, it gave the young men, later young women were admitted, but this was Harvard. Women were not allowed when I became a professor in 1956. If you had a lady friend, they had a special place in the back where you could dine. Not only were young women, or older women not allowed, it was considered a severe infraction to invite one to dinner.

But in this club, this society, furnished by Harvard University and the endowment of Mr. Lowell, you were given three years to do anything you wished, go anywhere in the world, without much consideration at all for expense. This was amazing.

I seized upon this, and proceeded to live my boyhood dream. I started with Cuba, and then over to the Yucatan and Mexico, and field trips all on my own, I would walk the forest for miles. And afterward, I went to the South Pacific, and explored, once again alone, making contacts as I went, everywhere. It was the Mobile swamps writ large to me. I was the second person to climb the center of the Sarawak Mountains (a mountain range in Malaysia) to 12,000 feet, collecting organisms all the way. I was the first to do that. It was such a thrill. Then on to Sri Lanka, Australia, then home, and sated for awhile, engaged to be married, I settled down, and did a lot more laboratory work.

I would go down to Alabama and gather colonies of fire ants. By the late late 1950s. I collaborated with chemists at Harvard to break the code of the ants. The pheromones that they use. That was the beginning of that field of study. We showed that ants communicated with each other not by tapping with their antennae as used to be thought, but by releasing from glands that are located all over their body, little puffs of pheromones.

So one little puff means 'Alarm!' Two together means 'Alarm, come!' Another one says 'follow me, there is food.' Another says 'follow me there are enemies.' Another says, 'take care of this object, this is a larva, wash it, feed it.' So we broke the code of the ants. I was able to talk to ants. I was able to lead ants where I wanted them to go. Alarm them, calm them down. That was very exciting.

So the laboratory work kept me down for awhile, but then as I grew older, the original dream came back. By this time, an amazing thing had happened. Biogeography - that was a field I helped create in the 60s in part by my travel around the world - was showing, amazingly, that the richest part of North America, I mean United States and Canada, was the Central Gulf Coast.

I'm talking Mobile and maybe 50 to 100 miles on either side, and then inland, along the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, and then joined inland with the Tennessee River. Alabama alone, and these are facts that we really didn't put together and decide there was anything special about it for awhile, 350 species of fish. That's a lot of fish. In Alabama, a large percentage of which are in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. In the section of the coast in Alabama, a little narrow section of the coast, a little bit on either side, the largest number of kinds of turtles anywhere in the western hemisphere. The only place in the world that has anywhere near as many turtles, and it is over a much larger area, is the Mekong Delta, and the Mekong River system.

The Mobile-Tensaw system, particularly along the coast, has the largest number of turtle species, and I believe the largest number of snakes. I shouldn't mention this, but when I was a teenager, that's what I was doing all the time, hunting down every one of them. Frogs. Salamanders. Not for every group, but for many groups of organisms, the largest number of species are here. Plants. We have in Mobile, in Bill Finch, one of the finest botanists in the nation. And Bill has made a real study of the plant species in this area.

For example, it was Bill that pointed out that whereas the southern Appalachians had been considered the headquarters of oak diversity, with 14 kinds of oak species known just in the southern Appalachians, places like the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Bill discovered that here in the Red Hills alone there are 24. That's probably the world record. The largest number of oak species in a concentrated area. And so on.

This is what is astounding about this area, and that portion of the panhandle, and that portion of Mississippi nearby. I know I sound like a circus barker, and one of your louder salesmen, but that is why it is so important that the plan I am involved with are for creating, or having the National Park Service, with Congress, create a major national park. It would include the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the Red Hills to the north, and the historic areas around Blakeley. It would be the first large natural history national park on the Gulf Coast. There is not a single one. (loud applause).

Now, what did you say your name was again? (Loud Laughter) No, Ben, I don't know how you feel, but I think I do. I think this is going to happen. We have all the pieces in place. And it is so compelling. If you take a map of the national parks, including the major national parks like Yellowstone, and Glacier, if you put it before you, these great historic parks of America, you will find that the west has most of the parks. And the east has, with the exception of the Great Smoky National Park and the Everglades, no large parks.

So, there is every reason for Alabama to have this park. It will have a considerable impact on the economy, there is no question. And great prestige. But it will also be the biodiversity park, with the most kinds of organisms, plants and animals, to be seen anywhere.

So I made my pitch, and thanks for the opportunity.

Ben Raines: If you were given a chance to have another scientific career, starting over now, with your youthful vigor and lust for life, what discipline or specialty would you choose? What do you see as the most exciting path forward in science?

E.O. Wilson: That's easy. I said it at the close of my autobiography, Naturalist. Microbial ecology. Let me tell you something. There are, at the present time, almost exactly two million different organisms known. We estimate that two million is only one fifth of the total variety of visible organisms. Things we can see, complex organisms, and things like algae, protozoans and so on. And yet those are only partly known. Four fifths remain unknown, undiscovered. Mostly insects, marine organisms, corals, and so on. That's amazing.

But when you come to microbial systems, these strange, very different genetically bacteria-like organisms called archaea, we know almost nothing at all. We know a few thousand species, and there could be millions. They are the foundation of the ecosystem. They are the most abundant organisms of all, and we've only begun to learn to study them.

I realize that it would be more attractive if you were taking up such a hobby to say birds or butterflies, but you asked me the question of what I would do.

I would take on this Lilliputian jungle at our feet. Did you know there are on the order of billions of bacteria in one gram of soil you could hold in your hand. And there could be thousands of species, most of them unknown to science. And they really are the foundation. Just think of the marvelous opportunities for exploration for young scientists.

If you don't mind me continuing to talk to you, and implore you to say, please support the park. If you have an offspring, or maybe a grandchild, who is thinking of maybe pursuing science, tell them what immense opportunities await. A lot of that can be in important discoveries made really quickly.

I might add, as long as I am in a preacher's mood, to those of you who have younger people, or children or grandchildren, or nieces or nephews, if they are interested in humanities, tell them to go for it.

Think about humanities, including creative arts, from writing to visual representations, not just from the recesses of their imagination, but from the extraordinary complexities and surprise present in the natural world. We haven't even begun to see a whole array of expressions of what we can find out, and know and see in the natural world.

Here the interview ends.