My new ant habitat came together over the course of almost a year. It was a little bit of "three steps forward, two steps back," but at least as I learned I progressed. My ultimate apparatus required more resources than I had budgeted and was nothing like I imagined, but it that was OK. It was better than I could have foreseen.
I had acquired something of a mentor, and he had urged me to work on the problem of symbiosis. In fact the new research had all been about undermining the whole idea of symbiosis. Both partners benefit, certainly, and yet one was ultimately in charge. Recent theory had thrown everyone into a tizzy showing, without much room for doubt, that the queen of an ant colony wasn't really the queen. She was more the reproductive slave of the workers. An ant colony was more of a Marxist paradise than a kingdom.
I was looking at another symbiosis, the relationship between ants and their plants. Specifically some ant species and plant species have close, nearly symbiotic relationships. The plants provides the ants with nectar or places to farm their aphids, and the ants protect the plants, acting like a personal army against more potentially damaging invaders.
But who's in charge? Do the ants work for the plants, or the plants for the ants?
After McMarky-Lemming, et.al., many people were asking this question, and yet it wasn't clear how to approach the problem. But I had an idea, and I wasn't sharing. I occurred to me that the question of dominance was etched into their DNA, so the question could be asked separately for each species and the answer should be the same. It was just a matter of recording their responses to certain kinds of stresses and determining -- basically -- who cracked first, the ants or the plants.
Once I had my parameters designed I worked in secret for about six months, collecting data. I felt bad about being so exclusive, and yet at the same time I was terrified that someone else was doing the same experiment based on my previously public discussions. I didn't know what I was -- shrewd scientist or information terrorist. I was an emotional wreck, but at the end I had my data and ultimately that's all that mattered.
The ants work for the plants, in case you were wondering. I guess it's sort of obvious in retrospect, but I have data, graphs and error bars to back me up. It was a bit of a yawn in the Roam. At 18 my writing lacked a lot of the flourish that science expects today. Hundreds of people anticipated me and thousands found all the primary sources I failed to quote. My first serious result was like a drop of rain in a thunderstorm. In the middle of the ocean. When no one was looking.
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