March of the ants

Insects are seldom loved and are often loathed, feared or disregarded, but they are an integral part of our ecosystem. In an extract from his new book, Framing Nature, Laurence Rose joins the effort to save the narrow-headed ant

- Laurence Rose

THE biologists B. K. Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson said: ‘Let us not despise the lowly ants, but honour them. For a while longer at least, they will help to hold the world in balance to our liking, and they will serve as a reminder of what a wonderful place it was when we first arrived.’

If conservation means to restore a mutually rewarding relationship between the human and the non-human world, and if this begins with not despising but honouring, then invertebrates present us with a challenge. Few are loved, many are loathed or feared, and all the others —some 40,000 species in the UK and perhaps 10 million worldwide—are simply disregarded.

At 1.11 pm on 26 November 2018 the endangered narrow-headed ant Formica exsecta returned to Bovey Heathfield nature reserve after an absence of fourteen years. Stephen Carroll marked the time precisely: he had for years been one of a very few people to concern themselves with the fate of this little-known species. Until 1846 the narrow-headed ant was unregarded, warranting not even the faint distinction of a name of its own. First described scientifically by Finnish entomologist Wilhem Nylander, it was located near Bournemouth in 1865, and over the following thirty-seven years Britain’s small community of myrmecologists found it in the New Forest, the Isle of Wight, and, in 1902, the extensive heathlands around Bovey Tracey in Devon.