---

Counting ants helps
trees in Palmyra

Although it feels like a gift, permission to anchor in Palmyra's lagoon for three months didn't come free. I'm a guest of the Nature Conservancy and a volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In return, I work.

My TNC job is to help clean the galley after dinner. Since about 20 of us, give or take a few, share in this rotation and people pitch in when it's not their turn, this chore is practically a social event.

For that small task, the station's managers feed me better than I eat at home, offer laundry facilities (a godsend) and share the camp's kayaks, showers, books and most everything else they have here. Talk about being overpaid.

For the FWS, I count ants.

I didn't think this would be as much fun as banding brown booby chicks, a chore we've already finished, but it's turning out to be even better. I get to kayak to work through lagoons teeming with marine life, and back in camp I watch ants through a microscope.

This, surprisingly, is as entertaining as the movie "Antz," which came on the plane this week from my sister. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard," says an Old Testament passage, "consider her ways."

Seven kinds of ants thrive in Palmyra, all aliens to the atoll. In a behavior called farming, several of these hardy species protect, nurture and transport scale, insects that suck sap.

Scale, so called because of their shell-like coverings, are rapidly draining the life from the native Pisonia trees. The result is that trees healthy a few years ago now lie like fallen giants, their carbohydrates sucked dry.

This ant-scale connection is a classic case of symbiosis. Ants like sap suckers because they excrete a sugary substance called honeydew. By farming scale, the ants maintain a source of food, and the scale get protection and rides to fresh trees.

Before biologists can tackle the scale, therefore, they have to fight the ants.

That's where my job comes in. Managers want to know how much ant poison it takes to knock back these industrious little farmers, and for how long. No one thinks they can eradicate ants here, but if their populations are decreased, then a specific, scale-eating ladybug might be introduced to eat the scale and hopefully save the trees.

With ant farming at its high rate, managers believe the scale would currently out-reproduce the ladybugs.

My task is to count ants at specific sites, on specific days, both before and after scattering ant poison. In addition, I'll help glue radio transmitters to the endearing little hermit crabs here to monitor how the ant poison affects them.

Also, I must soon help carry the giant coconut crabs away from the study sites to protect them from the poison. I look forward to getting to know these endangered crabs better, and hope those whopper claws won't seize more than my attention. Handling them will be another grand adventure.

Yes, I'm paying daily to stay here in Palmyra. It's the bargain of a lifetime.