Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration

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, 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 show more 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

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.

Fantastic book about ants and their social lives. Scientific but engaging and very readable. Authors are preeminent scholars in the study of ants.

Fantastic content with great illustrations and pictures that reads easily, although at a fairly high level

Brilliant

Big Ship

Read 1994

Très bon ouvrage qui nous fait découvrir les fourmis par le biais de l'analyse scientifique dont elles font l'objet. L'ouvrage est à la fois pointu et accessible, avec des anecdotes qui illustrent bien les aventures des biologistes dans l'univers des fourmis. Les auteurs ont réussi à transmettre leur passion et à vulgariser intelligemment leurs recherches.