Michael Schulson/YH

An ant colony is a factory, a police-state, an organism, a city. It is both eerily human and comfortably alien. Ants make farms and take slaves. They put their dead in makeshift graveyards and have designated garbage collectors. They are virtually all female and sterile, with the exception of the oversized queen, whose eggs, genes, and pheromones bind the colony together. An ant queen can lay millions of eggs over the course of her lifetime, fertilizing them from large stores of sperm. As for the males—they die after mating, their one duty fulfilled.

I have spent a lifetime in love with ants and bugs of all kind, and I have spent a lifetime trying to explain to people just why they are so fascinating. Facts alone do not suffice. No, all I can say is this: Please, please take the time to look.

You don’t have to travel far—just up Hillhouse Ave., on the flanks of Science Hill, stands the Peabody Museum of Natural History, one of New Haven’s finest public institutions. On the second floor is the Discovery Room, home to two snakes, 11 poison dart frogs, one giant lobster, and approximately 5,000 leaf-cutter ants. Housed in a network of plastic tubes and boxes, the ants cut leaves into small pieces and use the foliage to cultivate a mutualistic fungus. The fungus eats the leaves; the ants eat the fungus. Each is dependent on the other.

The reader well-versed in anthropology—or Yale Sustainable Food Project table-tents—will recognize this behavior as an example of “true agriculture.” Only a handful of species cultivate crops in this way. In one sense, it is a means to power; two of the world’s most dominant animals—humans and leaf-cutter ants—also happen to be its finest farmers.

Leaf-cutter ants are certainly dominant in the Peabody—not as an ecosystem keystone, but as something that is really, really cool to watch. In the Discovery Room, ants are a marquee attraction, popular among kids, parents, and museum employees alike. (Full disclosure: Although neither a parent nor, legally, a child, I am a museum employee.) Thanks to a translucent display case, the ants can be easily observed cutting leaves and tending to their fungal gardens. The hulking ants milling around are soldiers, ready to attack any intruders. Their oversized heads contain the muscles that power a ferocious, skin-puncturing bite. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot the queen, who is the size of a small thumb. In the wild, she could be the mother of millions. At the Peabody, her reproductive potential is a bit more limited. But to us, she’s still royalty.

The queen arrived at the Peabody around two years ago, accompanied by 50 workers. Collected in Trinidad by the Oakland Zoo, the Peabody’s ants arrived in a strikingly low-tech fashion: Placed in a cardboard box, they were flown to New England as carry-on luggage. Within a year they had settled in, multiplied exponentially, and captured the fascination of thousands of visitors.

The educational mastermind behind this whole exhibit is Jim Sirch, who works for the Peabody as an instructor and as the Discovery Room coordinator. Jim is tall, friendly, and a born educator, describing himself as “the go-to guy for life exhibits” at the Peabody. Since taking over the Discovery Room, he’s added a poison dart frog exhibit and introduced the ants. In the classroom, students can read books about biology or see pictures of animals. For Sirch, education is something you can see and touch. Instead of making a poster about bird evolution, “a few years ago, we hatched emu eggs in the Great Hall [dinosaur exhibit] in order to show the connection between dinosaurs and birds.”

Like most biologists, Sirch developed a love of nature by puttering around outdoors. “I remember as a toddler walking out in my backyard and catching salamanders in the stream,” he tells me, noting that hiking with his grandparents was a formative experience. “Most people with a love of nature have someone in their lives that really provided some quality outdoor experiences when they were younger.”

I know that, for me, it was hanging around natural history museums—my father is in the industry—and taking hikes that sparked my love of the natural world. And it is watching bees and ants hard at work—how they communicate, how they cooperate, how they operate as an ever-changing web—that makes me fall in love, again and again, with the natural world.

Incidentally, checking out the ants won’t just satisfy your curiosity and reawaken the child within. It could also help you excel in your political science class or become the Master of the Universe that Yale so wants you to be. After all, as previously noted, ants are a lot like humans. Watching them is an exercise in social observation. It’s no coincidence that E.O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology—the study of the evolution of social behavior, especially in humans—is an expert on ants. (Other entomologists-cum-social commentators include Vladimir Nabokov, superstar novelist, and Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.)

For example, when considering issues of human social class, we might ask ourselves about ant trash collectors. Taking out waste is a bad job—it exposes the ant to diseases and predators—and refuse-collectors in the leaf-cutter ant population tend to be undersized and bullied. As larvae, they were fed a nutritionally-limited diet that forced them into a lifetime as a worker.

Like ants, we humans have a pronounced division of labor in our society. How do we force people to take bad jobs? Do jobs like garbage-collecting pay less because they utilize unskilled labor? Or do they pay less in order to ensure that someone is forced to keep this job? Can classism and racism be seen as analogues to the way that ants aggressively force other ants into doing more dangerous jobs? Is this an inevitable part of large societies? What are the ethical implications of this sort of division of labor? And so on.

Of course, you may not find that the Peabody’s leaf-cutter ant exhibit inspires you to embark on a sociological quest. But that’s no reason to miss the ants.

Since toddlerhood, we’ve been fed books and stories about the world around us, from The Hungry Caterpillar on. Information is the sea in which our minds float. But facts alone do not suffice. Sometimes you need to go and see, and that’s where places like the Peabody come in. They’re filled with the tangible and the beautiful, and while they may have an informative sign or two, in the end it’s up to you to observe, think, and marvel. So, put down your books, put down this fine newspaper, and head north toward the Peabody. Really, it’s not that far. Go stare at the ants. Watch how they use their antennae. Pick a single ant and follow it for five minutes. Search for the queen.

Then again, maybe it’s not ants that really get you going. But something does, whatever it is. Don’t get too caught in the world of books and graphs and models. Go look—at something, anything. But look.