Bert Hölldobler

A beautifully illustrated, short account of the leafcutter ants, which doesn't quite manage to thread the needle between a technical scientific account and a popular one (there were a few bits I had to read more than once to make sure I got it).

You'll learn a lot from this extremely interesting book. But first - couple of quotes.

- It can be said that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies.

- If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

In this book however you'll not only learn about the art of ant war, like:
* Home turf matters - majority of battles are won on fields where future victors' droppings prevail.
* They seal defenders in their nests, show more spraying their victims with poison squirts from the tips of their bodies (think flamethrowers) and hurling small stones into shafts.
* suicide bombers is a routine practice, when an individual ant blasts itself in the midst of enemies, covering them with its highly toxic poison.
* selective highway robberies
* slave raids

But also about many ways these small creatures run their lives:

* intrigues among queens
* use of silk from pupae
* creation of live bridges
* storage of excess nutrients in overblown bodies of receptacle ants
* how cunning parasites exploit ants
* how they specialize and mimic the environment
* how they change the very environment they live in - from climate and humidity control of their nests to agriculture and pasturing that they pioneered zillions years before us.

You'll learn how they communicate and organize their foraging and warring activities. And much, much more :) show less

Reading for the "Altruism" theme at the Bookish club. (It makes perfect sense, shut up.) This is a deeply intimidating book - 500 big pages full of big words - but it's been really interesting when I've had the gumption to focus on it.

Yeah, I said gumption.

About ten years ago, after having finished reading all of the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners to date, I considered tackling the general-non fiction winners, one of which is The Ants, the Wilson-Holldobler monograph, about 800 pages of folio. I got about a quarter of the way through it one summer before giving up. This book is much more approachable and reads like a series of National Geographic articles for the most part.