IRIS Nights Lecture Series with Mark W. Moffett

Ants As Journalism: Chasing Down the Secret Lives of Small Subjects

Mark W. Moffett is a Harvard-trained ecologist who has had close to 500 images in National Geographic magazine, mostly of the small and little-appreciated: spiders, frogs and snakes. His goal in photography is to make people fall in love with the unexpected in nature. Over the last seven years, he has pursued unusual ants around the world to document the stories of their social lives for his new book, Adventures Among Ants.

Dr. Moffett discovered that their lives resemble ours in surprising ways -- in the animal kingdom, only ants and humans deal with issues of public health, market economies, highways and traffic rules, and warfare. He is known for his storytelling, and is the only regular National Geographic contributor who has made regular appearances on The Colbert Report and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Box office for this event opens Wednesday, January 12 at 12pm PT and Thursday, January 13 at 9:30am PT.