Ants in the City column celebrates one year with Motif.
“Stick to ants” he cried, hiding behind a zoom chat rather than showing up to say it to me in person at an invited seminar I gave at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City earlier this year. After a year of “Ants in the City” columns here in Motif, it might not be a surprise to our readers to hear that the research talk wove roughly traditional threads of ant metabolism and behavior with stories about the political nature of our scientific work and its impacts on communities, that don’t always feature prominently in STEM presentations. But they should, and it’s more important now than ever.
Just this summer, we found the first rolling ants (Myrmecina americana) at a Rhode Island Natural History Survey event in Johnston; the students in our lab studied the metabolic costs of reproduction, and there’s an interesting ant (TBD) swarming on the sidewalk-blooming Datura on the east side of Providence. After years of learning the tooling and machining, we’re sharing a new custom collecting aspirator model with entomology students around the country. And we’re also on the verge of being able to identify a species of ant newly introduced to New England (and the rest of the continent too). As I’m preparing this fall’s lectures though, can we really pitch to the next cohort of students that this kind of work is sustainable in our current sociopolitical landscape? Already we know that we will have fewer students this year than last due to the kidnapping and forced deportations that have taken place.
Even if we wanted to “stick to the ants” as the seminar attendee suggested, this really depends on being able to be here in the first place. Eighty-five years ago, my grandmother was one of a group of Jews who fled Antwerp during a Nazi invasion, running and swimming across a river as machine guns were fired into the water, traveling on foot for months, and ultimately finding safety as an immigrant to New York City. If she were still alive, she’d count an artist, musician, baker, and scientist among her grandchildren. We all grew up hearing her repeatedly pray, “never again,” and trusted this was a universally held truth — but here we sit watching genocide rage around the world, with more innocent children being killed every day in Palestine than in any other historic conflict.
Entomologists in my field, probably not unlike the one who chastised me to “stick to the ants,” would like you to know (and care) that insect populations are in decline. But are they speaking up about the people being taken from our cities? Ecologists would like you to take climate change seriously. But are they talking about the impacts of warming on water balance, renal physiology, and the vast numbers of people in our cities — both housed and unhoused — without access to cooling? And evolutionary biologists would have us cringe at how the “good genes” pun used in a recent American Eagle ad campaign is a eugenics dog whistle, but who among them are speaking out after Brown University voluntarily acquiesced to a deal with the Trump administration, abandoning protections for its transgender, non-binary, and racial minority students.
Through our research in the Ant Lab PVD, we are at the nexus of many different communities. We’re working with students on campus, all focusing on different majors and who, in just the last few years, have come from Rhode Island, Belarus, Puerto Rico, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Lebanon, and Syria. We visit with K-12 classes, we support our alumni, we’re connecting with neighbors across the city and state, investing in local businesses, working with staff at museums and nature conservancies, appealing to both local and federal funding agencies, and in dialog with the broader community of scientists and scholars interested in the results of our research. We collaborate with artists, we train future health professionals, and reach international communities through travel, discovery, and mutual exchange. While I’m proud of our network of interactions, it’s not fundamentally different from any other research lab’s. And for most of us right now, because we’ve been so reluctant to speak out and be political, it’s all in serious jeopardy. Our science relies on the people who do the work and for whom the work matters. Everything we do is intrinsically political, and we will keep doing everything we can to protect it, and protect us all.
Illustration by Danika Valentine. Follow Dr. Jane and her research lab on Instagram @antlabpvd or on the web lovetheants.org.