JAD ABUMRAD: So we start in California.

JAD: All right. Here, Deborah Gordon.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Deborah Gordon?

JAD: At the office of an ant expert.

DEBORAH GORDON: Hi. I'm Deborah Gordon, professor of biology at Stanford.

JAD: Deborah Gordon has been studying ants for over two decades.

DEBORAH GORDON: It's because such mindless individuals collectively can do so much that I'm just entranced.

JAD: You might say she's the reigning ant queen.

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, as long as you bring up the 'reigning' part?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: When we went there I thought, "Well, let's—" she has a lot of ants, but I wanted to see what the boss ant looked like.

JAD: So she led us to her lab.

JAD: We're going to the secret ant place.

DEBORAH GORDON: Correct.

JAD: Where we found, to our disappointment, that she keeps the ants in a big Tupperware container.

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, this is the foraging area of a colony that's stuck living in the lab instead of out in the desert where it would probably rather be. And ...

ROBERT: It's a big plastic box with plastic around it, and little bits of sand on it.

DEBORAH GORDON: That's right. And so I'm gonna take off the top. Maybe we can see the queen better by going like this.

ROBERT: I've never seen a queen before. When I'm looking for the queen, what am I—am I looking for just the ant in the center of just the biggest crunch of other ants?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, usually there are a lot of other ants around her. She doesn't look much different, but she's bigger.

JAD: Do the ants know that she's special?

DEBORAH GORDON: I think the ants know that she's the queen.

ROBERT: [laughs] What does that mean?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well ...

JAD: The queen in the way we think of the queen?

DEBORAH GORDON: Yeah. I mean ...

ROBERT: But do they know her as 'Mommy?' Or not even?

DEBORAH GORDON: I don't think so, no. I don't think they know anybody as anybody, and remember she's not in charge, she's not telling anybody what to do.

ROBERT: Wait a second. Wait a second.

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: This is different than I had actually imagined. I thought that queens gave commands. Like, you know, in Alice in Wonderland?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Off with her head!]

ROBERT: Kind of thing. But she says no.

DEBORAH GORDON: She's just a big ant that lays the eggs.

JAD: That's it.

DEBORAH GORDON: That's it. Every year there's a mating flight, and all of the colonies send out their virgin queens who have wings and males who also have wings. And they all go to one place and they gather and they mate. And the newly-mated queens fly off and start new colonies.

JAD: That's how it starts: queens scatter, make babies. But that's all they do—they're just the colony's ovaries. They don't sit on a throne and decree anything, nor are there generals or even bosses. The colony somehow gets by without any of that, which is especially hard to believe when you watch these ants.

JAD: Well, tell us what's happening here. This is ...

DEBORAH GORDON: That's an ant carrying a dead ant.

ROBERT: Remember there was this one little itty-bitty ant carrying a big, fat dead ant on her back.

ROBERT: And look at this: she seems to be gradually, although with some difficulty, moving towards my elbow.

ROBERT: Then she dropped it. Then she picked it up again, then she dropped it, and then up again.

ROBERT: But now she's turning in the other direction, all the while carrying this heavy corpse.

DEBORAH GORDON: She may lug it back and forth like that for hours. Sometimes some object will get in there that they can't all carry, and they can spend months tugging it one way and tugging it the other way.

ROBERT: Months tugging back and forth on either side of one seed.

DEBORAH GORDON: It wasn't a seed, it was a little twig.

ROBERT: One of them is thinking, "This way!" Another one's thinking, "No, this way." And one's going, "This way." And one's, "This way." And that's all that's going on?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, I don't know what they're thinking.

ROBERT: Right. No, I know. I understand.

DEBORAH GORDON: One of them is pulling one way because the stick feels like something that needs to be pulled. And the other also feels that the stick needs to be pulled and they just pull.

ROBERT: God, it must be frustrating watching these mindless exchanges.

DEBORAH GORDON: It is. It can be very frustrating.

ROBERT: [laughs]

DEBORAH GORDON: I don't have very much empathy for ants. They're so—the more you watch ants, the more weird it seems the way they never get discouraged, they don't care if they do something well. It's very alien.

ROBERT: I think she hates them!

JAD: Not really. Because here's the thing: you can make an argument that ants are the most successful species on the planet. They thrive in places that are too hot for us, too dry for us, even too cold for us. They outnumber us by a factor of many thousand. In pure evolutionary math terms, they're winning. Which intrigues her, and also forces her to think about them differently.

DEBORAH GORDON: I think about what the colony is doing and then I try to think how it would work.

JAD: If you do it like that, she says, ants are actually amazing. But you have to ignore the individual.

DEBORAH GORDON: Individually, they're totally incompetent.

JAD: And keep your focus big.

DEBORAH GORDON: As colonies, they do great things.

JAD: It's kind of a constant whiplash. You zoom in, stupid. Two ants pull a twig back and forth for months. You zoom out, smart.

DEBORAH GORDON: I'm impressed that it works at all.

JAD: That somewhere between the zooming in and the zooming out, a bizarre intelligence appears almost like a phantom.

DEBORAH GORDON: I think the most intelligent thing I've seen harvester ants do is to build a little turret around the opening of the nest just as the summer monsoons are gathering. And then when it rains and floods, it's raised up so that the water doesn't go in. So when I see the first few ants coming out with their little twigs, and I look up in the sky and I see a few clouds in the distance, and I realize that there's some link between the change in the barometric pressure or something, and it really is a very tidy and effective little construction.

ROBERT: And what else do ants do? Well, let me just count them for you, shall I? Ants farm. They have livestock. Ants make gardens. Ants organize wars, have generals and soldiers and things. Take slaves. Nurse young. Ants tunnel. Evolve incredibly good and sophisticated climate controls. They can start from two opposite directions and meet precisely midway. Ants are engineers. Ants orchestrate massive public work projects that put FDR's New Deal, I'm talking about the Tennessee Valley Authority from your home state!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: That's as nothing compared to what ants can do.

 

***

 

DEBORAH GORDON: Hello?

LINDA EVARTS: Hi, is this Deborah?

DEBORAH GORDON: Yes.

LINDA: Hi, it's Linda from Radiolab. How are you?

DEBORAH GORDON: Okay. How about you?

LINDA: Good. What did you think about the way that Jad and Robert portrayed you? I think Jad called you at one point the reigning ant queen.

DEBORAH GORDON: Yeah, and then he said, you know, she hates them. And somebody else said, "Oh no, she doesn't really." And one thing that always surprises me is when people think that the study of ants is somehow cute or funny. I never really get that, you know? I'm in a faculty meeting with my colleagues, and somebody mentions ants and everybody laughs. I'm like, why are ants any funnier than yeast cells or, you know, fish? [laughs] I don't really know.

LINDA: What did you think about the focus on the queen ant in the beginning of the segment?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well I think, you know, most people do think that the queen has some kind of political authority because she's called the queen. When we study ants or when we study anything, we bring to it the ideas that we have about how systems like that work. We can't help it, and more than that, it's really hard for us to think about any kind of social organization without some hierarchy. The queen kind of represents for people a way of thinking about an ant colony, so I think it makes sense to start out by saying there's a queen but the queen isn't in charge.

DEBORAH GORDON: I think the example—so the segment that I was in was about how ants behave in a way that produces something you could call emergent. The example that they chose, it centered chemical communication and foraging trails. Actually, a foraging trail is pretty easy to understand, and you don't really need ideas about emergence. So we know where to go with our cars because we know about lots of signals for where the road is. You know, there's a curb, there's a yellow down the middle, and so I think it's easy to imagine that when ants leave the nest and they find food and they put down a chemical trail on the way back that what the ants are doing is following the signal for where the road is in the same way that we do. Of course, ants aren't really doing that because the ants don't have an idea about what a road is.

LINDA: You're saying they're not capable of sending verbal messages whatsoever?

DEBORAH GORDON: No, not just verbal messages. They're not telling the foragers that it's a good day or that there's food out there or anything. It's not that the message isn't verbal, there isn't any message. Our work on harvester ants shows that ants use the rate at which they interact to decide what to do. And so each ant goes around smelling other ants, and it can tell by the smell what job the other ant is doing. So the ants that go out to forage, that go out to collect food, they go out, they get some food, they come back in and they wait inside the nest until they meet foragers coming back with food at a certain rate. When ants are coming back fast, it means there's lots of food out there. But no ant is coming back saying, "Wow, I had a really hard time out there today!" It's just that by tuning the rate at which they go to the rate at which other ants are coming back, the whole system is tuned to the availability of food, but no ant is telling any other any anything. So there's no message, it's just the pattern of interaction.

LINDA: We find that it can be so difficult to transmit these really complex ideas that you spend your life working on in, you know, the very short span of a five- or eight-minute radio piece. And so it's ever a challenge to see how close we can come to representing the complexity.

DEBORAH GORDON: I just read this book called The Last Samurai. Have you ever come across this book?

LINDA: Yeah, I've heard about it.

DEBORAH GORDON: Yeah? You read it?

LINDA: I haven't read it.

DEBORAH GORDON: Oh, it's wonderful, and I just printed out a little piece. Can I read this to you? So this is a person being very dismissive about science journalism. He said, "What you've got to understand is that you simply can't afford to act as if you were dealing with adults. You're not dealing with people who want to understand how something actually happens to work, you're dealing with people who would like you to rekindle a childlike sense of wonder. You're dealing with people who would like you to eliminate anything tiresome and mathematical because it will impede the rekindling of a childlike sense of wonder."

LINDA: [laughs]

DEBORAH GORDON: So that's a—that's a pretty cynical view. [laughs] But I think that there is something in that, you know, that I appreciate that you guys are up against, that you're trying to make it interesting and you're trying to make it clear and you have a very fine line because what is interesting about it is often really hard to get. You know, if it were easy, it wouldn't take your whole life to figure it out.

LINDA: How often do you discuss your work with people who aren't scientists?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, I wrote a book that was a—that I thought I was writing to other scientists, but it turned out that it was widely read by people who weren't scientists. And that's where—that for me was really a revelation that I didn't have to try to speak a special different language to talk to other people. I mean, it's still the same issue, that it's trying to find a way to be clear about what I do without changing it into some other version for people who aren't scientists.

LINDA: And how are the reactions different from scientists as opposed to non-scientists?

DEBORAH GORDON: Oh well, you know, people who are not scientists feel completely free to say, "Oh, that's really cool!" You know? People who—scientists have a different—we have a different process for evaluating and judging.

LINDA: So the "that's really cool" comes cloaked in something else?

DEBORAH GORDON: Yeah, sure. [laughs]

LINDA: What did you think about your interaction with Jad and Robert?

DEBORAH GORDON: I thought they were good. They were—they were, you know, really interested in understanding it. You know, they actually were genuinely open to what I said. They didn't come with a story that somebody had already written and they were just wanting me to fill in a piece of the script.

LINDA: Do you have a favorite part of the segment?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, I—there was a bit where I was trying to say that you can't see the pattern in the ant, and I thought that that—you know, that they actually got that point, although as I say, I think the example that they chose didn't really bring it out as strongly as you could've. But I thought that it was great that they—they went that far. That's a kind of a subtle philosophical point to try to get to on a radio program. I thought that that was kind of brave.

LINDA: Thank you so much for your time, Deborah. This has been really interesting.

DEBORAH GORDON: Okay. Well yeah, I recommend The Last Samurai. Bye.

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