Fuller hadn't a clue as to what kind of ants they were or where they came from. And she certainly had no idea that she was about to make scientific history. But several weeks later Fuller was visited by a WWF board member, Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, then engaged in co-authoring a 7½-pound tome titled The Ants, now the definitive work on the tiny insects. On being shown Fuller's office-dwelling ants, the professor was heard to exclaim, "My goodness! These appear to be from the genus Pheidole!" Fuller and her guest gathered a few ants in a prescription vial, and Wilson took them back to Harvard for laboratory scrutiny.
Not long afterward, Wilson phoned to say that the ants seemed to be of an unknown species and requested that Fuller collect some soldier specimens to send to him. Going by the book, that mission was accomplished by tempting the ants with a dish of sugar water. Now, Fuller finds it just as easy to entice them out into the open with her lunch. "I give them scraps from sandwiches, bits of cheese and chicken," she says. "They love apple cores." In time, she also followed their trail and found that an ant colony had set up nestkeeping in a potted plant, possibly of Central American origin, that sat in a corner of her office.
Last month Wilson confirmed that the ants are a new species, which he plans to catalog and officially name Pheidole fullerae, or Fuller's Pheidole Ant. "Finding a new species in this group is not unusual," he says. "What is unusual is finding one in a potted plant in a downtown Washington office building." And there, although the colony has now grown to "many, many thousands," Fuller reports, they can stay as long as they want. Never an ant basher to begin with, she's even less inclined to commit insecticide now that her office mates are also namesakes.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
