Mark Moffett is Research Associate in the Entomology Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. He is also a contract photographer for National Geographic, which has published twenty-four of his articles (text and pictures). He received his Ph.D. at Harvard under E. O. Wilson, serving as Wilson’s Associate Curator of Entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, in charge of the world’s largest collection of ants. In his extensive research in the wilds of five continents, he has discovered new species of ants, other animals, and plants. For his work on rain forest canopies, in 2006 he received the Explorers Club’s Lowell Thomas Medal for Exploration. His talk is based on Adventures among Ants (2010), for which he received the National Outdoor Book Award. He writes, “Humans are closely related to chimpanzees and yet our modern civilizations are more similar to ant colonies than to the communities of any ape. Living in groups of at most a hundred, no chimpanzee has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines, agricultural and animal domestication, warfare and slavery. Ants have behavior addressing all these issues.”
