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Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration
Hailed as "a masterpiece" by Scientific American and as "the greatest of all entomology books" by Science, Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson's monumental treatise The Ants also was praised in the popular press and won a Pulitzer Prize. This overwhelming success attests to a fact long known and deeply felt by the authors: the infinite fascination of their tiny subjects. This fascination finds its full expression in Journey to the Ants, an overview of myrmecology that is also an eloquent tale of the authors' pursuit of these astonishing insects.
Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement.
Accompanying Holldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants cooperate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they use propaganda and surveillance, and how they exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalence between allegiance and self-aggrandizement.
This exotic tour of the entire range of formicid biodiversity - from social parasites to army ants, nomadic hunters, camouflaged huntresses, and energetic builders of temperature-controlled skyscrapers - opens out increasingly into natural history, intimating the relevance of ant life to human existence.
A window on the world of ants as well as those who study them, this book will be a rich source of knowledge and pleasure for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder about the miniature yet immense civilization at our feet.
Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement.
Accompanying Holldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants cooperate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they use propaganda and surveillance, and how they exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalence between allegiance and self-aggrandizement.
This exotic tour of the entire range of formicid biodiversity - from social parasites to army ants, nomadic hunters, camouflaged huntresses, and energetic builders of temperature-controlled skyscrapers - opens out increasingly into natural history, intimating the relevance of ant life to human existence.
A window on the world of ants as well as those who study them, this book will be a rich source of knowledge and pleasure for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder about the miniature yet immense civilization at our feet.
228 pages, Paperback
First published August 5, 1994
84 people are currently reading
2354 people want to read
About the author
Bert Hölldobler
17 books77 followersBert Hölldobler is Foundation Professor at Arizona State University and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He lives in Arizona and Germany.
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December 7, 2020Update Farming, crops, in detail. This is unbelievably fascinating. Every time there is description and explanation for ant behaviour, there is another question raised, almost always the same one, 'how does she know?'.
This is how leafcutter ants farm their 'mushrooms' crop. The foragers drop their leaves into a chamber where slightly smaller ants shred them for even smaller ants to crush and mould into moist pellets which they then carefully insert into a pile of similar material. This fluffy mass looks like a sponge with cracks and ridges and channels and on it grows the fungus, sinking like all mushrooms, hyphae deep into the substrate. Workers, even smaller, take strands of this growth and place them, plant them, on the leaf-paste soil. The tiniest of ants now takes over, climbing all over the mould, licking it clean and weeding it of unwanted other fungi and growths. Occasionally they pick a tuft of fungus out and take it to feed the bigger ants.
That's true farming in every respect. And the 'How does she know' question is this - a new queen after her nuptial flight, now has enough sperm for 14 years of breeding and has brought with her a little 'seed' packet of the fungus. She must now grow her garden all by herself whilst she lives off the energy provided by ripping off her wings and absorbing her flight muscles. Ants take 40-60 days to hatch.
How does she know how to forage for leaves and which to take home. How does she know how to tend the garden, how to raise and nurture the young of the eggs she doesn't eat for nourishment or to feed the first hatchlings, how to clean the nest, how to set up the garbage and excrement midden (ants are 'toilet-trained'). How to do every job herself and then how to breed the different castes and sizes of ants needed?
It is all to do with energy expenditure, but there is still the, how does she know but the other ants don't .They are more restricted in what they know and can do, although not entirely as ants do have minds of their own and make decisions and communicate them without reference to others. How do they know to do these things that are driven by instinct but need the power of discernment to be successful?
This is so fascinating. How have I lived all these years and not realised there is a parallel world just as powerful as ours, and neither of us afraid of the other - indeed both of us will attack the other on sight. A creature a millionth the size of us will stand up, attack and hurt us, we are their enemy, and they are ours. But we co-exist without hardly any knowledge of each other at all.
____________________
Another ant book! And this is the best one yet. The reason for ants immense success is for the same reason as humans - communication skills. Ants have more ways of communicating than any other animal. They can make sounds -stridulation, rubbing body parts together, like crickets. Between 10 and 20 individual sounds have been identified as having separate meanings - words. Then there are pheromones of which there are many which, since humans are not good at detecting or giving meaning to smells, we can only guess at. Add to that actions and gestures, and the scents carried into the nest from outside and ants can communicate in simple 'sentences'.
What is a supercolony? "In 1979, a supercolony extending over 675 acres was found on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. It contained an estimaed 306 million workers and 1 million queens in 45 nests interconnected" by tunnels. This is like a State with many different cities and towns and villages, all the inhabitants employed in various occupations to maintain their nest, but not ever for individual benefit.
For food there will be hunters and foragers, as well as farmers who raise insects for 'milking' of honeydew. Others who grow and tend fungi farms, still others who raise scale insects for meat. There will be road and bridge builders, maintenance crews, scouts, guards and an army. Each nest, each village, town or city will have a Queen, a mayor if you like and all, whilst not really intermingling much, will have a common identity, a nationhood, that binds them and that they will defend against outsiders in a bloody, vicious way that far outstrips the cruelties of men.
It's kind of stupendous to think about that. This book is amazing, it's culled from the author's strictly academic texts, huge books and notations that can only be read and understood by other myrmecologists, ant scientists of which there are only 500 in the world . This is all the details the author's other books - The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct and Tales from the Ant World talked about, but here they are expanded. As is my mind. Visions of another world all around us, and neither of us know anything much about the other, although both of us, in our own ways dominate the planet like no other.
This is how leafcutter ants farm their 'mushrooms' crop. The foragers drop their leaves into a chamber where slightly smaller ants shred them for even smaller ants to crush and mould into moist pellets which they then carefully insert into a pile of similar material. This fluffy mass looks like a sponge with cracks and ridges and channels and on it grows the fungus, sinking like all mushrooms, hyphae deep into the substrate. Workers, even smaller, take strands of this growth and place them, plant them, on the leaf-paste soil. The tiniest of ants now takes over, climbing all over the mould, licking it clean and weeding it of unwanted other fungi and growths. Occasionally they pick a tuft of fungus out and take it to feed the bigger ants.
That's true farming in every respect. And the 'How does she know' question is this - a new queen after her nuptial flight, now has enough sperm for 14 years of breeding and has brought with her a little 'seed' packet of the fungus. She must now grow her garden all by herself whilst she lives off the energy provided by ripping off her wings and absorbing her flight muscles. Ants take 40-60 days to hatch.
How does she know how to forage for leaves and which to take home. How does she know how to tend the garden, how to raise and nurture the young of the eggs she doesn't eat for nourishment or to feed the first hatchlings, how to clean the nest, how to set up the garbage and excrement midden (ants are 'toilet-trained'). How to do every job herself and then how to breed the different castes and sizes of ants needed?
It is all to do with energy expenditure, but there is still the, how does she know but the other ants don't .They are more restricted in what they know and can do, although not entirely as ants do have minds of their own and make decisions and communicate them without reference to others. How do they know to do these things that are driven by instinct but need the power of discernment to be successful?
This is so fascinating. How have I lived all these years and not realised there is a parallel world just as powerful as ours, and neither of us afraid of the other - indeed both of us will attack the other on sight. A creature a millionth the size of us will stand up, attack and hurt us, we are their enemy, and they are ours. But we co-exist without hardly any knowledge of each other at all.
____________________
Another ant book! And this is the best one yet. The reason for ants immense success is for the same reason as humans - communication skills. Ants have more ways of communicating than any other animal. They can make sounds -stridulation, rubbing body parts together, like crickets. Between 10 and 20 individual sounds have been identified as having separate meanings - words. Then there are pheromones of which there are many which, since humans are not good at detecting or giving meaning to smells, we can only guess at. Add to that actions and gestures, and the scents carried into the nest from outside and ants can communicate in simple 'sentences'.
What is a supercolony? "In 1979, a supercolony extending over 675 acres was found on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. It contained an estimaed 306 million workers and 1 million queens in 45 nests interconnected" by tunnels. This is like a State with many different cities and towns and villages, all the inhabitants employed in various occupations to maintain their nest, but not ever for individual benefit.
For food there will be hunters and foragers, as well as farmers who raise insects for 'milking' of honeydew. Others who grow and tend fungi farms, still others who raise scale insects for meat. There will be road and bridge builders, maintenance crews, scouts, guards and an army. Each nest, each village, town or city will have a Queen, a mayor if you like and all, whilst not really intermingling much, will have a common identity, a nationhood, that binds them and that they will defend against outsiders in a bloody, vicious way that far outstrips the cruelties of men.
It's kind of stupendous to think about that. This book is amazing, it's culled from the author's strictly academic texts, huge books and notations that can only be read and understood by other myrmecologists, ant scientists of which there are only 500 in the world . This is all the details the author's other books - The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct and Tales from the Ant World talked about, but here they are expanded. As is my mind. Visions of another world all around us, and neither of us know anything much about the other, although both of us, in our own ways dominate the planet like no other.
August 25, 2015
If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
One of the best classes I ever took was taught by an entomologist. You couldn’t walk more than a few feet with him without coming across something fascinating. Every square inch of soil, every rock and branch, every type of environment—however seemingly barren—be it desert or riverine, was shown to be packed with little animated beings, scurrying about. The life of an entomologist is enviably interesting.
Of the innumerable species of bee and beetle and bug he showed us, one in particular stuck in my memory. We were in a sandy semi-desert, with air temperatures normally in the high nineties (the mid thirties, for non-Americans). And if you’ve ever walked barefoot on the beach, you’ll know that the ground temperature is considerably higher than the air when it's very sunny out. So the sand was extremely hot. Even so, an ant had evolved to survive in this environment—remarkable considering how moisture-loving ants normally are. The ant's strategy was simple: run really fast, holding its body high over the ground on its legs. (The poor beachgoer running over hot sand on tiptoe is thus using a valid evolutionary strategy.) Such was my introduction to the fascinating world of the ants.
(My professor also described a recent experiment that he or his colleagues had performed in the savanna. They wanted to know if the ants that nest in acacia trees, which aggressively defend the trees from pests like beetles and other leaf-eating insects, could dissuade much bigger herbivores. So they compared the time that rhinos and giraffes spent grazing at trees with ant colonies, as compared to those without ant colonies. In turned out that the aggressive ants could even bother a tough-skinned rhino enough to convince it to look for food elsewhere.)
Inspired by this experience, I wanted someday to read a book on the life of ants. At first, I was attracted to Wilson and Hölldobler’s magnum opus, The Ants. But a quick look at the size and the price convinced me to look elsewhere. As the two authors explain in the introduction to this very book:
… because exhaustive coverage is its primary aim, it is outsized, containing 732 pages of tables, figures, and double-columned text, measuring 26 by 31 centimeters in hard cover, and weighing 3.4 kilograms. The Ants, in short, is not a book one casually purchases and reads cover to cover.
So I gladly purchased this book, the popular version, and dug in.
This is one of those books that will fill you with trivia for weeks on end to entertain your friends. Ants are remarkable creatures. They go to war, enslave other ant species, practice agriculture (cultivating fungi), domesticate animals (protecting and nurturing aphids). They communicate with a formidable arsenal of chemical signals, which nevertheless leaves them vulnerable to a host of creatures which are able to reproduce their signals and take advantage of the ants’ cooperative lifestyle. Some ants perform feats that would put any human athletes to shame, forming chains with their bodies to pull leaves together into a nest (which are then sealed shut with silk made from their larvae). Really, I couldn’t hope to do justice to the wealth of information packed into this slim volume.
And along with these stories of evolutionary pyrotechnics, there are many pages of glossy photographs, which manage to be both beautiful and bizarre. Yet I have to admit that, even after reading this book, I still don’t find ants to be the paragon of beauty in the animal kingdom. But to put aesthetics aside, ants are interesting for the light they might shed on our own social species. For as the authors say at one point, myrmecologists use language adopted from human societies—such as war, slave raiding, domestication—precisely because ant behavior is so similar in form to our own. And what does this say about the nature of intelligence, that with our large brains we have slipped into the same patterns as the pebble-brained ants?
May 17, 2010
Journey to the Ants is THE indispensable and, as far as I know unparalleled book for myrmecophiles. Wilson's and Holldobler's prose is exceedingly clear, untechnical, and personal. Their passion for the realities of ant biology and ethology (as complemented by the isolated scientific knowledge thereof) makes every page alive. There is a LOT of really really cool stuff in this book.
Reading about the complexity and interesting permutations of ant behavior made me realize how little human justifications have to do with why we really do things. Complex social behaviors can, as ants show, evolve because they are successful or merely not detrimental, but since humans have conscious thought, we need abstract concepts to explain these behaviors to ourselves. Studying ants is a good way to overcome the tendency to take those justifications at face value.
Reading about the complexity and interesting permutations of ant behavior made me realize how little human justifications have to do with why we really do things. Complex social behaviors can, as ants show, evolve because they are successful or merely not detrimental, but since humans have conscious thought, we need abstract concepts to explain these behaviors to ourselves. Studying ants is a good way to overcome the tendency to take those justifications at face value.
October 31, 2017
La summa su questi meravigliosi insetti. Non credo esista nessun libro divulgativo migliore sull'argomento.
Se le formiche vi affascinano, leggetelo! E se non vi affascinano, leggetelo ugualmente: vi affascineranno!
Se le formiche vi affascinano, leggetelo! E se non vi affascinano, leggetelo ugualmente: vi affascineranno!
November 30, 2012
Journey to the Ants paints a very interesting picture of an ant colony as an intricate super-organism in which individual ants are only small, dispensable, fairly mechanical and easily replaceable walking batteries of exocrine glands that sense their world primarily through array of chemical words, touch, sound, and very poor vision in some cases. The fascinating image I take away from this book is that the colony is the individual, and every ant is like a protein flowing through the veins of the individual, doing various tasks to support the organism. Throughout the book you'll gain an understanding of an ant colony, how it functions, how it is divided into castes, how it controls its environment, migrates, cooperates with surrounding species through various symbioses, fights, and forages. There is a also a lot of discussion of various types of species in the vast and varied ant species universe, together with discussion on how they have evolved over time from wasps. Excellent!
I'm leaving out a star because it could have been even better! Very often a stunningly interesting behavior is described, but there is no effort made to explain on a reductionist level how it is achieved through simple rules that the ants may follow. For example, ants can build bridges across leaves with their bodies. How does a single ant decide to become part of the bridge? How does it know where to attach, or how long to stay? I wish there was an attempt to unravel the algorithm every ant follows. Surely, these kinds of experiments can be carried out in laboratory conditions and monitored closely? More generally, I found the book to be fairly light on this process of trying to "debug" an ant. Instead, much of the focus is on simply cataloging the behaviors on a high level. Maybe it's just the grumpy Computer Scientist in me... Oh well.
I'm leaving out a star because it could have been even better! Very often a stunningly interesting behavior is described, but there is no effort made to explain on a reductionist level how it is achieved through simple rules that the ants may follow. For example, ants can build bridges across leaves with their bodies. How does a single ant decide to become part of the bridge? How does it know where to attach, or how long to stay? I wish there was an attempt to unravel the algorithm every ant follows. Surely, these kinds of experiments can be carried out in laboratory conditions and monitored closely? More generally, I found the book to be fairly light on this process of trying to "debug" an ant. Instead, much of the focus is on simply cataloging the behaviors on a high level. Maybe it's just the grumpy Computer Scientist in me... Oh well.
August 12, 2012
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 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 :)
- 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 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 :)
June 25, 2020
Do you want to learn about ants? Of course you do.
I picked this up after enjoying Dave Goulson's A Sting in the Tale which was all about bumblebees.
Super, super, super interesting and fascinating stuff. I won't re-type all the fun facts I learned. Colony insects are so amazing.
If anyone in Saskatoon wants to borrow this, shoot me a note. It wasn't available from the library so I picked up a copy.
I picked this up after enjoying Dave Goulson's A Sting in the Tale which was all about bumblebees.
Super, super, super interesting and fascinating stuff. I won't re-type all the fun facts I learned. Colony insects are so amazing.
If anyone in Saskatoon wants to borrow this, shoot me a note. It wasn't available from the library so I picked up a copy.
December 16, 2025
Tante storie aneddotiche interessanti, ma mi è sembrato che al libro manchi qualcosa che lo leghi e lo faccio filare in modo perfetto.
March 16, 2015
So freaking cool.
Dozens of different ant species are profiled to highlight hundreds of cool facts, along with detailed pictures for context.
Some examples:
The Odontomachus bauri's jaw mandible is the fastest of any anatomical structure in the animal kingdom, moving at 8.5 meters per second (if human sized, that would be the same as a fist swinging at 3 km/s, which is faster than a rifle bullet). These mandibles are triggered by the largest nerve axons in the animal kingdom (larger size allows for faster transmission speed). These mandibles snap so fast, they are actually used sometimes to launch Odontomachus 40 centimeters in the air to land on nest invaders and sting them.
Or leaf-cutter ants, which can create colonies of up to 5-8 million in a colony of >1000 chambers varying in size from a closed fist to a soccer ball. Up to 44 tons of earth are displaced to make these colonies. Scaled to human equivalency, each colony is as large of a construction project as the Great Wall of China. The ants inside the colony vary in size so much that the largest soldier variety are 300X heavier than the smallest, which clear away mold from their subterranean fungi colonies.
Or the dolichoderus cuspidatus, which practices "true nomadism, or full migratory herding. The ant colonies live as stock farmers. They subsist entirely on their herds [of mealybugs] and closely coordinate their lifestyle with that of the livestock, while accompanying them from one pasture to the next."
Or the wide variety of parasites that live on ants, like the macrochelid mite that effectively replaces the foot of one caste of one species of ant, even providing replacement pincer toes for its host.
Even more enjoyable than the scattered facts are some of the deeper biological ideas EO Wilson and Holldobler describe:
The book explains quite well why colonies exist: based on kin selection. Ants inherit sex by haplodiploidy, which means fertilized eggs become female and unfertilized eggs become male. Further, male sperm are haploid, meaning they have only one set of chromosomes and are all identical. On the mother's side, you get gene recombination, which makes only 1/4 of all of the genes identical. Therefore, female offspring share 3/4 of their genes, while only sharing 1/2 of their genes with their mother.
Also fascinating were explanation of the emergent behaviors ant colonies perform, all controlled by systems of chemicals. These chemicals create odors, which are spread around colonies constantly by the ants, creating an "olfactory Gestalt". These odors help identify dead ants in a colony and strangers that need to be attacked. Chemicals are used to dictate between 20 and 42 different basic behaviors (like grooming, egg care, laying of other odor trails, etc), they determine when ants should make new queens and drones, or when army ant colonies should move.
Having gleaned a little about emergence and cellular automata (starting with Godel Escher Bach years ago), I was excited to learn more about sociogenesis (defined in this book as "the steps by which individuals undergo changes in cast and behavior to build the society") but they don't get much into the theory.
Dozens of different ant species are profiled to highlight hundreds of cool facts, along with detailed pictures for context.
Some examples:
The Odontomachus bauri's jaw mandible is the fastest of any anatomical structure in the animal kingdom, moving at 8.5 meters per second (if human sized, that would be the same as a fist swinging at 3 km/s, which is faster than a rifle bullet). These mandibles are triggered by the largest nerve axons in the animal kingdom (larger size allows for faster transmission speed). These mandibles snap so fast, they are actually used sometimes to launch Odontomachus 40 centimeters in the air to land on nest invaders and sting them.
Or leaf-cutter ants, which can create colonies of up to 5-8 million in a colony of >1000 chambers varying in size from a closed fist to a soccer ball. Up to 44 tons of earth are displaced to make these colonies. Scaled to human equivalency, each colony is as large of a construction project as the Great Wall of China. The ants inside the colony vary in size so much that the largest soldier variety are 300X heavier than the smallest, which clear away mold from their subterranean fungi colonies.
Or the dolichoderus cuspidatus, which practices "true nomadism, or full migratory herding. The ant colonies live as stock farmers. They subsist entirely on their herds [of mealybugs] and closely coordinate their lifestyle with that of the livestock, while accompanying them from one pasture to the next."
Or the wide variety of parasites that live on ants, like the macrochelid mite that effectively replaces the foot of one caste of one species of ant, even providing replacement pincer toes for its host.
Even more enjoyable than the scattered facts are some of the deeper biological ideas EO Wilson and Holldobler describe:
The book explains quite well why colonies exist: based on kin selection. Ants inherit sex by haplodiploidy, which means fertilized eggs become female and unfertilized eggs become male. Further, male sperm are haploid, meaning they have only one set of chromosomes and are all identical. On the mother's side, you get gene recombination, which makes only 1/4 of all of the genes identical. Therefore, female offspring share 3/4 of their genes, while only sharing 1/2 of their genes with their mother.
To see the consequences, put yourself in the place of a wasp surrounded by relatives. You are connected by one-half of your genes to your mother and by the same degree to your daughters. A normal amount of solicitude toward them will be enough. But you are connected to your sisters by three-fourths of your genes. A bizarre new arrangement is now optimal: in order to insert genes identical to your own into the next generation, it is more profitable for you to raise sisters than it is to raise daughters. Your world has been turned upside down. How can you now best reproduce your genes? The answer is to become a member of a colony. Give up having daughters, and protect and feed your mother in order to produce as many sisters as possible. So the best succinct advice to give a wasp is: become an ant.
Also fascinating were explanation of the emergent behaviors ant colonies perform, all controlled by systems of chemicals. These chemicals create odors, which are spread around colonies constantly by the ants, creating an "olfactory Gestalt". These odors help identify dead ants in a colony and strangers that need to be attacked. Chemicals are used to dictate between 20 and 42 different basic behaviors (like grooming, egg care, laying of other odor trails, etc), they determine when ants should make new queens and drones, or when army ant colonies should move.
Having gleaned a little about emergence and cellular automata (starting with Godel Escher Bach years ago), I was excited to learn more about sociogenesis (defined in this book as "the steps by which individuals undergo changes in cast and behavior to build the society") but they don't get much into the theory.
March 26, 2022
January 2022 book club
August 21, 2017
Formiche....quando sentiamo parlare o vediamo questi piccoli animaletti la maggior parte di noi resta indifferente o pensa subito come sterminarli per evitare che entrino in casa. Questo saggio, magistralmente scritto da due dei più grandi esperti mondiali di sociobiologia racconta un'altra storia che fa traballare la presunta dominanza e perfezione della specie Homo sapiens. Le formiche infatti sono un esempio sfolgorante della creatività del processo evolutivo che ha portato questo gruppo, nel giro di cento milioni di anni, a colonizzare e a dominare quasi tutti gli ecosistemi terrestri. Quando l'uomo non aveva ancora acquisito la propia identità specifica, le formiche avevano già avuto un'incredibile radiazione adattativa che le portò a sperimentare l'agricoltura, l'allevamento, una coesione sociale senza precedenti ma anche la guerra, le razzie e lo schiavismo. E' incredibile come l'uomo diventi piccolo piccolo di fronte ad un insetto che talvolta misura pochi millimetri....
January 5, 2016
I'm now full of facts for the rest of my life about ants. I had no idea how old the ant species is, and how social their world is. Worth the read but a few of my favorite learnings:
There are basically no male ants in a colony - they serve no purpose other than reproduction and die shortly after
Each colony is spawned from the same queen mother, so essentially the colony is full of daughters
Ants wage wars on other colonies, and are extremely territorial
One ant species has the fastest twitch muscles in the entire animal kingdom in the jaw
I could go on
There are basically no male ants in a colony - they serve no purpose other than reproduction and die shortly after
Each colony is spawned from the same queen mother, so essentially the colony is full of daughters
Ants wage wars on other colonies, and are extremely territorial
One ant species has the fastest twitch muscles in the entire animal kingdom in the jaw
I could go on
December 4, 2018
Great book, if you're looking to learn about this subject. Authors are experts in this field and well educated, they make connections with other "social animals" and most chapters are highly interesting, i found the chapters "the army ants", and the "strange ants" great.
March 14, 2020
One of mine most interesting reads lately. The microcosm of ants is the showcase of the most clever of nature's mechanisms which even the wildest of imaginations would have hard time making up
March 13, 2009
Hell yeah!! Journey to the motherfuckin ANTS!!
January 7, 2018
Great Photos, very informative, understandable for non-specialists and well researched.
June 1, 2020
All hail the glorious ants as now I think we're alive just because they don't yet need to conquer the Earth (and humankind).
May 18, 2025
great book, if you like biology or insects, you will love it. it is truly mind blowing how strong of an organism ants are
March 29, 2009
I was reading this article on superorganism on the internet the other day and saw Bert Holldobler and found out he wrote a 1000-page Pulitzer-winning tome on ants. That’s pretty impressive and gives me enough excuse to read this random book. Also my time in Australia made me fascinated by these tiny, apparently mindless creatures running about and organizing extremely efficient societies and evolutionary machines. And this is definitely a wonderful and exciting book that anyone remotely interested in insects should read. I’m totally awed.
There is lots of interesting ant stories in this book, and I’ll quote some here, just trying to make you interested.
My impression is ants turn out to be pretty smart, beautiful outcome of evolution. For example, before a nuptial flight, a virgin ant tucks a wad of hyphae into a pocket, and after copulation with heaps of desperate male ants (or disposable sperm-carrying missiles), she will dig a nest in the ground and grow a fungus garden. She then gives birth and feeds the first workers with the fungus garden. They then grow up and take care of the colony, the queen is reduced to a egg-laying machine for the rest of her life. And holy crap, a queen ant can lay 100 million eggs in her lifetime! How on earth do they deal with overpopulation!
Sometimes a nest can be founded by multiple queens, and the competition between them is just fascinating to read. The workers either kill all the excess queens or the queens compete among themselves until only one survives. They can secrete inhibitory pheromones to prevent production of eggs in others, or they bite off their rival’s gammae and eat other’s eggs. That’s pretty brutal. Generally ants aren’t quite friendly lovely things at all. They can viciously raid and destroy an entire colony and carry away all their eggs and larvae and have a wonderful feast back at their nest. We can heave a sigh of relief acquiring nuclear weapons is not on their agenda!
Ants can communicate with their antenna, sound, dance, and most intriguingly, pheromones. They drop excrements everywhere to mark their territory. They carry a “corpse” to a garbage pile if they can smell oleic acid. They excrete different chemicals at different diffusion rates when they encounter an enemy to alert their friends and urge them to attack any foreign object. When an intruder enters a colony, he can either be eliminated or adopted, but given less food until he acquires the same odour as the rest of the colony. wonderful organization and efficiency.
But ants of course aren’t super intelligent either. They regurgitate a sample of food when you tap a hair on its mouth, can’t really tell a beast a million times bigger from its mate. Or if you put the fatty acid on a live ant, he will be carried to the graveyard unprotestingly, then gets up and shakes off the odour and goes back to the nest.
I think the best part of the book is when Bert Holldobler and Ed Wilson explain why ants develop such highly cooperative and altruistic societies. Female workers are willing to sacrifice their lives for the colony, never reproduce and devote their lives to rearing new virgin queens. Why do they or evolution make that choice? The answer turns out to be extremely simple and beautiful. It has to do with the way ants inherit sex. When an egg is fertilized, it becomes a female, if it is not fertilized, it becomes a male. That means mothers share half of their genes with their daughters, but sisters share three quarters of their genes because their father came from an unfertilized egg. So it totally makes sense that you sacrifice your reproduction to invest in taking care of your sisters, because that’s the most efficient way to spread your genes. Brothers and sisters only share a quarter of their genes, so if you’re a male, be a drone. At the end of the day, why should you care about your sisters if some day you’ll fly away to copulate with a queen and spread your genes to an entire new colony. Ah, also, die heroically in the process. And amazingly, yes, worker ants do seem to exert that sort of control and regulate the sex ratio of their colony. Wow.
In the end, the best thing I learn from this book is the appreciation of how these tiny creatures have evolved to adapt and cooperate with other insects to survive for the last one hundred million years. Given the way a colony functions, it’s obvious to me nature has infinitely many ways to amaze us.
There is lots of interesting ant stories in this book, and I’ll quote some here, just trying to make you interested.
My impression is ants turn out to be pretty smart, beautiful outcome of evolution. For example, before a nuptial flight, a virgin ant tucks a wad of hyphae into a pocket, and after copulation with heaps of desperate male ants (or disposable sperm-carrying missiles), she will dig a nest in the ground and grow a fungus garden. She then gives birth and feeds the first workers with the fungus garden. They then grow up and take care of the colony, the queen is reduced to a egg-laying machine for the rest of her life. And holy crap, a queen ant can lay 100 million eggs in her lifetime! How on earth do they deal with overpopulation!
Sometimes a nest can be founded by multiple queens, and the competition between them is just fascinating to read. The workers either kill all the excess queens or the queens compete among themselves until only one survives. They can secrete inhibitory pheromones to prevent production of eggs in others, or they bite off their rival’s gammae and eat other’s eggs. That’s pretty brutal. Generally ants aren’t quite friendly lovely things at all. They can viciously raid and destroy an entire colony and carry away all their eggs and larvae and have a wonderful feast back at their nest. We can heave a sigh of relief acquiring nuclear weapons is not on their agenda!
Ants can communicate with their antenna, sound, dance, and most intriguingly, pheromones. They drop excrements everywhere to mark their territory. They carry a “corpse” to a garbage pile if they can smell oleic acid. They excrete different chemicals at different diffusion rates when they encounter an enemy to alert their friends and urge them to attack any foreign object. When an intruder enters a colony, he can either be eliminated or adopted, but given less food until he acquires the same odour as the rest of the colony. wonderful organization and efficiency.
But ants of course aren’t super intelligent either. They regurgitate a sample of food when you tap a hair on its mouth, can’t really tell a beast a million times bigger from its mate. Or if you put the fatty acid on a live ant, he will be carried to the graveyard unprotestingly, then gets up and shakes off the odour and goes back to the nest.
I think the best part of the book is when Bert Holldobler and Ed Wilson explain why ants develop such highly cooperative and altruistic societies. Female workers are willing to sacrifice their lives for the colony, never reproduce and devote their lives to rearing new virgin queens. Why do they or evolution make that choice? The answer turns out to be extremely simple and beautiful. It has to do with the way ants inherit sex. When an egg is fertilized, it becomes a female, if it is not fertilized, it becomes a male. That means mothers share half of their genes with their daughters, but sisters share three quarters of their genes because their father came from an unfertilized egg. So it totally makes sense that you sacrifice your reproduction to invest in taking care of your sisters, because that’s the most efficient way to spread your genes. Brothers and sisters only share a quarter of their genes, so if you’re a male, be a drone. At the end of the day, why should you care about your sisters if some day you’ll fly away to copulate with a queen and spread your genes to an entire new colony. Ah, also, die heroically in the process. And amazingly, yes, worker ants do seem to exert that sort of control and regulate the sex ratio of their colony. Wow.
In the end, the best thing I learn from this book is the appreciation of how these tiny creatures have evolved to adapt and cooperate with other insects to survive for the last one hundred million years. Given the way a colony functions, it’s obvious to me nature has infinitely many ways to amaze us.
February 22, 2025
This book is extremely interesting and well-written, and provides incredible amounts of information and insight into the workings of an ant colony, and also the practice of studying these ants.
July 18, 2020
No soy un biólogo y mi acercamiento con el estudio en este campo es la de un televidente de documentales de naturaleza. Me encontré con este libro de casualidad y lo abrí para ver de qué se trataba y me quedé.
Las hormigas me despiertan más curiosidad porque he tratado de implementar el algoritmo AntColony que se basa en la habilidad que tienen las hormigas para encontrar el camino más corto entre su nido y el alimento.
Este libro es un resumen del texto de los mismos autores, un referente en la entomología The Ants, texto que sienta las bases de una nueva ciencia, la sociobiología.
Es un escrito para nosotros los legos, donde nos muestran con respeto y de forma muy agradable las maravillas de estos insectos, además de algunos detalles de la aventura intelectual de los autores.
Algunas de las muchas cosas que me asombraron:
Las avispas, hormigas y abejas comparten la forma de determinación del sexo, las hembras nacen de un huevo fecundado con esperma del macho, pero los machos solo requiere el huevo de la madre. Por esto, las hermanas comparten las tres cuartas partes de su genoma y no la mitad como en la mayoría de otras especies. Desde el punto de vista de sus genes es más ventajoso tener hermanas que hijas y de acá sale su tendencia a ser sociales, a formar colonias como agrupación de hermanas.
En la guerra, las hormigas son fanáticas por defender su colonia. Dicen los autores que si tuvieran armas nucleares acabarían con todo. El "bosque oscuro" se queda corto con las hormigas. Usan todas las tácticas, estrategias y engaño, no sólo fuerza. Guerra química, memetismo. Todas las armas son usadas. Acá una hipótesis interesante de los autores:
Hay conflictos entre ellas. Por ejemplo, se hacen alianzas entre reinas vírgenes para fundar nuevas colonias, pero llegado el tiempo sólo prevalece una y las demás son expulsadas o asesinadas por las obreras. Si hay varia reinas fecundadas, las obreras repartirán sus lealtades entre una u otras y es posible que posteriormente se presenten guerras entre colonias si las nuevas creadas limitan entre si.
Usan códigos de comunicación por medio de sustancias químicas y rituales con su cuerpo que hace posible la comunicación al interior de la colonia.
Pueden considerarse un superorganismo. Cientos de hormigas trabajando juntas emulan funcionalidades como si fueran órganos de un organismo normal. Cientos de hormigas emulan una mano que presiona con mucha fuerza para "coger" una hoja mucho más grande que ellas y doblarla. Y usan "herramientas" utilizando a sus larvas, que estimulan para que expulse un hilo de seda, para tejer esa misma hoja doblada y construir un refugio.
Son ingenieras que controlan la circulación del aire de sus nidos y controlan la humedad para el bienestar de sus larvas.
La reina es una máquina de poner huevos. No da ninguna orden, pero es el principal foco de atención y cuidados por parte de las obreras. Son las obreras las que toman las decisiones del día a día.
La dependencia de las crías del cuidado de las hermanas adultas (similar al desamparo de los niños con sus familias) coadyuva a crear lazos y convenciones sociales más fuertes.
Todas las obreras tienen el potencial genético de ser reinas. Factores como la alimentación o ambientales pueden convertir a la obrera en reina. Son las obreras las que toman las decisiones del día a día en la colonia.
Son agriculturas y ganaderas. Cultivan hongos y ordeñan pulgones. Hacen alianzas con ciertas plantas para el mutuo beneficio de protección y alimento.
Tienen un capítulo especial para tratar a unas hormigas muy comunes en Colombia, las arrieras o cortadoras de hojas, que lo hacen para alimenta a los hongos que son su real fuente de nutrición.
Algunas especies hacen con los cuerpos de sus miembros una estructura que sirve de protección a su reina y sus pupas. Es una estructura móvil y adaptable a cualquier forma. Un arma fenomenal de defensa y ataque. Una casa rodante construida con los propios cuerpos que la habitan.
Algunas especies de hormigas se adaptaron para vivir de las otras, son sus parásitas. Usan el mecanismo de identificación del olor para camuflarse y confundir a sus huéspedes. Mecanismos similares han desarrollado otras especies de insectos para vivir a costa de las hormigas.
En cualquier rincón de este libro se muestran datos asombrosos.
También nos muestran formas para conservarlas y cuidarlas en espacios adecuados para su observación y estudio.
Mis apuntes sobre el algoritmo AntColony: simplifica demasiado los recursos que disponen las hormigas para conseguir comida. Las hormigas no solo miden la intensidad del rastro de feromonas, usan distintos tipos (al menos emiten tres sustancias químicas) y el orden en que se emiten tiene un significado particular. Las hormigas reales también usan los encuentros entre ellas para comunicar novedades. No conozco que existan variaciones del algoritmo original que tengan en cuenta estos aspectos, pero sería posible de manera relativamente sencilla al menos modelar los encuentros entre hormigas como un factor adicional para modificar la conducta de la hormiga cibernética.
Y por ultimo: una cita:
La plaga somos los sapiens.
Las hormigas me despiertan más curiosidad porque he tratado de implementar el algoritmo AntColony que se basa en la habilidad que tienen las hormigas para encontrar el camino más corto entre su nido y el alimento.
Este libro es un resumen del texto de los mismos autores, un referente en la entomología The Ants, texto que sienta las bases de una nueva ciencia, la sociobiología.
Es un escrito para nosotros los legos, donde nos muestran con respeto y de forma muy agradable las maravillas de estos insectos, además de algunos detalles de la aventura intelectual de los autores.
Algunas de las muchas cosas que me asombraron:
Las avispas, hormigas y abejas comparten la forma de determinación del sexo, las hembras nacen de un huevo fecundado con esperma del macho, pero los machos solo requiere el huevo de la madre. Por esto, las hermanas comparten las tres cuartas partes de su genoma y no la mitad como en la mayoría de otras especies. Desde el punto de vista de sus genes es más ventajoso tener hermanas que hijas y de acá sale su tendencia a ser sociales, a formar colonias como agrupación de hermanas.
En la guerra, las hormigas son fanáticas por defender su colonia. Dicen los autores que si tuvieran armas nucleares acabarían con todo. El "bosque oscuro" se queda corto con las hormigas. Usan todas las tácticas, estrategias y engaño, no sólo fuerza. Guerra química, memetismo. Todas las armas son usadas. Acá una hipótesis interesante de los autores:
"Propaganda, esclavismo, decodificación, engaño, mimetismo, mendicidad, caballos de Troya, salteadores de caminos, cucos: todos están presentes entre las hormigas y los depredadores y parásitos sociales que las embaucan. Estos términos pueden parecer excesivamente antropomórficos, al convertir a las hormigas y sus socios en hombrecillos. Pero quizá no lo sean. Es igualmente posible que el número de disposiciones sociales de que la evolución dispone en todas partes del mundo, o incluso en el universo, sea tal que los fenómenos que aquí hemos explicado sean categorías naturales inevitables de explotación, donde quiera que tengan lugar.”
Hay conflictos entre ellas. Por ejemplo, se hacen alianzas entre reinas vírgenes para fundar nuevas colonias, pero llegado el tiempo sólo prevalece una y las demás son expulsadas o asesinadas por las obreras. Si hay varia reinas fecundadas, las obreras repartirán sus lealtades entre una u otras y es posible que posteriormente se presenten guerras entre colonias si las nuevas creadas limitan entre si.
Usan códigos de comunicación por medio de sustancias químicas y rituales con su cuerpo que hace posible la comunicación al interior de la colonia.
Pueden considerarse un superorganismo. Cientos de hormigas trabajando juntas emulan funcionalidades como si fueran órganos de un organismo normal. Cientos de hormigas emulan una mano que presiona con mucha fuerza para "coger" una hoja mucho más grande que ellas y doblarla. Y usan "herramientas" utilizando a sus larvas, que estimulan para que expulse un hilo de seda, para tejer esa misma hoja doblada y construir un refugio.
Son ingenieras que controlan la circulación del aire de sus nidos y controlan la humedad para el bienestar de sus larvas.
La reina es una máquina de poner huevos. No da ninguna orden, pero es el principal foco de atención y cuidados por parte de las obreras. Son las obreras las que toman las decisiones del día a día.
La dependencia de las crías del cuidado de las hermanas adultas (similar al desamparo de los niños con sus familias) coadyuva a crear lazos y convenciones sociales más fuertes.
Todas las obreras tienen el potencial genético de ser reinas. Factores como la alimentación o ambientales pueden convertir a la obrera en reina. Son las obreras las que toman las decisiones del día a día en la colonia.
Son agriculturas y ganaderas. Cultivan hongos y ordeñan pulgones. Hacen alianzas con ciertas plantas para el mutuo beneficio de protección y alimento.
Tienen un capítulo especial para tratar a unas hormigas muy comunes en Colombia, las arrieras o cortadoras de hojas, que lo hacen para alimenta a los hongos que son su real fuente de nutrición.
Algunas especies hacen con los cuerpos de sus miembros una estructura que sirve de protección a su reina y sus pupas. Es una estructura móvil y adaptable a cualquier forma. Un arma fenomenal de defensa y ataque. Una casa rodante construida con los propios cuerpos que la habitan.
Algunas especies de hormigas se adaptaron para vivir de las otras, son sus parásitas. Usan el mecanismo de identificación del olor para camuflarse y confundir a sus huéspedes. Mecanismos similares han desarrollado otras especies de insectos para vivir a costa de las hormigas.
En cualquier rincón de este libro se muestran datos asombrosos.
También nos muestran formas para conservarlas y cuidarlas en espacios adecuados para su observación y estudio.
Mis apuntes sobre el algoritmo AntColony: simplifica demasiado los recursos que disponen las hormigas para conseguir comida. Las hormigas no solo miden la intensidad del rastro de feromonas, usan distintos tipos (al menos emiten tres sustancias químicas) y el orden en que se emiten tiene un significado particular. Las hormigas reales también usan los encuentros entre ellas para comunicar novedades. No conozco que existan variaciones del algoritmo original que tengan en cuenta estos aspectos, pero sería posible de manera relativamente sencilla al menos modelar los encuentros entre hormigas como un factor adicional para modificar la conducta de la hormiga cibernética.
Y por ultimo: una cita:
"La vida nunca morirá como consecuencia de las acciones de las hormigas o de cualesquiera otros animales salvajes, por muy dominantes que sean. La humanidad, en cambio, está destruyendo una gran parte de la biomasa y la diversidad de la vida, un éxito que mide de forma perversa nuestra propia dominancia biológica.
Si toda la humanidad fuera a desaparecer, el resto de la vida se recuperaría de nuevo y florecería. Las extinciones en masa que ahora se están produciendo cesarían, los ecosistemas dañados sanarían y se extenderían. Si, de alguna manera, desaparecieran todas las hormigas, el efecto sería exactamente el contrario, y catastrófico. La extinción de especies aumentaría aún más sobre la tasa actual, y los ecosistemas terrestres se marchitarían más rápidamente a medida que los considerables servicios que estos insectos proporcionan se redujeran."
La plaga somos los sapiens.
March 10, 2017
I have always been a bit of a junior entomologist, so when my boy got an ant farm for his birthday, I just had to find out more about ants. This book was just what I needed. Geared to the general public, this book had just the right level of detail to be highly interesting but not overwhelming. It was comprehensive and scientific while still being very readable. While I won't amaze (or bore) you with the details here, anyone who has been around me recently can tell you that I have learned so many incredible and astounding things about ants. Sadly, in the month that it took me to read this book all of our ants have died, (an ant fact not included in the book: To ants, Fruit Loops = Death) but my fascination for these incredible little creatures remains.
June 14, 2013
Pocas veces se concede el premio Pulitzer al autor de un libro de divulgación científica y los artífices de este son una de esas raras excepciones. El libro está descatalogado desde hace años y me costó Dios y ayuda conseguir un ejemplar de segunda mano en papel, que pude localizar finalmente en una librería de Jaén y comprar a través de Internet. Su lectura es fascinante, amena, instructiva. Sus contenidos sorprendentes y maravillosos, a poco que te guste la naturaleza y que te apasione la vida en cualquiera de sus manifestaciones.
August 10, 2019
Truly a fascinating adventure to another world
Journey to the Ants is a shorter version of the authors' monumental The Ants (1990), a 732-page tome aimed at professional biologists with a lot of technical language and a clear encyclopedic intent. This book, as Holldobler and Wilson explain in the Preface, is of "a more manageable length, with less technical language and with an admitted and unavoidable bias toward those topics and species on which we have personally worked."
It is a terrific book, lavishly illustrated with many color plates, line drawings, black and white drawings, photos, etc. Especially wonderful are the color prints of paintings by John D. Dawson showing ants in various activities. His style reminds me a bit of M.C. Esher. Also notable are the many photos taken by Holldobler and Wilson during their many travels and studies. They are born renowned experts on ants around the world.
The text is both informative and entertaining. Wilson in particular is a world class science writer as well as a great scientist, and his clarity of expression and enthusiasm show through. The chapters examine and illustrate how ants live in their colonies, how they hunt prey, tend aphid "cattle," cultivate fungi, raid other ant colonies; how they fight and how they reproduce. Other chapters focus on particular species, like army ants or leaf cutter ants, or "strange" ants. Still other chapters show how ants communicate especially through pheromones and touch. There is some theory on ant origins (about 100-120 million years ago) and their evolution and present distribution. I was particularly interested in and appalled by both the way some ants are parasites and how they themselves are exploited by parasites. Our esteemed authors show how ants, for all their power and evolutionary success, can be the most naive victims of beetles, flies, butterfly larva, etc. simply because they can be fooled by smells that mimic those of the colony and/or because they can be given irresistible concoctions of food or what might be called "drugs" that make them passive and acceptive of insects that will eat their eggs and larva. They are also tricked into feeding strangers on the trail and alien larva in the colony nest!
I purposely first read a couple of other books on ants (The World of Ants: A Science-Fiction Universe (1970) by Remy Chauvin, and Ants (1977) by M.V. Brian), written by myrmecologists of an earlier generation so as to be able to better appreciate this famous work. But you need not do that. Journey to the Ants is eminently accessible to just about any literate person.
While reading I had some thoughts (as Wilson famously has had) on the differences and similarities between ant societies and human ones. Ants are not governed as we are (and as was once thought) in any way by a central authority. (They are influenced by the queen's pheromones and her behavior.) Instead ants are examples of "swarm intelligence," that is purposeful and coordinated behavior that arises from each individual doing what comes naturally to that individual. This sort of intelligence was just beginning to be appreciated when Holldobler and Wilson wrote this book. The phrase "swarm intelligence" does not appear anywhere in the book, and yet it is clear that our present understanding of how this intelligence works was gleaned in part from the work of biologists and ethologists like Holldobler and Wilson.
Ants are famous for doing human-like things that no other animals or few can do, such as gardening, tending herds, making war, and constructing elaborate living spaces. It is usually said that ants do it from pure instinct whereas we use our intelligence and the experience. Humans and ants cannot be defined independently of their respective cultures. What I wonder is, is it an artificiality to say that their intelligence, spread out as it is among the individuals and their genetic endowments, is fundamentally different from our own? Clearly ants are limited in what they can construct, what they can understand, and what tools they can make and use. I read somewhere that ants never developed fire because no ant could get close enough to a sustainable fire to tend it.
A striking conclusion is that perhaps the real difference between us comes from our ability to grow a million times bigger in size which allows us not only to tend fires, but to develop brains large enough to handle abstract thought such as in language, which further allows us to develop and share ideas, concepts, practices, and all the other aspects of our culture in a way that is impossible for ants, whose brain size is limited by their anatomy.
So, although ants were here long before we arrived, and although they probably will be here long after we are gone, it is impossible to say which life form is the more successful. We do have at present the capability, which ants do not, of enhancing our ability to survive through genetic engineering and the development of biologically friendly machines, and even the ability to migrate away from this earth so that our genes and ourselves are not in one basket, so to speak. Should a planet-sterilizing event hit the earth, we could be on Mars and still survive.
But then there is this insidious thought: perhaps the ants, like our resident microbes, will find a way to come with us!
Don't miss this book. You are in for a treat.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Journey to the Ants is a shorter version of the authors' monumental The Ants (1990), a 732-page tome aimed at professional biologists with a lot of technical language and a clear encyclopedic intent. This book, as Holldobler and Wilson explain in the Preface, is of "a more manageable length, with less technical language and with an admitted and unavoidable bias toward those topics and species on which we have personally worked."
It is a terrific book, lavishly illustrated with many color plates, line drawings, black and white drawings, photos, etc. Especially wonderful are the color prints of paintings by John D. Dawson showing ants in various activities. His style reminds me a bit of M.C. Esher. Also notable are the many photos taken by Holldobler and Wilson during their many travels and studies. They are born renowned experts on ants around the world.
The text is both informative and entertaining. Wilson in particular is a world class science writer as well as a great scientist, and his clarity of expression and enthusiasm show through. The chapters examine and illustrate how ants live in their colonies, how they hunt prey, tend aphid "cattle," cultivate fungi, raid other ant colonies; how they fight and how they reproduce. Other chapters focus on particular species, like army ants or leaf cutter ants, or "strange" ants. Still other chapters show how ants communicate especially through pheromones and touch. There is some theory on ant origins (about 100-120 million years ago) and their evolution and present distribution. I was particularly interested in and appalled by both the way some ants are parasites and how they themselves are exploited by parasites. Our esteemed authors show how ants, for all their power and evolutionary success, can be the most naive victims of beetles, flies, butterfly larva, etc. simply because they can be fooled by smells that mimic those of the colony and/or because they can be given irresistible concoctions of food or what might be called "drugs" that make them passive and acceptive of insects that will eat their eggs and larva. They are also tricked into feeding strangers on the trail and alien larva in the colony nest!
I purposely first read a couple of other books on ants (The World of Ants: A Science-Fiction Universe (1970) by Remy Chauvin, and Ants (1977) by M.V. Brian), written by myrmecologists of an earlier generation so as to be able to better appreciate this famous work. But you need not do that. Journey to the Ants is eminently accessible to just about any literate person.
While reading I had some thoughts (as Wilson famously has had) on the differences and similarities between ant societies and human ones. Ants are not governed as we are (and as was once thought) in any way by a central authority. (They are influenced by the queen's pheromones and her behavior.) Instead ants are examples of "swarm intelligence," that is purposeful and coordinated behavior that arises from each individual doing what comes naturally to that individual. This sort of intelligence was just beginning to be appreciated when Holldobler and Wilson wrote this book. The phrase "swarm intelligence" does not appear anywhere in the book, and yet it is clear that our present understanding of how this intelligence works was gleaned in part from the work of biologists and ethologists like Holldobler and Wilson.
Ants are famous for doing human-like things that no other animals or few can do, such as gardening, tending herds, making war, and constructing elaborate living spaces. It is usually said that ants do it from pure instinct whereas we use our intelligence and the experience. Humans and ants cannot be defined independently of their respective cultures. What I wonder is, is it an artificiality to say that their intelligence, spread out as it is among the individuals and their genetic endowments, is fundamentally different from our own? Clearly ants are limited in what they can construct, what they can understand, and what tools they can make and use. I read somewhere that ants never developed fire because no ant could get close enough to a sustainable fire to tend it.
A striking conclusion is that perhaps the real difference between us comes from our ability to grow a million times bigger in size which allows us not only to tend fires, but to develop brains large enough to handle abstract thought such as in language, which further allows us to develop and share ideas, concepts, practices, and all the other aspects of our culture in a way that is impossible for ants, whose brain size is limited by their anatomy.
So, although ants were here long before we arrived, and although they probably will be here long after we are gone, it is impossible to say which life form is the more successful. We do have at present the capability, which ants do not, of enhancing our ability to survive through genetic engineering and the development of biologically friendly machines, and even the ability to migrate away from this earth so that our genes and ourselves are not in one basket, so to speak. Should a planet-sterilizing event hit the earth, we could be on Mars and still survive.
But then there is this insidious thought: perhaps the ants, like our resident microbes, will find a way to come with us!
Don't miss this book. You are in for a treat.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
May 3, 2020
I bloody loved this!!! Ants are just the best!
Hard-working, courageous, daring, feisty, nurturing, team players.
The two authors are life long students of ants and ant activity and their enthusiasm and passion for the subject shine through on each page. I read in true awe and fascination about these tiny creatures that knock the spots off us humans in terms of longevity and success in surviving.
Highly recommended if you've ever looked down at the ground outside and thought "where is that ant going in such a hurry"?!
Brilliant
Hard-working, courageous, daring, feisty, nurturing, team players.
The two authors are life long students of ants and ant activity and their enthusiasm and passion for the subject shine through on each page. I read in true awe and fascination about these tiny creatures that knock the spots off us humans in terms of longevity and success in surviving.
Highly recommended if you've ever looked down at the ground outside and thought "where is that ant going in such a hurry"?!
Brilliant
April 10, 2007
Ants are really, really strange--but strangely familiar. For instance, the decomposing body of a dead ant emits a chemical that prompts other ants to carry the body to the colony garbage heap. If you put that chemical on a living ant, other ants treat it like a corpse, and drag it to the garbage heap over and over again. I can relate to that. The NY Giants have been dragging me to the garbage heap for about twenty five years.
March 24, 2013
Beyond imagination, stunning the degree of social complexity achieved by such small brains.
Definitely made me consider altruism and conflict in terms of genetics and social survival.
However, the real catch is the author's passion about their subject.
I would recommend that everyone read at least part of this book
Definitely made me consider altruism and conflict in terms of genetics and social survival.
However, the real catch is the author's passion about their subject.
I would recommend that everyone read at least part of this book
April 11, 2018
Ants are awesome.
September 26, 2018
A great natural history book. Distilled from their monumental textbook.
September 1, 2025
Avevo un hype indescrivibile per questo saggio. Da tempo le formiche avevano catturato la mia attenzione e da come me ne parlavano questo sembrava IL saggio definitivo su quest’animale così sorprendente. Per certi versi lo è stato, per altri no.
Per essere concisi, il più grande problema che ho riscontrato è la mancanza di un file rouge. Mi è sembrata molte volte una raccolta di “fun fact” sul mondo delle formiche, più che un vero trattato che ne narra vita morte e miracoli. Ci sono capitoli bellissimi e altri dimenticabili (ad esempio Conflitto e dominanza; Per amore delle formiche; Formiche combattenti). Tra uno e l’altro c’è raramente un collegamento, e questo mi è pesato molto, specialmente perché adesso che sto scrivendo la recensione sto leggendo “Altre menti”, sempre divulgazione scientifica e quindi il paragone viene naturale. È un progetto molto più centrato e sensato, con un filo conduttore molto più profondo ed elegante. Ritornando a “Formiche”, all’inizio manca una spiegazione chiara di com’è il ciclo delle colonie, il ruolo delle regine, i voli nuziali e via dicendo. Nel corso del libro ci sono disperse informazioni su ciò ma non è sufficiente. Dico così perché questo libro (leggendo la pomposa prefazione) si proponeva di essere la variante più tranquilla e mainstream del volume di 700 pagine molto più specialistico. Un libro divulgativo per la massa, molto più accessibile e compatto.
Il capitolo che mi è piaciuto di meno è stato “Per amore delle formiche”, il secondo. Per me è stata una mossa sbagliata mettere proprio all’inizio del libro 30 pagine di biografia sui due autori, in cui l’obiettivo sulla facciata è di scavare nella loro passione mirmecologica, ma il risultato è stato più che altro un tutto tranne che modesto resoconto delle scoperte e raggiungimenti professionali dei due divulgatori, abbastanza noioso peraltro. Non l’ho apprezzato per niente. Magari lo avrei capito alla fine, come appendice, come nota di approfondimento. Per citare un altro saggio recentemente letto, in “L’evoluzione della fisica” di Infeld ed Einstein non c’è traccia di tale autocompiacimento, e con tutto il rispetto Einstein è uno degli uomini più importanti della storia umana. Holldobler e Wilson mai arriveranno alla sua grandezza, al massimo solo nella ristretta nicchia dell’entomologia.
Passiamo ai lati positivi. L’altra faccia della medaglia sull’osservazione che ho fatto precedentemente (la raccolta di “fun fact”) è una varietà stupefacente di specie, dinamiche, ambienti e fenomeni. Finito il libro ti senti un po’ inebriato da quel mondo, senti che sarebbe stato un peccato non averlo letto, non scoprendo tale grandezza in esseri così minuti. Inoltre in molti passaggi c’è un tocco poetico molto apprezzato. Spesso paragonano le formiche all’uomo, in termini di distanze, di proporzioni, di utilità agli ecosistemi, di pratiche culturali e sociali. Insomma la sensibilità c’è.
Nonostante la direzione, soprattutto all’inizio, non sia chiarissima, è comunque banale capire che al centro di tutto ci sia il cosiddetto “superorganismo”: l’insieme di centinaia, migliaia fino a milioni di formiche che formano un’unica entità collegata. In Hokkaido una super colonia copre 270 ettari, con 306 milioni di operaie e 45000 nidi interconnessi. Grazie a segnali chimici e altri mezzi di comunicazione soprendenti (come le vibrazioni che si propagano dal terreno alle loro sensibili zampe) tutti questi organismi riescono a creare un qualcosa di maestoso, come le tantissime piccole cellule del corpo umano. “La regina è l'organo riproduttore, le operaie il cervello, il cuore, le viscere e gli altri tessuti di supporto; lo scambio di cibo liquido tra i membri della colonia equivale alla circolazione del sangue e della linfa.”
Celebre è diventata la citazione sulle bombe atomiche: “Se le formiche possedessero armi nucleari, probabilmente distruggerebbero il mondo nel giro di una settimana.” Ripeto che forse la cosa che ho apprezzato di più è stato proprio l’abile e mirato antropomorfismo, come in questo caso. Sfogliando il libro se ne trovano molte di righe così.
Ho amato la maggiorparte dei capitoli (soprattutto: Guerra e politica estera; Ur-Formiche; Il superorganismo; Parassiti Sociali; Epilogo). Sicuramente si tratta di una divulgazione di qualità. Anche le immagini fenomenali, una raccolta preziosissima. Tuttavia, come dicevo all’inizio, è mancata secondo me la giusta coesione tra tutto. Mi è capitato altre volte in passato di criticare questo preciso aspetto. Penso sia giusto farlo. Chi scrive un libro deve tener conto che ruberà soldi e tempo al lettore, quindi ogni cosa deve essere affinata al meglio, un Labor Limae meticoloso. A maggior ragione l’obiettivo generale del libro, se si parla di un saggio soprattutto, deve essere estremamente chiaro e deve fluire tra i capitoli come un fiume in piena.
“Se si osserva una colonia dalla distanza di un metro o due, e si lascia andare l'immagine leggermente fuori fuoco, i corpi delle singole formiche sembrano fondersi in un unico organismo sovradimensionato e diffuso.”
Per essere concisi, il più grande problema che ho riscontrato è la mancanza di un file rouge. Mi è sembrata molte volte una raccolta di “fun fact” sul mondo delle formiche, più che un vero trattato che ne narra vita morte e miracoli. Ci sono capitoli bellissimi e altri dimenticabili (ad esempio Conflitto e dominanza; Per amore delle formiche; Formiche combattenti). Tra uno e l’altro c’è raramente un collegamento, e questo mi è pesato molto, specialmente perché adesso che sto scrivendo la recensione sto leggendo “Altre menti”, sempre divulgazione scientifica e quindi il paragone viene naturale. È un progetto molto più centrato e sensato, con un filo conduttore molto più profondo ed elegante. Ritornando a “Formiche”, all’inizio manca una spiegazione chiara di com’è il ciclo delle colonie, il ruolo delle regine, i voli nuziali e via dicendo. Nel corso del libro ci sono disperse informazioni su ciò ma non è sufficiente. Dico così perché questo libro (leggendo la pomposa prefazione) si proponeva di essere la variante più tranquilla e mainstream del volume di 700 pagine molto più specialistico. Un libro divulgativo per la massa, molto più accessibile e compatto.
Il capitolo che mi è piaciuto di meno è stato “Per amore delle formiche”, il secondo. Per me è stata una mossa sbagliata mettere proprio all’inizio del libro 30 pagine di biografia sui due autori, in cui l’obiettivo sulla facciata è di scavare nella loro passione mirmecologica, ma il risultato è stato più che altro un tutto tranne che modesto resoconto delle scoperte e raggiungimenti professionali dei due divulgatori, abbastanza noioso peraltro. Non l’ho apprezzato per niente. Magari lo avrei capito alla fine, come appendice, come nota di approfondimento. Per citare un altro saggio recentemente letto, in “L’evoluzione della fisica” di Infeld ed Einstein non c’è traccia di tale autocompiacimento, e con tutto il rispetto Einstein è uno degli uomini più importanti della storia umana. Holldobler e Wilson mai arriveranno alla sua grandezza, al massimo solo nella ristretta nicchia dell’entomologia.
Passiamo ai lati positivi. L’altra faccia della medaglia sull’osservazione che ho fatto precedentemente (la raccolta di “fun fact”) è una varietà stupefacente di specie, dinamiche, ambienti e fenomeni. Finito il libro ti senti un po’ inebriato da quel mondo, senti che sarebbe stato un peccato non averlo letto, non scoprendo tale grandezza in esseri così minuti. Inoltre in molti passaggi c’è un tocco poetico molto apprezzato. Spesso paragonano le formiche all’uomo, in termini di distanze, di proporzioni, di utilità agli ecosistemi, di pratiche culturali e sociali. Insomma la sensibilità c’è.
Nonostante la direzione, soprattutto all’inizio, non sia chiarissima, è comunque banale capire che al centro di tutto ci sia il cosiddetto “superorganismo”: l’insieme di centinaia, migliaia fino a milioni di formiche che formano un’unica entità collegata. In Hokkaido una super colonia copre 270 ettari, con 306 milioni di operaie e 45000 nidi interconnessi. Grazie a segnali chimici e altri mezzi di comunicazione soprendenti (come le vibrazioni che si propagano dal terreno alle loro sensibili zampe) tutti questi organismi riescono a creare un qualcosa di maestoso, come le tantissime piccole cellule del corpo umano. “La regina è l'organo riproduttore, le operaie il cervello, il cuore, le viscere e gli altri tessuti di supporto; lo scambio di cibo liquido tra i membri della colonia equivale alla circolazione del sangue e della linfa.”
Celebre è diventata la citazione sulle bombe atomiche: “Se le formiche possedessero armi nucleari, probabilmente distruggerebbero il mondo nel giro di una settimana.” Ripeto che forse la cosa che ho apprezzato di più è stato proprio l’abile e mirato antropomorfismo, come in questo caso. Sfogliando il libro se ne trovano molte di righe così.
Ho amato la maggiorparte dei capitoli (soprattutto: Guerra e politica estera; Ur-Formiche; Il superorganismo; Parassiti Sociali; Epilogo). Sicuramente si tratta di una divulgazione di qualità. Anche le immagini fenomenali, una raccolta preziosissima. Tuttavia, come dicevo all’inizio, è mancata secondo me la giusta coesione tra tutto. Mi è capitato altre volte in passato di criticare questo preciso aspetto. Penso sia giusto farlo. Chi scrive un libro deve tener conto che ruberà soldi e tempo al lettore, quindi ogni cosa deve essere affinata al meglio, un Labor Limae meticoloso. A maggior ragione l’obiettivo generale del libro, se si parla di un saggio soprattutto, deve essere estremamente chiaro e deve fluire tra i capitoli come un fiume in piena.
“Se si osserva una colonia dalla distanza di un metro o due, e si lascia andare l'immagine leggermente fuori fuoco, i corpi delle singole formiche sembrano fondersi in un unico organismo sovradimensionato e diffuso.”
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