The ants come marching
“To know them is to love them,” proclaimed the big-screen slide projected behind Aaron Ellison at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. That’s not a description usually associated with ants. A senior research fellow in ecology at Harvard Forest, Ellison was discussing his new book, “A Field Guide to the Ants of New England,” to an enthusiastic crowd that included members of the Harvard community and local fans of ecology. Beginning Thursday’s lecture, he asked for a show of hands: How many in the audience had taken a magnifying glass to ants on the sidewalk when they were young? Nearly a third raised their hands — almost all men, he pointed out, joking that it was a non-gender-neutral question. He flipped through his first few slides, of an ant farm from decades past, to an image of two human feet covered in ants. The air was sucked out of the room when the...