In Conversation: Catherine Chalmers, Barrett Klein and Oliver Milman

An in-person discussion at The Drawing Center focusing on the intersection of science, nature and culture, presented on the occasion of Catherine Chalmers' exhibition We Rule. Chalmers was joined in conversation by Oliver Milman, environmental correspondent at The Guardian US, and scientist Barrett Klein.

In We Rule, Chalmers created a site-specific drawing installation in The Drawing Center’s lower-level gallery and corridor that depicts the underground labyrinth of an ant colony inspired by her observation of, and engagement with more than one dozen colonies of leafcutter ants on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. For Chalmers, leafcutter ants are metaphors for humanity’s life on earth: they farm, communicate, and collaborate; they also colonize, battle, and destroy. Yet the drawings inWe Rule highlight a significant way that the insects diverge from humans—as an integrated part of their ecosystem, the ants carry out their actions in harmony with the earth.

Aimee Good:
Welcome everybody. Welcome. Hello, my name is Aimee Good. And I'm the Director of Education and Community Programs here at the Drawing Center. It's great we have such a full house this evening. We're just welcoming some more folks coming in. Before we begin, on behalf of the Drawing Center, I acknowledge and pay respect to the Lenape peoples, their elders, both past and present and future generations on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their home here in New York City today. Before turning over the program to Olga Tetkowski, the Drawing Center's deputy director and curator of this exhibition, which is fantastic. I'd like to share that support for our public program this evening is made possible by the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation. Major support provided by the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation and the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation. Additional support is provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Claire and Theodore Morse Foundation. We're very grateful. Olga.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Okay, thank you. Thank you everyone. Can you hear me? Great. It's a pleasure to welcome all of you and to welcome our guests tonight. We have Entomologist, Barrett Klein, of course, our artist Catherine Chalmers, and the environmental correspondent for The Guardian, The US Guardian. Yes?

Oliver Milman:
Yes.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Oliver Milman. So this evening we hope to bring together the ideas of culture, art, and nature. And I think being in this space and being in a museum looking at and thinking about ants and bugs in general is a unique opportunity, and I'm hoping that I have questions, but mostly I really want these three lovely people here to really just go with it. I'm not rigid at all.

So I wrote all this stuff, but really the main thing I want to start by saying is that Catherine and I have been talking about this for many years now, and I came to ants in a very funny way. I actually have a strange fear of them. As a little kid... oh, sorry, can you hear me now? Yes. So as a little kid, I was in my aunt's garden, and must have stepped on ant hill, and was covered by ants. So since that childhood memory, I've been freaked out by them, but also truly fascinated by them. And so when I first saw a mock up in Catherine's studio of the piece that is now on our walls, I was totally intrigued and fascinated and that is where this project started. So here we are many years later.

First, I want to introduce our panelists. Catherine Chalmers is a Guggenheim fellow. She holds a BS in engineering from Stanford University, and an MFA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She has exhibited her artwork widely, including at MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA, and the Kunsthalle in Vienna. There are two books that have been published by Aperture on her work, food chain and the American Cockroach. Her video Leafcutters, which is on view here, won best Environmental Short at the 2018 Natourale Film Festival in West Baden Germany. Hopefully I said that okay. And in 2019, it won the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives in New York City.

Barrett Klein is an entomologist based at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he studies the sleep of social insects, explores the connections between science and art and creates entomo art. Did I get that right? Entomo Art. Great. Sometimes collaborating with his youth social subjects. Barrett used to create exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History and still dreams that he is fabricating faux insects for dioramas. [inaudible 00:05:16], awesome. He is writing a book about cultural entomology for Timber Press and ants. Hopefully Catherine's work will definitely be in this. Yes. Awesome.

Oliver Millman is an environment correspondent at The Guardian US. He has firsthand experience of the world's environmental crises covering the vanishing ice of arctic Alaska, the charred remains of towns emulated in California, and the roofless abandoned communities of hurricane Puerto Rico. He helped launch the Guardian's operation in Australia, charting the tightening grip of climate change upon cities, farmers, and the natural wonder of the Great Barrier Reef. He is writing on the environment business and the media industry. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Age in Australia and the Ecologists and New Internationalists in his native UK. The Insect Crisis, the Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World was published by W. W. Norton, this book, which has been with me for a year and Atlantic Books in the UK.

So I'm going to start by asking each of you a question just to be a little specific and get more history about each of you. And then I will ask another question that I hope will just lead to a conversation. I'm not sure if everyone's... Is it okay if we get interrupted with questions? I think let's just go with it. Okay. So Catherine, we'll start with you as the artist, you have a long history of focusing on insects in your art. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what led you here?

Catherine Chalmers:
Is it on? Hello. Oh, hi. Thank you all for coming tonight. This is amazing. Sorry we don't have more chairs. Yeah, I've been working with insects for a really long time. And surprising, a little bit to me, I mean, Oliver also said he was surprised his first book would be about insects. And I wasn't one of these little kids who played with bugs and then continued. I think the thing that attracted me to them first all was that they are so different from us and they offer a very non mammalian view of how to look at life around us. So their difference in the craziness of the things they do, like praying mantis', she'll bite the head off of her mate before, during, or after she's having sex. I mean, these things were interesting to me. And that crossed with the fact that we dislike them. And so I found those two things quite interesting.

And then also fundamentally, they essentially are the engineers of the ecosystem. So those three things put together were a really rich terrain for an artist. And I've been working with them longer than Oliver's book coming out, and also some of the science that says that they are in decline, both in biodiversity and in biomass. So that puts a little bit more of an urgency to it. And then really the last thing about it is that I can. Nobody really cares if I work with insects and working in Costa Rica with leafcutter ants, I could go down and work with them. If I wanted to go down and work with a tapir, let's say, they're endangered, I needed PhD and a whole bunch of papers signed. So it was a way into the ecosystem. And I think why even start down that line of being intrigued by them?

And ultimately I think that I have an atavistic leftover from, I don't know, maybe some hunter gatherer need to engage with a natural world beyond what I could do as a modern person living in an urban environment. And so art offered me a way to investigate the natural world beyond which I could do in normal life, just being a tourist in the landscape. So I used the tools of art very much like a scientist or a field biologist would use the tools of science. And art allowed me to make investigations and follow of some hunches of being intrigued by something. The first project was with houseflies, so I started really small and they happened just to live where I lived. And I thought, oh, that's interesting, I know nothing about them.

And so that's, as a painter, then I switched to photography because I was more able to access their lives. And so I photographed my houseflies that I was raising for four months and yeah, they had a lot of sex. So that was one. And they didn't fight. There was really no territorial battles. And so that wet my appetite. And then from there I went a little bit further into the food chain. And this is when I was, I'm upstairs here and raising everything in my studio. So then I thought, well, what's more fundamental to the ecosystem? And I don't know what I'm doing, I just sort get intrigued by something. And it is the project that actually then is the exploration. And so now I can talk about it and I can say, oh, this is what it was about. But at the time, I never really know, I just keep going.

But then I thought a little bit bigger and I thought, okay, well I conquered houseflies. And so I thought, well, what's fundamental to the working of the ecosystem? And I thought, well, the main engine that goes on an ecosystem is a food chain, to eat and be eaten. And I thought how removed I was from that? And I go to the grocery store and I buy food. And I thought, that's interesting. So I thought, well, maybe I'll raise the animals, and recreate essentially a three step food chain. And I was horrified that I was going to raise animals to feed other animals. But anyways, I did it. And then after that I thought, well, there's really something interesting about having an embrace of the environment, but yet seeing a cockroach and being terrified of it and hating it. And so then I started raising cockroaches, which I'm glad I'm past that, but it was really more like an investigation into our adversarial relationship with nature and nature that we hate and nature that we kill.

And I didn't have that relationship with nature. I don't hunt and I don't fish. And so I've never gone out and killed something before. And so I thought, well, this is really interesting. This is what humanity does with most of the animals out there. So let's see what this is about. So I raised cockroaches, staged executions and stuff like that. But the leafcutter ant project was the first time I've worked in the field and it was a sea change and I don't think I'll ever not work in the field anymore. And really with the leafcutter ant project, it was just, they were beautiful, simply why I started working with them. But the more I worked with them, the more I realized that there was this really interesting cross between them as a sophisticated social creature and us. And particularly in terms of communication and how our communication was changing to become more participatory, efficient and quick and instantaneous like theirs is. So anyways, that's my life in a nutshell.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
So Barrett for you, since you're our resident entomologist this evening, E. O. Wilson, who I now know is an American biologist who focuses on ants and leafcutter ants in particular, he described leafcutter ants as being the most complex social creatures other than humans. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why he would say that?

Barrett Klein:
So if we think that we're social organisms, we are, but we're not the most social organisms on the planet. There's a term used by biologists, eusociality or true sociality, and it adds a component that isn't typically applied to humans or at least arguably to humans. And that is not only a division of labor, but a reproductive division of labor. So we don't have a set unless it's some strange little cult. We don't have a community in which we have a reduced subset of reproductives. And in eusocial organisms, which predominantly occur within arthropods, which are the segmented jointed leg, tightness, exoskeleton animals, the most diverse filum of organisms on the planet. And within one order, actually two orders specifically of insects. Hymenoptera, bees, ants, wasp, soft flies, as well as termites, which are social cockroaches. So these are the truly social organisms that have a reproductive division of labor.

So in terms of being so E. O. Wilson comes from a great grand lineage of social insect biologists. And he was instrumental in not only synthesizing the literature in grand ways, but producing a seminal work every once in a while that represented and moved a field. Most controversially in 1975, it was sociobiology the new synthesis, where you build 25 chapters that few would argue with about non-human animals being social. And then it culminated in the very controversial human based chapter on social biology. So once people were confronted with this idea, which wasn't new to biologists but was new to others, that wow, some of what we do is actually based in biology, is founded in our genetics, might be beyond, to at least a small extent, our control, was anathema to the thinking of many. So even within the same hallway at Harvard University, you had Steven J. Gould and Luton who wouldn't even speak to E. O. Wilson.

And when Wilson went to a conference, grad students dumped ice water over his head and terms like sexist, every ist that would be negative misogynist, he'd be confronted by. But people needed to see a diverse independent set of lines of evidence converge on this idea. And now people don't bat an eye in considering with a mountain of evidence that much of what we do is based in our biology. That doesn't mean we don't have control over our actions. And this was the fear that many knee jerk responses resulted in. So ants are truly social. And the funny thing is, we've got, I checked today on a particular site that I like to check for biodiversity. And they're 15,378 described species of ants. That's up from even last week. And this may seem like a small number for some and a big number for others. If somebody here studies birds, that's arguably, well more than the number of bird species that have been described on the planet, far more than there are mammals on the planet.

And this is just one family of one order of insect. And this leads to discussions of their unrivaled success in numbers, in diversity. So to give you an idea, there's a paper published in August in PNAS that attempted to address a controversial and conservative estimate of how many ants exist on the planet. And if we know that there are over 15,000 described species of ants and they fill all these ecological services and rolls on every continent, save Antarctica, think they're ubiquitous. They're in the upper canopy, they're subterranean, they're a leaf letter, ants are everywhere it seems. And so what they did was they looked at 465 studies that they could use with leaf litter traps and pitfall traps, and they did meta-analysis, basically an analysis of all these analysis. And they determined that a really conservative estimate discounting all those ants that live below ground, all those ants that are immature, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You come up with... Any guesses? How many ants are there out there? How do you even begin?

Speaker 6:
How do you say that many zeros?

Barrett Klein:
Yeah, that's right. So actually any guesses is about how many insects, just abundance, insects are estimated to be on the planet? I know Peter knows at least some estimates. Anybody? Not enough is a perfect answer from Joey Stein takes it away. Absolutely true. But some estimates would suggest 10 quintillion, that's 10 with 18 zeros. And 1% of those is thought by some to be ants. And if we were to put a number on that, it would be say 25 times 10 to the 15 ants. Give or take five times 10 to the 15 ants. And again, this is a really conservative estimate.

Now, if we want to think about that in maybe more manageable terms, we could weigh them. And a typical thing to do is to extract the water weight. And another typical thing to do, because we're based on car... You hear in Star Trek carbon based life forms, right? The idea is that carbon is such a versatile atom, because it has four possible places to bind. So you can form rings, you can form ladders. And that's why our carbohydrates, our proteins, all these things are built on carbon rings and ladders and coils and stuff. So if we just take that one atom and we weigh it for all the ants, then you've got 12 mega tons, 12 million tons. So I'm going to make a scale here. And in one hand we're weighing just the carbon of ants, and then we're going to weigh the carbon of all of the wild birds and mammals on the planet. Ants outweigh them.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Well, I have a question here.

Barrett Klein:
But if you weigh it against humans, this should be really telling, only 20%. You might think, well, they're verging on 8 billion humans on the planet, I would hope that ants would weigh outweigh us, and they don't. But they do weigh 20%, at least in carbon weight. Yeah, please.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Okay, well I'm going to turn this to Oliver because that actually leads into your work. So in the insect crisis you wrote that insects are so numerous that they are both unknowable and annoying, so odd looking that they inspire the forms of malevolent beings in horror movies, and so vital that we would perish without them. They now appear to be suffering a silent existential crisis. Can you talk a little bit about that and just thinking about what Barrett has shared in terms of biomass and all of that. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience, what you're thinking?

Oliver Milman:
Yeah, sure. Is this... That's right. Okay. Hello. So in terms of insects, yes, there's this weird dichotomy whereby they seem to be everywhere and they are because they're so diverse, as Barrett pointed out so numerous. And yet they are suffering these quite extraordinary declines in numbers. I mean, when you look through literature, which I did, and I spent a lot of time speaking to entomologists and looking through research papers, you see these incredible plummets in numbers in research sites around the world of 80, 90% in places, sometimes 95%, sometimes more than that. And it really struck me that we've done a real number on insects in quite a short period of time. I mean, I think we've lost about 95% of the world's tigers, for example. But we've done that over a hundred years or so.

Their sites in Germany and Puerto Rico in Denmark that have been documented similar rate of decline of insects. But since the 1970s, 1980s, so just since the last time flare jeans were in fashion, we've managed to get rid of almost all insects in certain parts of the world. That's not to say that insects are going to disappear, they're not. We're not heading to some oblivion. They're definitely going to outlive us on this world. It's just we are creating a world of winners and losers whereby a lot of the insects we really cherish, the ones we want around, are suffering from all kinds of things. And the ones that we dislike a little more are perhaps adapting to the world we are creating around us. So it was interesting to walk around in entomologist shoes for a couple years to work out what was going on, because it's certainly a complex story.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
So obviously being in this space and surrounded by art, just thinking about art and insects, is there a way that somehow art can make insects more, I don't know, make us more compassionate towards insects or just bring a different, the fascination to these animals, these creatures that we share our world with? Do you each have thoughts on that? That's a big question, but any thoughts would be great. I think it's a starting point.

Oliver Milman:
I think so, yeah. One of the entomologists I spoke to, Michelle Trautwein, she's in California. She actually started off as an artist and she became fascinated by the look of them. And as part of her final year art school project, she did an enormous intricate painting of a stonefly. And I think it summed up quite a lot about our attitudes was insects that her tutor, her lecturer said, that looks absolutely disgusting. Why would you do such a thing? And they picked ahead of her a picture of somebody who just smeared some wet dog food onto a canvas. And so she felt horrified by this, and she launched herself into this entomological career. She summed up what I feel about them. They're almost like aliens on earth. They look otherworldly. They look, especially when you have these microscopic closeups of them, they look just incredible.

I think there was a picture recently released of an ants face, I don't know if people have seen it, it was shared quite widely. It looked demonic to some people, I think. But to me, just, it's fascinating. And I certainly think art and our appreciation of insects can certainly go hand in hand. We've verified them in art and verse for millennia now. And I think along with that is that strange relationship we feel irritated by them a lot of the time, want them away from us. But a lot of us are also fascinated by them, find it peaceful too.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
What about you?

Catherine Chalmers:
Yeah, I mean one of the things that you write about in your book that thought it was really interesting is that one of the reasons why insects are in serious decline is how we carve up the land. And so our neatness and tidiness and doing things in rows and getting rid of the hedgerows and putting things, lawn, front lawns. So that aesthetic, which is really an aesthetic choice, is really problematic for the insects because they like the scrub, they like the mess, they like the weeds. And so we tend to go into the landscape and make it respond to our aesthetic desires and our visions of having some sort of order and yet, but disorder is the thing that they seek most. And so in some sense, this is to me why it ends up being, let's say, relevant to speak about insects in an art museum, is that they're both dealing with aesthetics.

In some senses, the decline of insects is very much our desire to cease the landscape in a particular way which is causing their demise. And that's one aesthetic avenue. And then the other aesthetic avenue is surely the fact that they work in numbers and we see ourselves as individuals and we can't control them. I mean, working with 8 million members of a leafcutter ant colony, you work with the whole colony. It's not like with a dog, you can bribe it and say, oh, here, do this, well, you get a treat. And so I think this whole idea of numbers that we can't control and they're everywhere and we can't just go get that thing, they're too big, they're too widespread. And I think that out of controlness thing becomes a problem. And I think the aesthetics of them with the six legs, and we prefer things that have big eyes opposed to thin antennae and that are soft and furry.

Barrett Klein:
Do we? Do we really?

Catherine Chalmers:
Well, people tend to. So I think all of those things play into why our aesthetics is causing their decline. But then also why there's such rich terrain to, for me, as an avenue to... Because I mean feel that our culture is far richer and more resilient with the consideration and inclusion of other life forms. And that if our culture is entirely focused on humans, we're going to end up with just humans. I don't know. There needs to be some consideration of things that are not us, in art I think.

Barrett Klein:
There are a lot of ways I can run with this. And one is, so this is my first time meeting Catherine, and I'm really honored and thrilled. I've featured Catherine's work in two publications this past year that actually involve this intersection of science and art with the idea that maybe just maybe, since science is essential, but it is insufficient to move the hearts and minds of the masses when it comes to global climate change, other avenues need to be addressed or pursued as well. And art is one of them. And so one of those papers involves the idea that artists have selected insects essentially as their muses to further explore ideas related to global climate change, to habitat destruction, basically to all the human induced means of environmental destruction. And so insects are great. I mean, I could stop right there. Insects are great, but insects are wonderful because of their grand diversity and ubiquity.

If you want to find a behavior, a color, a form, a shape, you'll find it within this class insecta. It'll be out there in all its glory, you just need to look. And so an artist can really pick or choose which behavior, which form, which color, which niche she would like to in order to explore an idea. And so Catherine was suggesting these tensions that work out really beautifully in her art, in all of her art, where there is this draw and then this repulsion at times. And you see that in the execution series. You see that in the food chain where there's almost a morbid curiosity, there's a love of, and then you have this empathy, and it's coming from the strangest place where people wouldn't sooner squash a cockroach, and now they're decrying this presentation of a cockroach being executed, well, no cockroach was harmed in the photography or videography where they're switched out and everything.

Still, just that idea becomes too inhumanely human. And we're confronted by that. And so this is one of an infant number of approaches artists can take. And really amazing diversity approaches that artists have taken using insects to present ideas, not just related to anthropogenic environmental destruction, but any and all topics. And we can talk about the history of insects and ants and art if we like.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
So I mean, I do think this conversation can go in many, many directions. I am curious if there are any questions that the audience does want to ask of these three.

Barrett Klein:
Oh, I've got a quick question for the audience if that's okay.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Okay.

Barrett Klein:
So who has seen that viral image of the ant that Oliver mentioned?

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Oh, I think who hasn't.

Barrett Klein:
Okay. A lot of people have, and if I can just add that is totally emblematic of biasing our views of a subject. So that ant, that wasn't an ant, that was a highly manicured, cropped artistic view of a portion of an ant head. It removed the beauty of the Frans, and the scape, and the [inaudible], and the mandibles, and the pulps, and it discolored and focused on areas warping your perception of the morphology such that the bases of an antennae look like these demonic eyes. So yes, that's a choice by the artist to manipulate the audience through this highly choreographed warping of an image. But it's also up to the receivers, the viewers of the art to interpret maybe it excited, maybe it horrified some, maybe it lured others to look at the beauty of ants. For example, if you go to Brian Fisher's website, ant web, it's amazing. You've got all these mugshots of anterior lateral views of almost every species of ant in the world. The diversity is phenomenal.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Thank you. So are there questions? If not, I do have... Oh yes, I see a question.

Speaker 6:
I have a question for you guys. I mean, you've spoken a little bit about ants or insects being strange or other. I just keep wondering if you can talk to us about the value of insects generally, and not in terms of monetary, or weight, none of that. I'm interested in terms of our own value of ourselves because we value humans above all else, that's given in this room, or in our culture. So I remember visiting upstate there, the Karner butterflies, and I was thinking, wow, there's something like maybe 5,000 of those left now. And I was like, man, one of these is probably more valuable than me, honestly. I mean in terms of where its space is left on this planet. And yeah, I'll just leave it at that.

Catherine Chalmers:
Yeah, I mean one of the things I think when you talk about insects and the value is that immediately the conversation usually or eventually heads or pretty quickly heads to bees. And bees pollinate our food and we wouldn't be having a diverse diet if it wasn't for bees. And what's interesting about your book is really bringing up the fact that, and I'm going to misquote all this and probably put in the wrong place, but bees in some senses are to wild pollinators, let's say, what cattle are to, let's say, moose and elk or something. And so we think about the insect crisis, we think of the bee crisis and your examples in the book about all the different ways that, all the things that insects do for us and the ways that they're threatened, I maybe you could...

Oliver Milman:
Yeah, I mean I think the interesting thing is there's a mismatch between what we appreciate in the world and it's value to us in a selfish sense. So obviously, we spend a lot of time and effort and conservation dollars on rhinos and elephants and things like that. Big charismatic megafauna which is a horrible term, but is what's used for those creatures. And we do need to keep those creatures on this planet. It would be a terrible crime to lose them. But in terms of their impact on us and our lives, they could disappear, and it wouldn't barely cause a ripple. The loss of insects, E. O. Wilson estimated we would be around for three or four months really. We would quickly disappear off the face of the earth in a starving, horrible mess. So we rely upon them for food, for ecological services, nutrients through plants, the whole architecture of our forests and our grasslands and all kinds of things.

And the food chain as well. If you don't like insects, you like birds. So there's all these practical things, but they obviously have intrinsic value in themselves. They are beautiful in themselves. They predated the dinosaurs, outlived the dinosaurs, they'll probably outlive us. They are the great survivors of this world. So we should admire them for their tenacity, their beauty, their diversity, as well as what they selfishly do for us. Because yeah, talking about dying out, we could die out and it wouldn't affect them much at all. And yet despite that, we have this verbiage around them, which is very rude. We say that people are annoying, they are bugging us, we call them creepy crawlies. And we have these very unkind terms for them. And that puts us in deficit, I feel, when it comes to dealing with the insect crisis.

We're being asked to care about something and try to mobilize to save something that we're actually quite rude about. Obviously, if it was a big conservation effort to look after puppies and kittens, we would be much further ahead, wouldn't we? As a starting point with insects, I and other people have to write books about why it's important that we don't want to starve in a massive poo and dead bodies, because we don't want to have that and we want to eat chocolate. I mean they pollinate chocolate and the ice cream and all the lovely things, coffee that you want in life. So whichever way you want to cut it, they're important to us and they're important to the world.

Barrett Klein:
Oliver, I'm glad you brought up chocolate, because with chocolate I'm sure several people enjoy eating chocolate. There are known pollinators and there are a lot of unknown pollinators, minute insects that are valuable in pollinating. So there are the knowns, and Catherine was mentioning bees as being forefront in our minds as pollinators. But there are so many unknowns that the glib reaction of politicians and others to say, what good are those? Why are people studying basic science with respect to these insects? Remove them and you'll find ripples that weren't predictable. Some are predictable, a lot of them are not predictable. And our love of chocolate will hinge on the unknowns. Would it be really weird if I quoted Oliver since he's sitting right here?

Oliver Milman:
It's a bit weird, yeah.

Barrett Klein:
It's really weird, but I'm going to do it anyway maybe.

Oliver Milman:
Sure. I can't escape. The stairs are literally taped.

Barrett Klein:
Two really relevant quotes and I'm going to affect and act. No, I'm not. So amid this carnage, fretting over the loss of fireflies or beetles or even butterflies can feel incidental, even quaint. And yet the tragedy of wiping out rhinos would not threaten the viability of global food production. And the hideous crime of allowing all orangutans to perish would not provoke widespread child malnutrition, trigger the demise of dozens of bird species or cause a landscape to be covered in rotting cadavers. In terms of impact, the insect crisis drowns out any other alarm bells and the domain of animals. And then I really liked-

Oliver Milman:
So embarrassed.

Barrett Klein:
Oliver's approach to thinking about the value of butterflies I thought was really eloquently done because he prefaced, well, I'll just read this slightly extended portion. They are ecologically pointless. This is not Oliver words, says Erica McAllister, who points out that flies may lack the popularity of butterflies but are far more valuable as pollinators. What really annoys me is that their larvae go around eating everything and yet we forgive them when they are adults because they are pretty. Butterflies defenders may quibble with this assessment and that's true, butterfly lepidopterists would definitely quibble.

But the argument is almost moot if other insects help keep us alive, butterflies are surely one of the things it's worth keeping alive for. As the quote misattributed to Churchill, the butterfly aficionado put it, when more time spending cuts to the arts were proposed, then what are we fighting for? And so if we think about the value of insects, there are a lot of ways to approach this. And pollination was mentioned, and this tends to again be the primary concern people have for good reason. You'll see some quotes that animal pollinators contribute to every third bite we consume, ultimately. You'll find all these images and quotes related to that. And insects are the primary animal pollinators of animal pollinated plants, angiosperms.

But pollination is one of many services performed by insects. Ants alone are really huge in terms of soil aeration, nutrient and seed dispersal. Oliver was mentioning decomposition. The list goes on and on and on and on. But aside from ecological services on which we depend, there are cultural services and that's something we can discuss too. How everyone in this room, and I challenge anyone to defy me on this, even you in the way back are performing an activity, maybe it's an advocation, maybe it's a profession in some way is affected by insects. Sometimes it's really explicit. You're an integrated pest management person and sometimes it's secret even to you. And I think that should be really telling that insects are hidden everywhere. I think as you mentioned, they're ubiquitous but invisible. Peter.

Speaker 7:
The secret elephant in the room though is that we are both part of the solution and part of the problem. And that this is an argument that I didn't originate, it's found in many places, including Elizabeth Colbert's the Sixth Extinction, which is that human curiosity is the primary route of the anthropocene time that we're living in now. And that artists and scientists are in some ways arguably the most culpable for what's happening in the world today. A stroll in the forest is not only what helps us understand what goes on, it helps us destroy it at the same time. And that's a conundrum that I wrestle with in my own thinking about these things all the time and my own work as well.

Barrett Klein:
I don't think curiosity should be conflated with a lack of control of our behavior as a species. And we have nearly 8 billion people on the planet. We could stem that we could control that. I'm not talking about extreme measures, misanthropic ventures, but we can control our actions. And it's not curiosity, I would argue that leads us down an ugly path, but it's our inability to stem our greed.

Speaker 8:
Catherine, I have a question for you, because you brought up all these aspects of our relationship to insects. Oh yes. You have brought up all these ways in which we are related to insects and ants. But to you specifically, aesthetically, when you're creating this work, I'm looking for what is the foremost thing? Is it that we have a repulsion or is it because you find them structurally so beautiful? Or does it have something to do with the fact that they're going extinct or that there are so many of them? Or what are the things that are foremost in your mind when you look at the work and step back and think either that was successful or it wasn't?

Catherine Chalmers:
Yeah, it's interesting because I think at the end of the day, it's always personal. And I think the work that we all do, it comes down to personal choices. And so when I started the Ant project, it wasn't like I was thinking of the decline of insect species, and also leafcutter ants are not at odds with the environment that they live in. They're not out of balance with it. So there wasn't really any underlying environmental policy problem or ecological problem, they weren't a pet. They're not like bark beetles munching down the Conifer forest in the American west. And so what is it that drives me to, let's say, work with leafcutter ants? And ultimately when I first saw them, it's just that this brown leaf litter on the forest floor. And I had taken a truck through the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, and then you have these perfectly beautiful pathways with these very quiet, these thousands of ants carrying little flickering bits of the green canopy. And they just looked beautiful.

And I think that in doing this project, I came at it as one would, let's say, an individual artist thinking about working with these and what would I do? But as I went on, I understood in trying to do the films and which really sit at the heart conceptually of the project, that I'm trying to interact with the social system. And I think as a social system, I'm starting to understand, and I think this is my own personal trajectory that I'm part of a social species. It made me understand what it is to be a member of a social species and that interconnections, because the power of the ants is a little bit like the power of a brain. It exists in the connections between neurons. It exists in the connections between the ants. It's not one ant, it's all of them. It's not one neuron. It's the whole connection and how they reconnect.

And the thing about ants is that they're like user generated data. They go out and they're doing this and they're sharing through pheromones and sound and touch these communications that then is shaping what they all do. And I think that that inner connectedness of it made me really understand what it is to be a human, which is a social species. And I think sometimes as you battle being an artist on your own, you have this individual idea, well I'm painting a painting today. And I think that the ant project really was, for me personally, how it affected me is understanding the wider network and web of communication that holds us all together. And seeing ants as being more individual, because on the ground filming, they're not all being uniformly industrious and they're not all doing the same thing. And so I saw them as more individual and I saw myself as more social at the end of it.

Speaker 9:
Congratulations on the work. Sorry, my voice. But since we are in the Drawing Center, I would like you to share a little bit more in terms of your choice of the material, the drawing as these meticulous delicate labor of them and your choices of these meticulous drawing act and devotion which is shown on your work.

Catherine Chalmers:
Oh, sorry, I did miss the art part of it. Yes, there was some entomologists who poured cement into a leafcutter ant colony and excavated around it, obviously because they're underground and they're massive. They're as big as this room down even lower, so they're huge. And they poured cement and excavated around it and saw the labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. And it was a really beautiful, I mean, as an artist, it was this just really complex, beautiful system. And so I wanted to do that in a drawing and do the tunnels and chambers. Yeah, so that's really the origin of the colony drawing. And then the maps over there were, each year that I went back to Costa Rica, I kept very detailed notes of what the colonies, where they were, what they were doing, what the species were, where their major foraging roots were. And so those are two different years that I was there and mapped out where the colonies were and what they were doing and then what I was doing in that landscape. So those are really a representation of my process.

Speaker 10:
Is this on? Yeah, so Catherine's an artist and it strikes me that what she's producing is art, not illustration. And the parallel is fiction as opposed to nonfiction where we learn about the human condition better, I think, through fiction, good fiction, than we do through nonfiction. Likewise, we've learned about these ants and the beauty of what Catherine's created. I think the scroll is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And so it's just an observation about we're in an art space, we're not in a museum of natural history, but we're learning to appreciate the ants.

Catherine Chalmers:
Thank you. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I'm an artist. I don't have an entomology degree, and I am interested in using art and connecting to something that's not me. And so sometimes I go on about the things that I'm looking at that aren't me, but at the end of the day it's interpreted through the eyes of an artist. And in some ways going down each year and keeping track of where the colonies were in a sense is a little bit maybe something like a scientist would've done. But then I interpret it and I make the drawing look a little bit like neurons. And I mean those are some of the inspirations. And really the mural, which is some of the ideas of where the show started from. The idea was if ants... We are cutting down their rainforest home.

So I wanted to do something in a sense if it was the ants revenge and I was doing these smaller drawings, is that the ants were dismembering the paper that they were drawn on, in a sense, attacking at our culture because culture is the thing that keeps us together. Culture's the heart of us as a social species and however it changes and grows and moves. And so from expanding to attacking the very medium it's been drawn on, I thought, well why don't you just go into the gallery architecture? And so that's where the mural idea came from, is it's just really revenge for us cutting down the rainforest home. But all these ideas of working with something are interpreted through the eyes of an artist.

Barrett Klein:
So one thing I was, this is for Catherine. One thing I really appreciated when you said that you approached a colony that what I'm hearing is that you had the appreciation of a system's biologist. You see a complex interplay between individual automata or elements, but you also layered on it your emotional feelings about something about the value or lack of control that here are vast population of individuals that you don't have control over that you can't give a treat to like you did a dog. I really like that analogy. And I remember years ago reading about manatees and how people used to think manatees were stupid, but then they realized, oh, it's because they don't respond the way the dolphins do. They go and chew algae off rocks and therefore you can't really entice them to do your bidding. So you can't study memory and learning in the same way.

So getting to the question about value, one measure of value is appreciation. And you were saying we can appreciate things that look a little bit more like us or cute babies or whatnot. If you were to approach a colony and think about how the average person would like to appreciate what you are seeing without a full appreciation of the system's biology that each of you has taken the opportunity to study over years, if you could see each colony as an individual, how might you do that? How might you characterize it so that an average person could say, wow, there are so many colonies with such diversity, and they're like personalities, and they might not have the cute face that I'm used to seeing, but they have something that I can appreciate?

Catherine Chalmers:
Well, the colonies actually do all have different behaviors and that was the reason I went back to the same place over and over again. But I think in the films, and I'm not really trying to teach people about, I mean I'm not a didactic and also like the cockroach project, I wasn't advocating for their demise or their conservation, it was just what I was investigating. And with the four films they take on the themes that we attribute are unique to us, which is language, ritual, art and war. And so in going down that area where you're getting into working with them to do these films that take on things that we think are proprietary to us, that's where the confusion starts to come. So I'm not really teaching people about ants as much as just making these crosses and seeing what people think about it. Yeah.

Barrett Klein:
Can I add something? So in the comment about illustration versus art, there's some blurry lines, gray areas when you distinguish between art and illustration, just as you can distinguish between art and science. And some of the more interesting places to explore are those intersections. So Catherine had mentioned pouring concrete down the cavities and the galleries of leafcutter ant nests, if you're interested in that, there's a book by Walter Tschinkel called Ant Architecture. And he's made his scientific career in part by pouring molten metals down different species of ant nests and then excavating them laboriously. And some of these you'll see in museums. So they're really beautiful aesthetic pieces, but they're part of his scientific process to better understand the ecology and behavior of the ants in a place that is otherwise invisible to us, a subterranean existence.

And we find these strange and beautiful intersections in a lot of artists works. And part of it is, while it's easy to see artists being inspired by scientists, it may not be as explicit, but as the art or the aesthetics can influence the process of science. So if I'm conducting research and I have data, and those data can take lots of different forms, points on an XY plot or a thermographic film, you have through scientific visualization, not only organization of information where you can seek out data, but it can help facilitate analysis of data, generate new hypotheses and novel discovery comes out of imaging. So there are a lot of really interesting overlaps there.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Oh, we have more questions in the back end.

Speaker 11:
So there's a lot of really interesting work going on with understanding how each species has a different perceptual space and that intersects with how they communicate with each other. And I'm just fascinated by how do ants talk to each other. Do they release pheromones, they make noise, do they touch each other's?

Catherine Chalmers:
They do all three.

Speaker 11:
There you go, okay.

Catherine Chalmers:
Yeah, mean, well you could probably say this better than I can, but the pheromones, they have different pheromones over long term but that are more, less volatile, let's say the ones that they laid on the trail than the more short term ones where they're communicating with each other. And then more medium ones that where the pheromone lasts the medium amount of time then. Yeah, so those are the ways. But it's really interesting with that communication that, I mean with the video where they're taking flowers, they'll take flowers but they won't target it unless the source is abundant.

So I'm introducing something, I go and collect the flowers for them and try them out in different colonies, and then try to get them to change their mind. And so how do you change the mind of thousands of ants? And so you interact in that communication. And some of them are really flexible, and some of them will take novel material that, I mean it's flowers in the forest, it's not something strange. And then other ant colonies are really inflexible and won't even take what they are actively taking if moved a little bit forward. So there's this really interesting thing where the communication that they use is used in so many different ways and that the colonies actually have completely different personalities.

Barrett Klein:
Actually you have not only individual behavioral differences, you have colony level behavioral differences and you can measure that. And there have been really excellent publications on colony level attributes of honeybees, as well as individual behavioral syndromes or personalities. It's a hot topic in animal behavior and has been for 15 years or so. And the idea of communicating, it's really interesting because you can look at an insect, like a forensic biology, like a detective, and think functional morphology. Does it have massive eyes with lots of little lenses like a dragonfly with only these wispy and antennae setatious hair like antennae. It's a visual predator. It's not going to use old faction much. You go to leafcutter ants, but better yet, army ants, some of the ones I brought, they're either virtually blind in the case of the army ants or totally blind. So they might not have the eyes, but they don't need them because they're using trail pheromone. So insects are by and large chemical organisms, but they use a whole variety of perceptual modalities depending on who you are and what you need to do.

Olga Valle Tetkowski: Oh goodness.

Speaker 12:
Did you ever think in your work with the insects that they were ever trying to communicate something to you specifically? Like you said you came back every few years to the same colony. Did you ever get the feeling that that was happening at all?

Catherine Chalmers:
No, they ignored me.

Speaker 12:
Interesting.

Speaker 13:
I had a question for Catherine. At what point, this was raised in a few questions, but since we talked about work of fiction at some point and we're speaking about this fiction, non-fiction, at what point do you decide to direct the animals versus just observing more of a cinéma vérité, just sitting there and observing what's happening? And at what point do you decide I'm going to take control over this habitat or I'm going to decide that this is going to be my actor? Yeah, I'm just curious, when do you decide I'm going to be more a director and treat these animals as actors versus just being more observant? Yeah.

Catherine Chalmers:
Good question from a film director. Yeah, I mean, I'm always trying to reach that sweet spot where the two of us come together, where my ideas meet their behavior. And so if it's too much them then it's too much natural history. If it's too much me, it's too top heavy. So there's this fine balance and that thing is constantly moving and so I think, oh, I know what the leafcutter ants are about, and I'm going to go down, and I'm going to do this. And I'm going to set up a time lapse, and they're just going to take... I'm going to a time lapse of them is stripping a small tree. And none of the ants would do it. And that's after years and years of being down there and makes you pull your hair out. And so it's this constant battle back and forth.

But there is never a point in any of the animals that I work with where it's possible to direct them. And I think that that lack of control is something that I'm really interested in and not having control. But yet then, there has to be some negotiated place where those two things come together. And so it depends on, that was one of the reasons where it was so great working this one spot in Costa Rica, is there were many different colonies and some of them were, as I said, really flexible. And I would put the flowers down and they couldn't thank me enough, so they didn't have to go climb a tree and they would take it back and I thought this was great. So there's little direction, but other times, let's say when I'm trying to get them to hang art piece, I'm like, okay, well they cut a piece, they're going back that way. I mean that's just surely what's going on.

So how do I get it to look like they're actually hanging these really beautiful pieces as they're cutting? So I can make these crazy ideas, well, they cut the plant, it was really beautiful. They look like abstract expressionist paintings, so they're going to put it on an art show. So if they're going to put on an art show, then it's got to hang. So then I turn the set, they're going this way, I stick it against the stone wall with some surfing wax and they come and they take it away and then I reverse the footage. So that's more like film managed. But it was only in trying to figure out once I was down this line, how can I as a filmmaker make these things happen within the behavior that they do? Yeah. And that's where it gets exciting. That's where it's really fun because then you're negotiating the space. And unlike, let's say, working with a cockroach where they're terrorized by me and I'm terrorized by them, and somehow you've got to navigate that.

Speaker 13:
And what becomes interesting is that the experiment, whether the experiment succeeds or not, is not only a scientific experiment, whether the performance that you're putting on succeeds or not.

Catherine Chalmers:
Yes.

Speaker 13:
It could be a failed experiment for you, the extent that they're not doing what you're telling them to.

Catherine Chalmers:
Yeah. And it's one thing to fail at a cockroach when you're doing it in your own space, but it's another to go all the way down there in an expedition that you put all this time and money and equipment into, and I was down there for two weeks and I couldn't get them to take any green trees. I'm like, how is that possible? This is what they do day in and day out. So then you get a little bit more unnerved by it.

Barrett Klein:
And that's when it's a lot field research. And Catherine's not alone in this lack of control when it involves non-human animal and human collaborative art ventures. So for example, Yuki Norienagi works with ants. And you've got Kazuo Kadonaga and Xu Bing who both work with Silkworm moths. And Hubert Duprat in France who collaborates with Caddisfly Larvae . And in these cases and a number of other cases, they have to forego the ultimate control of any art project that culminates from their interaction.

So for example, you talk with Duprat about his work, he'll say you've got this Claddisfly close relative to moths. And many of them build these species specific cases within which they live and feed until they develop into winged adults. And what he does is he plucks off the pebbles or sticks at the back end and pokes them, so they wiggle it out. And then he removes their natural elements and offers them gold spangles and pearls and other items of his choosing. And then he watches as the Claddisfly larvae use their head base silk glands. And then either weave together or reject and they're really persnickety. So he can have all the best laid plans going into his field, which wouldn't be the literal field, and come up with something very different at the whim of the Claddisfly.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
So I know there are some more questions in the audience, but I want to ask Oliver a question because both Catherine and Barrett really work with insects, but that's not really what you do. So I'm trying to think of how has that changed your world view, the way you move through the world? I mean, know my husband thinks I'm nuts, but I'm never trying to kill the flies at home. I'm always trying to catch them and throw them outside. So how has it changed you and the way you do things?

Oliver Milman:
That's a great question. I mean, ironically, I started writing the book and then ants invaded my apartments, and they marched into the kitchen and took it over. And it was such a lengthy battle to try and get rid of them, because essentially they outsmarted me. I gained an appreciation as I was writing and speaking to entomologists as it was happening. I certainly noticed them more. I mean, they are the closest animals to us, aren't they? Other than our cats and dogs or goldfish or whatever. And yet we tend to overlook them or try and swat them away or whatever. I've taken more time to appreciate them, see them, notice them. Especially when you speak to entomologists who are like, I used to see these butterflies all the time and didn't think about them. Now I rarely see them, and so I savor them. And so I try to savor them. I also changed my views on honey bees as these avatars of all bees and insects.

I think that's useful in some respects because it's a symbol that everybody knows, but they are, I think Catherine mentioned before, it's like bird conservation and focusing on chickens because they are so ubiquitous. They're managed by humans, they have beekeepers to keep their numbers up. And we've unfortunately put them in prime position in terms of agriculture so that they prop up the food system to an unhealthy degree because wild bees are dying out. Also, one of them stung me in the face in California, so I have a grudge that's quite personal. The beekeepers had no sympathy because it happens all the time. I was shrieking. So it's an appreciation. I've been on a few radio phone ins where somebody angrily says, well, I've got a termite problem and why can't I kill them? I'm going to say, don't kill termites. And it's not that, that every insect needs to be cherished and saved, but as a collective, they need to be more warmly received, I think, by us and appreciated. So that's where I've ended up.

Speaker 14:
I want to know how your kitchen episode ended, did you win in the end?

Oliver Milman:
Yeah, yeah. I was a horrendous hypocrite after writing about how terrible pesticides and chemicals are and people shouldn't use them anymore. I just sprayed the shit out of them.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Let's see, how am I doing on time? Where's Aimee?

Aimee Good:
I think we're getting close.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Okay. All right. So maybe one or two questions and then we will close out for the evening. Any more questions? Oh, one hand back there. Way back there.

Speaker 15:
Hi. So I have a history of loving the ants and I understand that, and I love the drawings and art and everything. But the words we use, the words we've spoken about tonight are conquest and ecological domination. And we talk about their economic value. And I was wondering when you put all of that together, and even when we look at the artwork, what do we see? They're destroying the room we're in, they're swarming over the whole wall. Are these just reflections of our imperialist Western culture like King Solomon told us in proverbs? Go to the ants, learn their ways, and be wise so that we can be more powerful and have more staying power. Can we reflect on this? Or do all cultures revere ants the way ours does when you get to know them? Is it just our greed and our lust for conquest that makes us want to identify with them and learn more about them?

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
I don't know. From the layperson point of view, I think they're really fascinating. So that's why I wanted them here. But I don't know.

Barrett Klein:
So culturally, there is a deep respect in some parts of the world. So for example, if you go to Australia, they have honey pot ants, just as you do in southwest deserts of the US, different species. And there you have the honey pot dreaming in art as well as symbols and their belief systems. So they revere the honey pot ants. It's a source of a sweetener. And that's one of many, many, many examples around the world where ants have been used symbolically or within mythology in actually quite positive ways. Not to the extent of honeybees, because we have that tight association and to some extent interdependence with sweetener wax for all of its purposes and the rest. But you also see a twisting and a manipulation of the insect and what it represents depending on who you are. So I've got a quote from a really excellent book series reaction books has an animal series and I just had to get all, I think it's 15 arthropod based books.

And the ant one is quite good by Charlotte Leigh, and she quotes Otto von Bismarck of all people, and I'm not going to speak in German, but if I had to choose the form in which I would rather live again, I think it would be as an ant. Just see this little creature lives under a perfect political organization. All ants are obliged to labor, to lead a useful life. All are industrious and perfect subordination prevails with discipline and order.

So E. O. Wilson, we've mentioned at least once before would famously said something to the extent of ants basically the perfect organization, or sorry, communism or Marxism is perfect, but in the wrong species. So he is thinking about how ants are so divergent in their behaviors with respect to their well in Otto von Bismarck's word subordination. But I think it wholly depends on the culture that has drawn from their ubiquitous ants, as food sources, as symbols of social entities, or as agents of destruction. I mean, an extreme example, there are many accounts in the Brazilian Amazon where traditional communities would revel in the army and sweeping through their villages because they just step aside maybe in the river while the ants removed all their pests and they move on.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Okay. I think we have time for one more question, and oh, there's a young lady there. Oh.

Speaker 16:
Okay. I'll take this. Oh, was there someone else? No, I think it's me. Well first of all, thank you to the panelists. This has been exceptional and I wanted to actually double click on what Catherine said about essentially ants being social animals. And what I'm curious to learn a little bit about is the cases in which there is social dysfunction. And I think Catherine, you mentioned war, and so I'm just curious maybe across all panelists, if you've experienced war between ants, what does that look like? Is it the way we experience war? And then how do you think of that colony interaction like with this backdrop of the decline of the population?

Catherine Chalmers:
Well, the wars are between two different colonies, and the colonies that I worked with had very different tolerances for their neighbors. So some of them were highly tolerant, two lines would be maybe 10 feet from each other. They'd be passing each other. They would know that they were there and they wouldn't attack. And this one colony that started all the wars was very aggressive. Within a colony, they all share this pheromone, so they all identify in this colony. And what's interesting is I took one of the soldiers out to photograph it just individually of looking up at it to mock up these statues that I wanted to do.

And I had the ant out for, I don't know, 12 hours or something, and then put it back on the colony. And over that period of time it lost some of its colony's scent. And so when I put it back in the colony, some of the ants were not attacking it, but sort of, so that scent, either it is actively changing or that they lose it pretty quickly. But that was interesting that at first, they didn't identify it, then it went back and it was fine. But within a colony there is no dissent. I mean, you don't see any dissent. They all go and get along. If you drop one ant from a different colony in that line, they'll kill it immediately.

Barrett Klein:
There is nuanced disharmony in every society, and so even in the most seemingly harmonious honeybee colony, you'll have cheaters and there's a certain threshold under which cheating is allowed, or at least you could say tolerated from an anthropocentric point of view. But beyond which they become selected against at the colony level. And I'd be happy to talk about a lot of examples in a number of species where you have this disharmony that stems from selection below the level of the individual, as well as above the level of the individual, because it's really fascinating. For example, you have worker policing behavior in honeybees where if workers... So honeybees are strange, just as ant strange, they belong to the same order hymenoptera And what happens is they have a genetic system called haplodiploidy in which the queen or queens, depending on the species, lay an egg, she can select to lay a fertilized egg or an unfertilized egg.

If it's a fertilized egg, then it has two sets of chromosomes, it's diploid and they become worker females. If she chooses to lay an unfertilized egg with only one set of chromosomes, it becomes a male. So this sets up a strange relatedness across the colony. And if a worker decides she's going to lay eggs and she's not the reproductive, the queen, then the others perform what's called worker policing and attack her, and eat her egg, and bite her wings if she has wings. So there are really interesting subtleties, but they're out outrageously terrifying extremes when you look at colony level warfare. So just as Catherine mentioned, you can see these leafcutter ants going in lines one by the other. But say if they cross their paths, and I've seen this happen where you dribble some Quaker oats over here, and you attract one colony here and another colony here, then it's this raging battle with soldiers wrapped around each other to death.

But you don't have to go to central or South America for that, in New York City, just look at the right time of the year and you see a massive black on the sidewalk. Focus in on it, look very closely, and you'll see that you've got two colonies of ants. And at the fringes, all of the workers are locked together forever, they're dead. So what they're doing is they're assessing the numbers and those that are no longer locked, if they're greater number in this colony, they're victorious and that way they set up a jigsaw puzzle, in some cases, really extreme jigsaw puzzle of territories.

Olga Valle Tetkowski:
Right. Okay. I think we're out of time. Thank you everyone for coming. I think we could keep talking for a very long time. Thank you.

Oliver Milman:
Thanks.