Dear Dr ......

I hope you do not mind me getting in contact with you, I found your details on the Natural History museum's website, and am writing to you in the hope that you may be able to offer advice on a project that I am working on.

I am, by trade, an architectural model-maker and my long awaited retirement is fast approaching. I have spent the best part of my career creating scale versions of the buildings of the Business Capital's of the world. Although such work has reaped me financial rewards it has left me increasingly hollow. The buildings, on the whole, lack imaginative flair and I have lived (in miniature) the monotonous days' of workers spent in pursuit of capital gain in these homogenous corridor and office spaces. For some years the only respite I had from this depression was to spend my spare hours creating models for my own dream cityscape. The model workers of my city languish in gleaming white towers, write poetry in dusty attic rooms and traverse the city via boat or a series of spiralling staircases and bridges; cars have not been invented and nature sprawls across the city walls in abundance.

I completed my model city to the degree that I wished and, for reasons I will go on to explain, turned my efforts to designing what I hope will be my "Master" retirement project. The idea is to create a scale model of a palace of fairy-tale proportions. Each path and staircase in the palace will lead to the centre-piece - a banqueting hall complete with miniature tables, chairs, plates, knives, forks and spoons. The palace and its contents will be made entirely in gold, the only exceptions being the dining room's chandelier, whose crystals will be formed from sugar, and the feast itself. The feast will also be made of sugar, but melted and cast to give the appearance of a splendid array of meats and vegetables of every kind, fine wines, cheeses and deserts to make the fullest mouth water. I believe my skills to be capable of creating all of this but am missing the final and most important ingredient and the reason why I seek your advice.

I came to tire of my city because of its lack of genuine animation. No matter how hard I tried to read myself into the lives of the miniature people they remained static, relying on my hand to move them before their stories could unfold. I grew tired of listening to my own imaginary readings of the character's lives whose plastic features betrayed their emptiness. It was whilst visiting your museum where I found the first two parts of the answer to my solution and I hope that you may be able to go some way in helping me to achieve the third and final part.

While visiting the display on "Insects" I discovered a tank of "leaf-cutter" ants and became mesmerised. Within this macrocosm of the world I saw what my own city had been missing - life in all its intricacies unfolding in-spite of my presence. I quickly set to work on my designs for this glorious palace to which I could attract a host of ants with my sugary temptations. Yet at the back of my mind was a niggling sense of incompleteness, in order for the project to reach true perfection the architecture and its inhabitants would form some sort of symbiosis. By this I mean that, to be really believable, the ants should be almost indiscernible from their architecture as if a natural and miraculous evolution had occurred. Over time I wanted to be able to persuade my imagination that I had discovered and was observing the lives of golden beings in a golden palace of their own making, rather than seeing brown ants that I had placed in my golden palace. I had little hope that such an outcome might be achieved until I came across a display at your museum, detailing the history of the "Peppered moth''. I conducted some further research and, my understanding of the story is that, in 1848 there was a report from Manchester that the species had begun to appear in a black form, whereas up until this point it had always been grey. By the time of Darwin's death in 1882 this black (or melanic) was the most commonly spotted. The cause of the phenomenon was thought to be the large amount of pollution that appeared as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the fact that dark moths could not be seen by birds when they rested on the smoke blackened trees. It struck me then that there could be a tiny chance that by altering the environmental conditions of an insect you could alter its appearance. I realise that the achievement of such an outcome would be no mean feat, but am willing to wholeheartedly dedicate my time and energy to it. I would be extremely grateful for any expert advice that you may be able to offer, and if you could let me know frankly whether or not there would ever be any possibility of evolving a species of golden ants if this colour was their only habitat?