Gathered together in the Red Hills by the king of their tribe, the ant freaks tumbled out of the car and dropped to the red earth on bended knees.

Hands clutched at the ground, pulling up clumps of pine straw, dirt, and, hopefully, ants.

Sifting through the leaf litter, the scientists began calling out to each other in Latin.

"We've got a ton of Nylanderia. Pheidole moerens isn't here is it?"

“There’s a great silphid. Spectacular.”

For E.O. Wilson, no term more endearing than ant freak



E.O. Wilson, perhaps the most famous entomologist of all time, grinned broadly as his acolytes surveyed the tiny world of ants, beetles and spiders crawling beneath the trees.

"He's a true ant freak," Wilson said, referring to one of the group, which included 2 Harvard scientists, Stefan Cover, who manages the university's massive ant collection, and David Lubertazzi, as well as 2 ant specialists from Florida, Mark Deyrup and Lloyd Davis.

No term could be more endearing than ant freak for Wilson. And no task could be more important than the one that led him to invite fellow scientists to Alabama, a place he believes represents one of the last great frontiers of biological discovery.

Wilson likened the central corridor of the state — from the Mobile-Tensaw Delta north through the Red Hills — to the upper Amazon, or remotest Borneo. He has called it the culmination of his life's work to begin to catalogue all that is here, and to help protect it.

“There is so much here,” he said, spreading his arms wide beneath a sheltering forest canopy in a deep hollow 20 miles north of Monroeville. “People think it is exciting to discover a new species. Well, it is happening all the time here.”

As a child, Wilson regarded the swamps and forests surrounding his hometown of Mobile as places of great mystery. By the time he was in college, he had begun to dream of exploring those places as a scientist. But other dreams intervened. Harvard called. And then places like the upper Amazon, Africa, and China captured his attention.

Southwest Alabama, he said, managed to escape virtually all scientific scrutiny during the ensuing 60 years.

“I was thinking about it then. And now — how should I put it — in the autumn of my career, I am here,” Wilson said. “I am participating in scientific studies. In my case, all the different kinds of ants that are here. It’s a new scientific effort to explore the Delta. That effort will go on for many years.”

Pecan Sandies in the scientists' bag of tricks



The group spent two days surveying the narrow bed of a small tributary to Beaver Creek. The creek lies at the bottom of a steep-sided valley, with walls of crumbling sandstone and clay that drop hundreds of feet from the ridgeline. The hills are the haunt of the Red Hills salamander, one of the last new amphibians to be discovered in the United States.

Wilson and crew are captivated by the thought of what other creatures might be revealed.

“Oh, this is an amazing place. This is the kind of place where you would find things left over from before the glaciers came down and changed the climate in the area,” said Deyrup, a research biologist at Archbold Biological Station in Florida.

Deyrup was on the lookout for rare trapdoor spiders and ants, but he was most excited about the bizarre bee species that he encountered.

“The glaciers never got here, but they changed the climate so much that many things just disappeared. Things either got too dry or too cold,” Deyrup said. “These sheltered ravines could have unbelievable things hiding away in them.”

Deyrup and his colleagues scattered crumbled cookies in clumps around the forest and the creek, including along a 20-foot-tall limestone wall with water dripping from its face. All of the scientists agreed that pecan Sandies worked the best thanks to a high sugar content.

Wilson placed small surveyors flags to mark the spots he baited in the woods, clearly an old pro’s trick. Within a few minutes, ants began discovering the crumbs. Two hours later, small lines of ants could be seen harvesting tiny particles of cookie and ferrying them to nearby nests.

A quick hand grab came up with a fistful of crumbs, twigs, leaves and insects. Dumped in a sifting box with a removable screened liner, the bugs were quickly separated out. The list of things found is indecipherable to the average person.

"We got a small Formica that's real dark that I thought might be rostrata. We might have gotten Strumigenys. Stefan got a Ponera exotica. I got Myrmica americana. Stefan got Myrmecia," said Davis, who specializes in fire ants. "We got Camponotus pennsylvanicus, Aphaenogaster, Nylanderia, Ponera, Hyponera opacior. Mark got Amblyopone yesterday."

"Did you mention Temnothorax curvispinosus?" asked Deyrup. "This place is just amazing."

Wilson knew that his team would be stunned by his old stomping grounds. But he bemoaned the environmental damage he has witnessed during his lifetime.

He spoke particularly of a loss of water quality, mentioning that the clear water he remembers from his youth is no more.

He said, “Whenever you have a great natural area like this, the first thought is don’t destroy it. Save it. Save the parts that are the richest. And this is one of the richest places in the United States.”