Ants At Work: How An Insect Society Is Organized

by Deborah M. Gordon

A scientific tour de force, Deborah Gordon's Ants at Work takes us to the amazing world of an ant society and reveals a new and original understanding of how these tiny animals get the work of the colony done. Gordon's surprising and deceptively simple message that the queen is not in charge represents a fundamental shift in modern biology. It is no less than a revolution in our thinking on the mystery of natural organization.

Based on the author's seventeen years of research on harvester ants in the Arizona desert, Ants at Work overturns all standard ideas of insect society hierarchy. Gordon shows that an ant colony operates without any central control and that no ant has power over another. Yet the ant colony, harmoniously performs extremely complex tasks; including nest building, navigation, foraging, food storage, tending the young, garbage collection, and on occasion, even war. She shows that there are no territorial borders in the way we understand them because ants are always ready to change. Ants also switch from one task to another, which undermines the standard view that insect societies are run on a caste system. Gordon explores how ants use simple, local information to make the decisions that generate the complex behavior of colonies. New colonies are born, struggle to occupy a foraging area, grow larger, start to reproduce, and then settle in among their lifelong neighbors.

Superb drawings of ants and maps directly from Gordon's field notes enrich the experience of reading this breakthrough work. In these maps we discover what ants do when a neighboring colony disappears behind an enclosure and what they do when their neighbors suddenly reappear. We see where different tasks of ant daily life are performed. Through Gordon's wry sense of humor and lucid voice, we experience the delights and frustrations of spending blistering days in the desert between the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains of Arizona, pursuing the mystery of the fascinating behavior of Pogonomyrmex.

By focusing on chaotic patterns of behavior instead of searching for fixed universal laws, Gordon signals the future of scientific investigation. She boldly contends that ant communication is a model of how brains, immune systems, and the natural world as a whole organize themselves. Her discoveries have profound implications for anyone who is interested in how organizations work, from biologists and physicists to business leaders and pioneers of cyberspace. Ants at Work brings to the natural world the insights of a new era in the science of life.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Nature, Animals

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 1999

About the author

Deborah M. Gordon is an American biologist best known for her impactful research in the behavioral ecology of ants and her studies on the operations of ant colonies without a central control. In addition to overseeing The Gordon Lab, she is currently a Professor of Biology at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Sandy Maguire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned. While the title promises a great deal, the book does not deliver. It's much less about ants than it is about the researchers studying ants, and the very quaint methods they used to study ants. What took them 20+ years of hard summers in the field, wandering around with magnifying lenses following ants around the desert is the sort of thing we could automate today with a couple of cellphones and a little bit of software in a month. Being a grad student sucks in the 2020s, but it seems like it must have been much worse in the 90s.

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange but somewhat interesting little book with the emphasis on 'dry'. It is a mostly dry academic treatment with a bits of dry humor and set in a dry environment! The book tells of her 17-year study of Red Harvester ants conducted at the Southwestern Research Station located in eastern Arizona in the Chiricahua Mountains There is a lot of information packed into less than 200 pages and lots of little factoids--the ants stop all activity when soil temperature exceeds 52C (125F), ants live one year, there are about 10,000 ants in a colony (and yes only one Queen), colonies have a life cycle of about 15 years. There are detailed discussions of colony life-cycles, foraging patterns, 'foreign' policy (vis-a-vis other ant colonies), nest structure, queen behavior and the roles and activities of the various ants. A number of graphs and simple drawings help to explain and clarify both ant and colony-scale behavior. Among the worker ants there four basic tasks, patrolling, foraging, midden work, and nest maintenance. It was actually amazing how she and her teams were able to conduct the various analyses and experiments and the humor is embedded in these stories of working in the often blistering hot desert with biting ants as your constant companions! Still almost hard to believe you could spend 17 years at it but there is no accounting for taste as they say, and people get interested in more arcane things than this. I did not however learn enough to devise new methods to deal with the very recent appearance of ants (thankfully not Red Harvester ants!) in my kitchen except the tried and true and ant traps!

[Arthur Sperry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book detailing a lot of information about Ant communities and how Ants communicate using pheromones. A lot of interesting study on the organization of different kinds of Ant communities.

[Jenne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ants! Ants are rad.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear, sensitive, and readable

A pleasant little book almost exclusively about harvester ants of the American southwest. Gordon makes a special effort to be readable and to avoid jargon. There are a few charts and some drawings. She shows how harvester ants perform four kinds of work, foraging, patrolling, nest maintenance, and midden work (feeding the refuse pile). She gives details from her experiments in the Arizona desert where she studied harvester ant colonies for seventeen summers.

The fascinating thing about ants is that they are able to organize and accomplish their work without a central authority telling them what to do. Gordon's main purpose is to understand how they do this. She shows that pheromone messages and contacts among individual ants lead to a kind of group knowledge that is reflected in individual behavior. Each ant makes its own choice about what to do at any given time based on clues it gets from its environment, either its nest mates, the weather, or other changing circumstances, or from contacts with ants from other colonies. She shows that the life cycle of a colony and its overall behavior can be seen as that of an organism composed of individuals analogous (but without central management) to an animal made up of individual cells. The colony has a life span, and during that span behaves differently depending upon its age. Because disrupting the underground nests of the ants would alter their behavior, we don't get a very clear picture of how the nest appears. Gordon implies that nests maintained in labs are not the same thing. She makes it clear that such ants also behave differently than ants in a natural setting.

This is a fine book. My only quibble would be to say that I would like to read a book on ants with a wider focus, especially on the Argentine ants that dominate the urban environment here in southern California. Additionally it would be nice to know how the organization of harvester ant society compares and contrasts with that of other species.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”

[Linda Gaines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book that discusses in first person the author's work. It is written such anyone can understand it. It doesn't really delve into highly scientific terms. I like how it is written first person, and she puts in a few personal comments here and there. Not many, but enough that the book is not too analytical. I also like how in the epilogue she does not try to make her work some grand work that connects it to everything else. "And I have not learned much about people from watching ants." I love the honesty of that. She then goes to discuss the bigger picture though. ". . .[T]hey show how simple parts make couples living systems, and how those systems connect to the outside world."Interesting, fairly short read.

[Hom Sack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just fascinating. Dispels what I thought I knew about ants, e.g., contrary to what Aesop (The Ant and the Grasshopper) and the Bible (Proverbs 6:6) said. Some of the ants in a colony just "standing around doing nothing".

[Thien Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I read this book but I recall it being a good recap of Gordon's long history of research as well as a summary of what is still to be learned. Less for the casually interested in nature and more for those who think digging in dirt for hours under the hot desert sun to count ants is an acceptable use of time.

[Robert Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably most appropriate for those interested in experimental methods and outcomes. I like that there is no final answer, like science should be, there are answers that lead to better questions. I was quick to find parallels to human behaviors and the author addressed this in the epilogue.

“Ants do not offer moral instructions, but they show how simple parts make complex living systems”.

[Void Sky · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book about scientific research. Easy to read. Not too complicated or in scientific terminology. You can learn something about ants ant their behavior model. Maybe not for everyone, but more for ones that could be interested in the area for one or another reason.

[Grady Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it, very informational with some wonderful anecdotes.

[Mangoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ants can become an addiction, and this book is a must-read demonstration of this apparently weird fact. Ants are rather simple agents, yet their colonies and even populations show stunning behaviors in terms of coordination, organization, task allocation, reaction to environmental events, survival strategy, co-existance with neighbors, flexibility and robustness (in one, adaptivity) that make them an outstanding case study for how complex socio-ecological behavior emerge from rather basic features of agents.
The author is devoted to the topic, which is apparent from is bio and from the writing style, too - smooth, reflexive, attentive and humorous at times. The book starts with the description of the setting of the field studies and the characteristics of the ants investigated, and goes on rather concisely to face important and general questions as: how is task allocation managed? How can the behavior of a colony change in time if the average life of each ant (except the queen, who just starts the colony and lays eggs for 15-20 years underground) is very much shorter than that of the colony itself? How do colonies coexhist within a population? How do ants reactively switch tasks? What is the role of the interactions pattern (apparently more fundamental than the physical (chemo-tactile) details of the inter-ant communication)?
The author describes a host of field experiments throughout years, both in the desert and in the lab, engineered to try to provide tentative answers to such and more questions. Models of task allocation, both neaural-network based and ecological, are provided. Ignorance is often admitted, which is to be counted as a plus, either.
Some lessons are finally learned (not on populations in general, though), particularly how the behavior of an agent cannot be studied in isolation, since it also depends critically on its interactions with other agents, (homo and/or heterogeneous). The old notion that the traits of the ants were such because of genetics and so little could be done to change them is more an ultimately false excuse to avoid the study of interaction networks than a timeless law.
A fashinating book, and must-read for complexity enthusiasts.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book 2 stars because it does what it's supposed to: It explains how an insect society (of ants) is organized and contains interesting information. Unfortunately, I expected more from it, but that was because I didn't really pay attention to the title so much as I did the ants on the cover.

I find ants fascinating, and Gordon does a great job at illustrating the different functions of different ants, their movement patterns, and reactions to various stimuli and species, which was great...

I have to say though, the book was quite boring overall, and even though it is an academic work, it has no right to be this boring, darnit. I found Gordon gave away the basics in the beginning, and subsequent chapters added little other than to re-confirm that 'we don't actually know why they do this.' Additionaly, her name-dropping and experimental minutiae - which take up half the book - should appeal to people in the field of ant ecology almost exclusively. In the end, the conclusion is that nobody really knows why ants do what they do, or exactly how, and you won't really have much of a clearer understanding after reading the book, other than the basic ant organization structure and interesting suppositions such as that the queen has no power or control over the nest. Skim through it quickly, and then go hang out by an ant hill for a few hours instead of reading this dull text.

True Rating: 2.3 stars

[Upom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting book with a ton of information about ants. The scientist who wrote this book has been working in the fields with ants for 17 YEARS! The book was kind of weirdly structured, as it first describes properties of the ant colonies, goes on to describe interactions of colonies, and then looks at individual colony behaviors. Personally, I would have preferred a complete bottom-up approach, but whatever. The book contains just about anything you want to know about red harvester ants, including some interesting information on how to study them, and what it takes to be an ant scientist.The writing was really plain, and often hard at times to read without losing focus. Still, she really details a lot about the experimental process in science, something many scientists don't do in their books. In fact, the amount of experimental detail could allow you to start your own ant investigations. Ants are fascinating because by following simple local rules, they can create complex global behaviors, information which could be useful to understand complex systems. One thing she notes about ants is that ants really focus on pattern of interaction, as opposed to specific interactions to determine their behavior. Thy also have behaviors that change in response to size. This book has inspired me to try and do some ant experiments of my on at some point in the near future.

[Alejandro Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

It throws little light on the issues I was more curious about: how did specialized behavior on simple units evolved? While it points to the fact that there are different role changes, caused largely by environmental changes perceived as chemical signals based on frequency and intensity of contact. Fascinating that nests behave differently as community at different ages, given that except the queen all ants live only 1 year. The grooming of the ants give them their group chemical signature, so an alien ant raised on that nest could ass as one of them, as is only the exterior chemicals that are perceived. Can you train Ants to do productive work? Detect oil patches? Collect diamond dust?

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting but slightly less informative book than I expected. My main impression was, despite the author's clear enthusiasm for her topic,that studying ants is extraordinarily difficult and I'm amazed we know as much as we do! Surely there must be some clever method for estimating the number of ants in a colony, for example - no. Nope. You dig up the colony and count, by hand, all ten or fifteen thousand ants. The portions of the book detailing the author's research methods seemed to involve vast patience and continual manual effort. I'm very impressed, but glad not to be a scientist myself.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good little book. I’d say it’s about high school level or so, but it’s a good example of how science works. Observations are made, questions are asked, and experiments are designed to answer the questions. Didn’t learn as much about ants as I had wanted, but that’s okay. The book touches on a subject that we don’t know much about… colony behavior in social insects. She proposes possible explanations, but admits that we really don’t know why they act the way they do.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good little book. I’d say it’s about high school level or so, but it’s a good example of how science works. Observations are made, questions are asked, and experiments are designed to answer the questions. Didn’t learn as much about ants as I had wanted, but that’s okay. The book touches on a subject that we don’t know much about… colony behavior in social insects. She proposes possible explanations, but admits that we really don’t know why they act the way they do.

[Chelsea Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an easy to read account of a series of several experiments observing harvester ant colonies in a small patch of land in the American Southwest. It's a great read even if your interests are not particularly ant-focused, as the author carefully describes her experimental methods and her well thought out methodology is itself a pleasant exercise in logical thinking. With any interest at all in ants this book is even more worth reading.

[John Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, fascinating read about ants. Gordon has studied ants, this is what she has observed and learned on her field trips. What I found most interesting was the different roles the ants play, and how it is decided which ones each does fill and when; how they forage, store and protect food, and defend and extend their territory. Great little book. Now I'm ready for more, something from E.O. Wilson, perhaps.

[Manar · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was a little to complicated for me. Or maybe I wasn't interested enough in the topic. Either way, I have more respect for ants. I am pretty sure now when ever I find an ant colony I will sit there and study them, instead of destroying them and their hill. That was one of the main reasons I started reading this book. I wanted to know more about ants... Or at least enough to fall in love with them a little. I guess it worked.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very disappointing book because the authors didn't really know many answers. This is a shame because they've done decades of research, but it seems that they only have arrived at superficial observations. The topic itself is very cool. I suppose if one is very interested in the topic and is willing to accept that they aren't going to learn many answers by reading this book, then it'd be okay.

[J.K. Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look into the life and social behaviors of ants. If you are going to read the entire book you may find some points a little repetitive. The simple language and story-telling approach is appealing for the general audience and makes this a quick read. For the scientist however, the format can come off as too informal. All in all, I learned a lot and think it was worth the read.

[Groot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a working scientist's detailed view of the ants she studies, told interestingly, with a doggedly curious, hardworking humility that is very appealing: she's studying ants, after all. Year after year, mounting to decades, she goes out to the desert to actually observe, analyze and learn about her tiny hive creatures.

[Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you ever wanted to know about red harvester ants, heres the book for you. seeing as i did, i really enjoyed it. then i did experiments with the hill in my albuquerque backyard, seeing what sorts of seeds they would eat and which they would discard...i'm a nerd.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the writing is not superb, the ideas presented are. Overall, this is a great book. It is a fantastic exploration of how simple animals, with simple brains, can create and maintain complex societies, and accomplish complex goals.

[Jason ("jcreed") · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good description of very interesting research. Started to drag a bit at the end, though.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr Gordon has a lot of questions about Ants. She and her graduate students do some painstaking work to get the answers .

[Carly Svamvour · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a copy of this book and often open it, just to entertain myself. It's a fascinating account of just how 'ants work'.

[Christy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was disappointed to find this a relatively boring book. Not surprisingly, I put it down halfway through.