Mark W. Moffett, PhD, known affectionately as "Doctor Bugs," has carved out an extraordinary career as a biologist, naturalist, author, and adventurer whose groundbreaking work has captivated audiences worldwide. His pioneering study of Asian ants led to his first published story in National Geographic Magazine, launching a remarkable journey that has taken him to more than one hundred countries in search of new animal species and behaviors. Currently serving as a Research Associate in entomology at the Smithsonian Institution and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, Moffett has become one of the world's most respected nature photographers and storytellers.
Moffett's impressive body of work includes several acclaimed publications: "The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall," "Adventures Among Ants," "Face to Face with Frogs," and "The High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy." His exhibitions have drawn massive crowds, with "Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants" at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History becoming one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum's history, traveling for five years across the country. His "Face to Face with Frogs" exhibition at the National Geographic Museum further cemented his reputation as a master storyteller who can make audiences fall in love with the world's smallest creatures.
Moffett's unconventional path to scientific stardom began during a troubled academic start. "As a kid, I wasn't very interested in school, but in junior high I became obsessed with a book called 'The Insect Societies,' full of beautiful images and esoteric words I didn't understand," he recalls. After dropping out of high school, he managed to gain admission to Beloit College, a liberal arts school in Wisconsin, where he formed crucial connections with professors and researchers at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Despite coming from a family that rarely traveled beyond U.S. borders, Moffett discovered he possessed what he calls "explorer's genes."
The turning point in his career came when he wrote a letter to Professor Edward O. Wilson, the renowned author of "The Insect Societies" that had so captivated him as a teenager. Wilson's response was characteristically gracious – he scribbled a note inviting the young student to visit him at Harvard. "I had no understanding of how famous he was," Moffett admits. "Having gone to a small, informal school, I called him by his first name. This seemed to do no harm, since we immediately began looking at pictures of ants and telling each other stories." This meeting with Wilson, who would later win two Pulitzer Prizes, proved transformative for Moffett's understanding of visual storytelling.
"Stories! Right from the start," Moffett emphasizes. "The world is swamped with images. What's always been in short supply are compelling stories that can be told visually. Learn a subject, that's the best way to uncover stories that will truly surprise the viewer." Under Wilson's mentorship as a graduate student, Moffett made a crucial discovery in the museum – specimens of an overlooked ant species with workers that came in a dramatic range of sizes and shapes, indicating an intricate way of life. This species, which he would later call the marauder ant, was from Asia, setting the stage for an extended overseas research expedition.
Faced with the prospect of spending months abroad studying creatures that might seem fantastical to his doctoral committee, Moffett made a critical decision to commit to photography. "I was concerned that if I returned after a protracted time with tales of ants without images to back them up, my doctoral committee might conclude that I imagined it all," he explains. With minimal photography experience and a creative approach borrowed from fashion photography, he applied techniques used for photographing supermodels to insects – "fill light, hair light, and so on."
Equipped with a used camera and twenty flashes that frequently gave him electric shocks, Moffett practiced his techniques with a dead ant on a gray card in the final days before boarding his flight to Sri Lanka. Having received a grant from National Geographic's research division, he arranged for them to develop his film to save money for fieldwork. After six months of shooting in the field, never having seen a single image of a living ant due to pre-digital camera limitations, he mailed off eight rolls of film. The response came via telex and was beyond his wildest expectations: the magazine was flying someone over to discuss his photography.
However, success didn't come without setbacks. When National Geographic wanted to publish his story based on initial results, Moffett convinced them he could do better with a return trip to Asia, free from the pressures of thesis research. The magazine agreed to fly him to Singapore, where he worked around the clock for a month, shooting 200 rolls and pressing the camera button 7,200 times. Disaster struck when he received a devastating voicemail a week after mailing the film: his images "lacked critical resolution" – they were all blurry due to a lens cleaning mishap at a camera shop.
Refusing to give up despite an empty bank account, Moffett talked his way into Canon's Singapore corporate office by explaining he was working for National Geographic and had experienced lens failure. The Canon executives were thrilled to help, knowing that National Geographic photographers typically used Nikon equipment. Within an hour, he left with a new macro lens. Drawing on the intensive photography experience from the previous month, he shot virtually the complete article with his remaining 20 rolls of film during his final four days in Asia, creating images that would launch his career before he had even completed his doctorate.
Moffett attributes his early success to several factors, including his ignorance of the typical hurdles photographers face when working with National Geographic. "How did I get good images without the 10,000 hours of practice that a specialized career supposedly requires?" he asks. "The camera served as my microscope for observing ants. The only obligation was to press the button when anything fascinated me. Where I had accrued those 10,000 hours of experience was in my years of insect watching, which gave me the wherewithal to know when to press that button."
His approach to equipment reflected both financial constraints and practical wisdom. Starting his first National Geographic story with just $300 worth of gear, he discovered the winning tactic of keeping things simple to concentrate on shooting quickly while action was happening. "On most expeditions, my gear fits in a pack I lug on my back," he explains. "I am not going to come up with the images I desire if I must assemble elaborate equipment every time I encounter an animal doing something astonishing. Simplify!" He even glued down every button on his camera that served no purpose.
What set Moffett apart from other macro photographers wasn't technical prowess but his unique perspective and storytelling ability. "My advantage was never technique, but that I had stories to tell," he notes. "Another advantage was that I photograph creatures as I see them. For me, insects are Titans. I treat the blades of grass ants move through as forests, their nests as Rome. That's a powerful way to engage the viewer." This approach led National Geographic editors to tell him his ant photography brought to mind the movie "Alien."
Moffett possesses an unusual gift for maintaining sharp focus on tiny subjects under challenging conditions. In Japan, he photographed samurai soldier aphids defending their siblings – creatures so small he needed half a meter of extension tubes and had to manage a depth of field "the length of an amoeba." Even while working in mosquito-filled swamps, he never used a tripod, preferring mobility to track the attacks of what he calls "killer aphids." His extreme close-up capabilities even caught NASA's attention, leading to inquiries about potential astronaut training, though the space agency ultimately abandoned the idea.
After completing his PhD, Moffett made the unconventional decision to forgo the traditional academic path of becoming a professor, instead supporting himself through photography and writing while continuing the research that serves as the wellspring for his stories. "A tricky career choice, both because my finances go up and down depending on what I'm doing, and because my fellow scientists don't always take photography, and photographers, seriously," he admits. This interdisciplinary approach, common a century ago but rare today, means he's unlikely to achieve top honors in either science or photography alone, but it allows him to pursue connections between science and the arts.
Ants remain central to Moffett's work because they "offer a hell of a lot of stories that have never been told, full of sex and violence worthy of science fiction. (Mostly violence, since only the queen gets the sex.)" He recognized this potential intuitively as a child, when he spent time observing ants in "muck and mire." The parallels between ant and human societies fascinate him – unlike many mammals that spend much of their day inactive, ants display constant activity: building roads, cooperating to gather food, and waging wars.
These similarities provide rich material for both scientific study and visual storytelling. In his essay "Apples and Oranges, Ants and Humans: The Misunderstood Art of Making Comparisons," Moffett argues that the greatest discoveries come from spotting similarities between seemingly different things. While humans and chimpanzees share obvious evolutionary connections, ants parallel humans in certain respects not because they're intelligent, but because they live in large societies and face similar challenges – including public health emergencies that no chimpanzee in its small community would encounter.
Moffett's approach to nature photography challenges what he sees as an antiquated focus on "pretty calendar pics." Like written journalism and scientific investigation, he believes photographic success comes from documenting life-changing moments for subjects. While acknowledging the value of traditional portraiture and everyday activities, he emphasizes the importance of digging deeper. "To genuinely break new ground, don't be the shutterbug who might as well have been a space alien, using all the craftsmanship at your disposal to document a Thanksgiving dinner while failing to understand, and convey, what that meal really means."
One of his greatest challenges involves recording species under natural conditions without manipulation. While many photographers refrigerate insects to slow them down or build elaborate setups, Moffett commits to capturing subjects in their normal behaviors. "The activities of my marauder ants, for example, completely fall apart in captivity," he notes. "Even naïve persons are excellent at telling the difference when presented with both staged images and pictures of an animal that's simply been caught doing its thing, without manipulation."
This philosophy extends to his scientific approach, which he describes as choosing accuracy over precision. While laboratory researchers control variables to get exact data, fieldwork may be "sloppy, uncomfortable, time-consuming," but it reveals how animals actually behave in their natural environments. Moffett employs what scientists call "critical anthropomorphism" – carefully attributing human-like characteristics to understand animal behavior, much like hunter-gatherer ancestors who would "get in the head of a game animal" to predict its movements.
Among his most dangerous assignments was documenting forest canopies – the multi-tiered architecture formed by trees, vines, and epiphytes. After climbing trees in numerous countries and eventually joining a team to scale the world's tallest tree (a California redwood), he faced a life-threatening moment while photographing his mentor, Dr. Wilson, surveying the canopy from a metal scaffolding in Panama. Ascending an adjacent tree, Moffett heard a snap and found himself thrown upside down 100 feet from the ground when his safety harness came undone. Clinging for dear life, he managed to call out "Just a moment – just a moment" to Wilson below, reattach his harness, and continue shooting without revealing the near-disaster. His lesson: "Never buy a safety harness that advertises a quick release feature."
Moffett's story development process involves either identifying ignored species for his own research or learning about existing research on subjects that have never been photographed. One National Geographic article featured flies from New Guinea that fight with antlers like miniature elk – species he discovered through the 19th-century explorer Alfred Wallace's writings. After tracking down recent research by biologist Gary Dodson, Moffett faced the challenge of convincing National Geographic editors to approve an assignment about flies, overcoming their initial "yuck" response by bringing museum specimens to demonstrate the creatures' charismatic appearance.
Throughout his career, Moffett has discovered new species of ants, frogs, and plants in locations ranging from Venezuelan sinkholes to remote forests, with several species named in his honor. However, his primary contribution lies not in taxonomy but in describing and photographing novel animal behaviors. His first Asian expedition yielded publications on numerous unstudied species, including an ant with sawblade-like jaws that quickly dispatches adversaries, another with soldiers resembling decapitated heads, and the world's tiniest ant. The marauder ant proved to hunt in swarms like army ants, displaying organized behaviors that translated magnificently to film.
Moffett's research into social behavior scaling reveals fascinating parallels between ant and human societies. As societies grow larger, both species develop more complicated division of labor and intricate infrastructure. Massive ant colonies with populations exceeding one million tackle health problems using disinfectants for cleaning, isolation of sick individuals, and specialized sanitation squads – strategies that humans, despite our advanced civilizations, often handle less effectively. Large societies of both species also engage in mass warfare, employing similar military strategies and drawing from excess labor pools for battles.
His photographs capture dramatic scenarios that would be inappropriate to show with human subjects – ants literally pulling each other apart or employing suicide bombers that explode upon contact with enemies. This work appeared in his Scientific American article "Ants & the Art of War," demonstrating the photographic potential of inter-species warfare while illustrating broader principles about social organization and conflict.
Following his mentor E.O. Wilson's advocacy for biodiversity education, Moffett emphasizes that much of Earth's functioning depends on arthropods, making declining insect numbers alarming for long-term human survival. With so much species diversity poorly documented, he sees thousands of opportunities for journalists to tell untold stories. Rather than covering "well-trodden ground" like pandas eating bamboo, he advocates for making viewers "fall in love with the unexpected in nature," particularly the "little underdogs that keep nature running."
Moffett's approach to environmental communication focuses on positive framing rather than overwhelming audiences with bad news and statistics about extinctions and rainforest loss. By taking people by surprise – making spider-haters cheer for a struggling male spider seeking a mate – he believes people become better motivated to protect the natural world. "If we frame the natural world in a positive way, they'll be better motivated to go out and save it."
Currently, Moffett has stepped back from active photography to focus on his next major project: understanding what keeps societies together or breaks them apart across species, including humans. This research has led him to study diverse creatures from dolphins to hyenas while consulting with psychologists about human behavior. Working toward another book and hoped-for museum exhibition, he's playing "the long game" on what he considers a subject of vast importance.
Reflecting on his career, Moffett emphasizes that Earth remains far from fully explored, contrary to what many young people believe. While laboratory science contributes significantly to knowledge, he advocates for outdoor discovery, noting that important nature stories can even be explored from home. Years ago, he wrote a National Geographic article about acorns in his own backyard, which teachers adopted for school projects. "The humble acorn is the perfect lodging place for a diversity of unseen organisms, fostering a veritable ecosystem: a grand story in a nutshell." Through his extraordinary journey from high school dropout to internationally acclaimed scientist and photographer, Moffett continues to demonstrate that the natural world offers endless opportunities for those passionate enough to look closely and tell its stories with both scientific rigor and artistic vision.
