It’s a raw Tuesday evening in early April. Rain clouds darken downtown Chicago, veiling the night sky. But in a roped-off exhibition room at the Field Museum of Natural History , the stars are plain to see.
Corrie Saux Moreau is an evolutionary biologist, an entomologist, a curator at the Field Museum, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, and a National Geographic Explorer. Her specialty is myrmecology—the study of ants. Like Goodall, her work has altered our understanding of the natural world—and our sense of what a scientist looks like.
Moreau’s research has redrawn the ant family tree, showing that the ubiquitous insects are at least 40 million years older than previously thought. She and her colleagues have also demonstrated that the microbiomes of ants play a major role in their diets, their social interactions, and their evolutionary success. More broadly, Moreau’s work might indirectly help us develop tools to answer bigger biological questions: how to control pests, how to promote helpful species, how to improve digestion and nutrition.
Yet groundbreaking research is only part of Moreau’s story. A leading advocate for women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), she co-founded the Field Museum Women in Science in 2011 . With monthly meetings and a speaker series, the group actively promotes gender parity through fellowships for female doctoral and postdoctoral candidates and paid internships for young women in high school and college.
Turtle ants coat a tree branch in Paraná, Brazil. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WILD
The framed watercolor is hanging on the wall in her new office, painted by the museum’s longtime artist-in-residence, Peggy McNamara. Recently promoted to be the director of the Integrative Research Center, Moreau now oversees the institution’s three core divisions—life sciences, earth sciences, social sciences—and its academic research center, which includes faculty curators, scientific laboratories, and associated staff. That’s in addition to running the 12-member Moreau Lab and doing her own research, collection management, and fieldwork, including annual ant-gathering trips to the equatorial belt.
Somehow Moreau still makes time to give personal tours of the Field Museum. After leading a visitor to the insect collections in the building’s mothball-scented bowels, she points out a few of her favorite species. One is the leaf-cutter ant, which gleans nutrients from a plant-based diet by growing polymer-dissolving fungus in its nest. Another is the green tree ant of Australia, which uses larval silk to stitch together its nest “like a mini sewing machine.”
But her favorite of all may be a turtle ant called Cephalotes varians. First described by Darwin, these neotropical tree-dwellers live in holes bored into the bark by beetles. To protect their nests, female soldiers use their heads—shaped like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—to plug the holes and stave off intruders. Moreau and Shauna Price, a postdoc in the Moreau Lab and a Women in Science committee member, have a multiyear National Science Foundation fellowship to study the evolution of these perfectly adapted “living doorways.” ( When attacked, the Colobopsis explodens ant will rip itself apart to scare off predators and protect its colony .)
One thing that sets Moreau apart from other scientists is her ability to convey wonder and enthusiasm—to make whoever she’s talking to care about ants. While most people see them as pests to be endured or eradicated, Moreau sees an endlessly fascinating group of social animals brimming with evolutionary insights.
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Moreau’s dissertation, on the evolution and diversification of ants, was highly ambitious. She and her colleagues used 43 fossils from the ant family tree to calibrate a “molecular clock,” then sequenced six genes each from 139 genera, comprising 19 of the world’s 20 ant subfamilies. With their findings, they were able to redraw the ant family tree, push back the insects’ origins by millions of years, and prove that ants’ astonishing global bloom—there are now over 15,000 named species—coincided with the rise of flowering plants about a hundred million years age.
