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Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions
Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, “the Indiana Jones of entomology,” takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. In tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and a faster tempo. Moffett’s spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles; warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them creating marketplaces and assembly lines and dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human—including hygiene, recycling, and warfare. Adventures among Ants introduces some of the world’s most awe-inspiring species and offers a startling new perspective on the limits of our own perception.
• Ants are world-class road builders, handling traffic problems on thoroughfares that dwarf our highway systems in their complexity
• Ants with the largest societies often deploy complicated military tactics
• Some ants have evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating other insects and growing crops for food
• Ants are world-class road builders, handling traffic problems on thoroughfares that dwarf our highway systems in their complexity
• Ants with the largest societies often deploy complicated military tactics
• Some ants have evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating other insects and growing crops for food
288 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2010
64 people are currently reading
1582 people want to read
About the author
Mark W. Moffett
9 books17 followersMark Moffett (born 7 January 1958) is a tropical biologist who studies the ecology of tropical forest canopies and the social behavior of animals (especially ants) and humans. He is also the author of several popular science books and is noted for his macrophotography documenting ant biology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 78 reviews
February 2, 2020
Review 1 Ants are superorganisms. No one part has autonomy. But then the cells in our bodies are like that. We are superorganisms that respond, as ants do, to chemicals and our cells are programmed to do certain things. Be a lung cell, be a kidney cell, be a brain cell even. What is the difference, intelligence? I have issues with intelligence tests on animals since they only measure their intelligence compared to ours, which is ridiculous as it says there is only one kind of intelligence. So is it consciousness? Our cells aren't conscious, we don't even direct them to do most things, but as a superorganism, we are.
What about ants? They have the same fighting strategies as Sun Tzu wrote about. They build and maintain roads and traffic. Maurauder ants are omnivorous but do not cannibalise other species of ant. When they fight other ants, they bury the dead. They maintain farms, both vegetable and livestock. They act co-operatively, which is quite rare in the animal world, and they do something even rarer, group transport of items too big to be managed by one of them. Some species even maintain social relations with other ant colonies whilst attacking others. There are a lot of decisions to be made in their world.
Is all of this unconscious, just artificial intelligence in a living creature instead of a robot? Do they not enjoy their lives, do they not know what is going on? Are they just automatons?
I don't know, which is why I read books on ants. The first one major one I read, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct was a revelation to me. But I didn't think it was the whole story. I hope to learn more from this book.
Review 6/2020
What about ants? They have the same fighting strategies as Sun Tzu wrote about. They build and maintain roads and traffic. Maurauder ants are omnivorous but do not cannibalise other species of ant. When they fight other ants, they bury the dead. They maintain farms, both vegetable and livestock. They act co-operatively, which is quite rare in the animal world, and they do something even rarer, group transport of items too big to be managed by one of them. Some species even maintain social relations with other ant colonies whilst attacking others. There are a lot of decisions to be made in their world.
Is all of this unconscious, just artificial intelligence in a living creature instead of a robot? Do they not enjoy their lives, do they not know what is going on? Are they just automatons?
I don't know, which is why I read books on ants. The first one major one I read, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct was a revelation to me. But I didn't think it was the whole story. I hope to learn more from this book.
Review 6/2020
February 2, 2020
Review 2 I reread the book, and it clarified my thoughts into even more unanswerable questions and so I wrote another review based on the first.
Think of your body. It's made up of cells that have specific functions, some to do with nutrition like the stomach, some with breathing like the lungs, others with waste disposal duties like the kidneys and in the middle of it all a heart whose central function all other cells, the entire body, is dependent upon. Think of an ant colony, it has specialised ants that rear brood, that search out food, that defend the colony and in the middle of it is a queen, without whose central function all the other ants, the entire colony, is dependent on.
What do we have in common? All communications between ants are chemical transmitters called pheromones. In people the cell communicators are chemicals known as neurotransmitters.
So what we have might be two different types of creature - the self-contained organism called a body and a distributed body called a colony. We cannot talk about intelligence because measuring an animals intelligence by using human standards is one of the more ridiculous things people do. So the one thing that seems obviously to be missing any analog in ants is consciousness. And culture.
But even if consciousness can be interrupted or destroyed by accidents to areas of the brain or heart, we still don't know where it lies, how or when exactly it is formed or or define it in strictly scientific terms anyway. Because of this, if we were thinking of consciousness in ants we would be saying, in effect that "we know it when we see it" and we don't see it! As with measuring cognition, our consciousness is going to be impossible to test for adequately. But then, the idea that there may be a different, alien consciousness may be very hard to imagine, harder even than the concept of a colony acting as a single animal.
Culture. Culture without consciousness is a set if innate behaviours in response to stimulation. So although road-building and maintenance, nutrition both from hunting to farming agriculture and livestock, may all be instinctive, there are many decisions to be made along the way.
Building and maintaining a road. Setting the best route given the territory and the prevalence and distribution of threat: this requires knowledge of the terrain, the ability to compare a tiny bit this way or a detour around that, and to be able to grade the severity of a threat. That might be as simple as knowing that it was in anteater territory or in the way of a stream that would flood it, but it's still knowledge and that sort of knowledge is a judgement based on past experience. And it is the older ants that are at the forefront of many such aspects of ant-life.
Bees and ants both have a way of determining a new nest/hive site that must involve some very complex thought. When they are looking to move, they send out scouts - how that is determined no one knows. These scouts will have looked at sites where the entrance doesn't face into the weather, where the hole in the tree (or whatever) is of the right dimensions as is the actual cavity, what about air circulation and other criteria we might imagine. Then all the other bees go from one site to the next following the instructions for getting to them from the scouts to inspect inspect the sites and where they like the place they stay. When sites are eliminated as they get few enthusiasts, the bees or ants from them go to another one they like, and so a consensus is reached. Voting with your feet (or wings!) is what it is.
Here's another example that is mystifying if you don't grant the creature knowledge, reasoning power and the will to action that is unique to her. The author was watching ants co-operatively carrying a scorpion (this sort of co-operation in the animal world is rare) when one of the ants noticed the tail was dragging on the ground, so she ran around and picked up the tail to carry it.
We aren't anything like ants. But the similarities are fascinating and how they operate and think or analogs thereof, is a whole world of questions that there doesn't seem any way to answer. Not as yet anyway.
Review 7/2020. First 10 star book of the year. The first time I read it in Nov. 2019 and it was a 10 star too.
Think of your body. It's made up of cells that have specific functions, some to do with nutrition like the stomach, some with breathing like the lungs, others with waste disposal duties like the kidneys and in the middle of it all a heart whose central function all other cells, the entire body, is dependent upon. Think of an ant colony, it has specialised ants that rear brood, that search out food, that defend the colony and in the middle of it is a queen, without whose central function all the other ants, the entire colony, is dependent on.
What do we have in common? All communications between ants are chemical transmitters called pheromones. In people the cell communicators are chemicals known as neurotransmitters.
So what we have might be two different types of creature - the self-contained organism called a body and a distributed body called a colony. We cannot talk about intelligence because measuring an animals intelligence by using human standards is one of the more ridiculous things people do. So the one thing that seems obviously to be missing any analog in ants is consciousness. And culture.
But even if consciousness can be interrupted or destroyed by accidents to areas of the brain or heart, we still don't know where it lies, how or when exactly it is formed or or define it in strictly scientific terms anyway. Because of this, if we were thinking of consciousness in ants we would be saying, in effect that "we know it when we see it" and we don't see it! As with measuring cognition, our consciousness is going to be impossible to test for adequately. But then, the idea that there may be a different, alien consciousness may be very hard to imagine, harder even than the concept of a colony acting as a single animal.
Culture. Culture without consciousness is a set if innate behaviours in response to stimulation. So although road-building and maintenance, nutrition both from hunting to farming agriculture and livestock, may all be instinctive, there are many decisions to be made along the way.
Building and maintaining a road. Setting the best route given the territory and the prevalence and distribution of threat: this requires knowledge of the terrain, the ability to compare a tiny bit this way or a detour around that, and to be able to grade the severity of a threat. That might be as simple as knowing that it was in anteater territory or in the way of a stream that would flood it, but it's still knowledge and that sort of knowledge is a judgement based on past experience. And it is the older ants that are at the forefront of many such aspects of ant-life.
Bees and ants both have a way of determining a new nest/hive site that must involve some very complex thought. When they are looking to move, they send out scouts - how that is determined no one knows. These scouts will have looked at sites where the entrance doesn't face into the weather, where the hole in the tree (or whatever) is of the right dimensions as is the actual cavity, what about air circulation and other criteria we might imagine. Then all the other bees go from one site to the next following the instructions for getting to them from the scouts to inspect inspect the sites and where they like the place they stay. When sites are eliminated as they get few enthusiasts, the bees or ants from them go to another one they like, and so a consensus is reached. Voting with your feet (or wings!) is what it is.
Here's another example that is mystifying if you don't grant the creature knowledge, reasoning power and the will to action that is unique to her. The author was watching ants co-operatively carrying a scorpion (this sort of co-operation in the animal world is rare) when one of the ants noticed the tail was dragging on the ground, so she ran around and picked up the tail to carry it.
We aren't anything like ants. But the similarities are fascinating and how they operate and think or analogs thereof, is a whole world of questions that there doesn't seem any way to answer. Not as yet anyway.
Review 7/2020. First 10 star book of the year. The first time I read it in Nov. 2019 and it was a 10 star too.
November 16, 2020
Down the years I’ve seen enough TV nature documentaries to know that ants are amazing, but this book really brings it home that they are mind-bogglingly amazing. The author makes the point that the different ant species display a huge range of sizes and behaviours. In this book he features a number of species that he has observed in his own fieldwork. Generally these are the better known types such as the Army, Weaver, Leafcutter, Amazon, Marauder, Argentine ant etc. I hadn’t realised that the last-mentioned are an aggressive invasive species who in North America, Europe and South Africa have formed “supercolonies” that can cover hundreds of square miles, contain trillions of individuals, and pose a significant threat to native flora.
The author advances the idea that an ant colony can be viewed as a single organism, albeit one that can detach bits of itself to carry out different tasks. The division of ant societies into workers and soldiers is well-known, but some ant species keep individuals called “repletes”. When food is plentiful, these ants are fed by the others to produce and store a secretion called honeydew, their abdomens becoming distended as result. When food is short they act as an emergency food supply. The author compares them to human fat cells. The ant queens of course, perform the function of reproductive organs.
Some ant species deliberately grow, tend and harvest crops. Others keep insects such as aphids as “cattle”, guarding and herding them about and “milking” them for honeydew. The aforementioned Amazon Ant is a slavemaking species. They capture individuals of a different species and get their “slaves” to do all their work. So dependent are the Amazon Ants on their slaves that they have lost the ability to feed themselves – they will ignore food that is dropped right in front of them. They have become refined into pure fighting machines, whose only activity is to capture more slaves. Other species will maintain trails, keeping them free of twigs, leaves and other debris. Despite all these remarkable activities, the brain of an individual ant is apparently small even allowing for the size of its body, and in a few ant species individuals who become detached from a nest or a column wander around helplessly, unable to function on their own. The author therefore further argues that an ant colony is not just a superorganism but also a collective mind, with each individual ant performing a role analogous to neurons in a human brain. What a concept!
Sometimes the text of this book isn’t as exciting as it should be, given the subject, but I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in entomology, or in biology more generally. Amazing photos as well.
The author advances the idea that an ant colony can be viewed as a single organism, albeit one that can detach bits of itself to carry out different tasks. The division of ant societies into workers and soldiers is well-known, but some ant species keep individuals called “repletes”. When food is plentiful, these ants are fed by the others to produce and store a secretion called honeydew, their abdomens becoming distended as result. When food is short they act as an emergency food supply. The author compares them to human fat cells. The ant queens of course, perform the function of reproductive organs.
Some ant species deliberately grow, tend and harvest crops. Others keep insects such as aphids as “cattle”, guarding and herding them about and “milking” them for honeydew. The aforementioned Amazon Ant is a slavemaking species. They capture individuals of a different species and get their “slaves” to do all their work. So dependent are the Amazon Ants on their slaves that they have lost the ability to feed themselves – they will ignore food that is dropped right in front of them. They have become refined into pure fighting machines, whose only activity is to capture more slaves. Other species will maintain trails, keeping them free of twigs, leaves and other debris. Despite all these remarkable activities, the brain of an individual ant is apparently small even allowing for the size of its body, and in a few ant species individuals who become detached from a nest or a column wander around helplessly, unable to function on their own. The author therefore further argues that an ant colony is not just a superorganism but also a collective mind, with each individual ant performing a role analogous to neurons in a human brain. What a concept!
Sometimes the text of this book isn’t as exciting as it should be, given the subject, but I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in entomology, or in biology more generally. Amazing photos as well.
December 21, 2020
Moffett puts himself in the picture as a media-friendly guide to the ants. Starting with boyhood enthusiasm, he builds a career in ant watching, touring the world to observe their armies, tree nests, and underground farms at close quarters. Shunning the laboratory and statistical analysis, he does science the good-old way, by patient observation and prose description. At first it seems this cannot possibly entertain. But slowly the practice of following ants around all day spins a web of fascinating complexity. These ants are like the planet's nanotechnology for self-cleaning. From noting how individual ants do specialized tasks, Moffett slowly expands the picture to well-organized cities with collective intelligence that function as globe-spanning super-organisms. It starts off quite slow, and keeps getting better.
January 16, 2011
My real review: http://www.inklingmagazine.com/articl...
I lay on my stomach in my driveway. The breeze ruffled my skirt and the sun warmed the backs of my legs. Three ants scurried across the concrete. They were tiny, like cumin seeds but smaller. They seemed to come and go from a crack in the pavement where weeds sprouted and untold ant-sized wonders must lie, but I could see no pattern to their hurried movements. I pinched one between my fingertips, stood up, then let her fall. The drop was four feet or more, easily a thousand times the ant’s height, and my actions seemed like cruelty—but I told myself it was science and I’ll admit I got a little thrill. I was testing a theory I’d just learned: Ants are so small they have no “critical injury height,” no height above which a fall can cause harm. An ant could drop forever and land without being bruised.
By the time I got my face back down toward the pavement, the ant was upright though not unfazed. She bent over double, antennae quivering around her leg. Was she nursing an injury? Cleaning herself? Trying to get oriented? But then she started forward again, zig-zag stumbling across the warm, infertile ground. Before long she was back where she started, making haphazard-looking arcs near a particular crack. The moment of truth came as another ant approached her. Would my victim’s fall mark her as damaged in some way? Would her sister reject her? In less than a second I had my answer, as the two locked antennae for a brief moment, then moved on. It was as if I’d never been there at all.
Ants have always seemed to me simultaneously ubiquitous and inscrutable. Easy to find, hard to understand. I’d hoped my newfound willingness to experiment on them would open a door for me into their world, but it was clear I’d have to do much more than lie in the driveway for a few minutes to gain that kind of access. I might, for example, have to fly to Singapore and sit for fifty hours straight in a forgotten corner of a botanic garden, through sunburn and rain, to really understand a little corner of an ant’s world. If I really wanted to do it right, I’d need a camera with a lens that worked as a magnifier, and a waterproof field notebook, and patience like steel. I’m not that patient, so my front-yard taste of ant science would have to do. Besides, I’d already found a shortcut to ant insight, in the form of Mark Moffett’s new book Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, released in May 2010 by the University of California Press.
“Wherever we notice parallels between ant colonies and our own societies, we should remember that the ant societies came first,” writes Moffett. Adventures Among Ants (or AAA, as Moffett, AKA Doctor Bugs, calls it on his blog) is partially a memoir and travelogue from three decades of stalking ants around the world. Moffett’s had an interesting life—he earned his Ph.D. under the legendary Edward O. Wilson, earned his living in part as a photographer for National Geographic, and earned the title of the “Indiana Jones of entomology” by capering through jungles around the world—but what makes the book a worthy read is its other half: his close and thorough telling of the stories that belong to the ants.
Moffett’s first accomplishment is that he differentiates the teeming invertebrate mass that the ant world seems to the uninitiated. In the tropics of Asia, large marauder ants carry “minor” workers of their own species on their heads; the minor workers weigh 500 times less than the large ones. The marauders work as a group to swarm out from their nest, capture prey, and bring it home. The minors lead the swarm and immobilize the victims, from termites to pill bugs to lizards, by pulling on them in dozens or hundreds of places at once. Then the larger ants arrive to smash and dismember the prey as needed. When the marauders chance to encounter another colony, they fight, but mostly the more expendable minors. “After some minutes of struggle,” Moffett writes, “one of the ant’s limbs will pop off like the arm of a medieval torture victim stretched on the rack. Slowly, surely, the workers pull each other apart.”
Contrast that to the life of the temperate-zone Amazon ant, Polyergus breviceps, an orange pumpkin seed-sized species that only leaves home on slave raids. The Amazons follow a scout to the nest of gray Formica, invade, and steal their brood. Arriving home at their own nest, the Amazons hand off their burdens to adult Formica workers who have grown up indentured to their captors as part of the Amazon colony. It’s the gray Formica who raise the young of both species, scavenge for food, maintain the nest, and generally keep life running. Imprinted on the scent of the Amazons from birth, the Formica likely have no idea that the queen they toil for is not their mother.
“Is it reasonable to apply the word slavery to ant practice?” Moffett muses, in a long meditation on what the Amazon behavior means. He takes inventory of animals who practice slavery, including humans and a large Australian bird. He enumerates the differences between ant slavery and human slavery, the most important of which being that the ants likely don’t realize that they’re slaves. “Among animals other than ourselves,” Moffett concludes, “actions are neither right nor wrong. They just are.”
Yet how they are can teach us, as humans, about what works, or about who we are. Ant colonies get faster paced and the labor gets more specialized as they get larger, just like in human cities. Colonies can accomplish complex tasks, like building and maintaining roadways, without any centralized leadership but with well-networked, redundant communication. Moffett illustrates each of these concepts with concrete examples and fascinating stories of ants simply being remarkably themselves.
The scientific process is in plain view throughout, as Moffett makes and tests hypotheses right in front of his readers. He strikes a good balance between clear and precise science and an accessible tone. In addition to describing many of his own experiments, Moffett refers to discoveries by other scientists, and gives them warm credits and cameos. Extensive endnotes to peer-reviewed research should satisfy anyone wanting to explore more in depth. The work is not for the total beginner, but it could have been—a labeled diagram of ant parts and the ant lifecycle would have cleared up a lot for me, for example.
Though it is filled with stories, the book lacks a larger story arc to push you to keep turning pages. But gorgeous photographs and smaller-scale mysteries make up for the lack of momentum. (Why do the Amazons mill around outside their own nest for a while before going on their raids? SPOILER: They’re waiting for a scout to show them a better place to mill around.) Apart from the occasional far-fetched metaphor, Moffett’s prose is smooth and goes down easy. He’s charmingly enveloped in the tiny world he studies, and through his eyes the ants grow huge. “Like a lion,” Moffett observes, “an ant is easiest to approach and photograph when it is preoccupied.” That sentence is best read in an Australian accent.
Most of all, Moffett’s discoveries left me wanting to make my own, even in my own yard. His stories reminded me of what’s possible in the natural world. For those of us who dream of far-flung explorations, Moffett’s explorer’s life may inspire a bit of jealousy, but he redeems himself by leaving us the richer for having encountered him, our world enlarged as our focus shrinks. He reminds us to pay attention, and that even among ants, there’s adventure. Give this book to any eleven year old dreaming big about science, and go ahead and keep a copy for yourself. Just now you may wind up together, face down on the driveway.
I lay on my stomach in my driveway. The breeze ruffled my skirt and the sun warmed the backs of my legs. Three ants scurried across the concrete. They were tiny, like cumin seeds but smaller. They seemed to come and go from a crack in the pavement where weeds sprouted and untold ant-sized wonders must lie, but I could see no pattern to their hurried movements. I pinched one between my fingertips, stood up, then let her fall. The drop was four feet or more, easily a thousand times the ant’s height, and my actions seemed like cruelty—but I told myself it was science and I’ll admit I got a little thrill. I was testing a theory I’d just learned: Ants are so small they have no “critical injury height,” no height above which a fall can cause harm. An ant could drop forever and land without being bruised.
By the time I got my face back down toward the pavement, the ant was upright though not unfazed. She bent over double, antennae quivering around her leg. Was she nursing an injury? Cleaning herself? Trying to get oriented? But then she started forward again, zig-zag stumbling across the warm, infertile ground. Before long she was back where she started, making haphazard-looking arcs near a particular crack. The moment of truth came as another ant approached her. Would my victim’s fall mark her as damaged in some way? Would her sister reject her? In less than a second I had my answer, as the two locked antennae for a brief moment, then moved on. It was as if I’d never been there at all.
Ants have always seemed to me simultaneously ubiquitous and inscrutable. Easy to find, hard to understand. I’d hoped my newfound willingness to experiment on them would open a door for me into their world, but it was clear I’d have to do much more than lie in the driveway for a few minutes to gain that kind of access. I might, for example, have to fly to Singapore and sit for fifty hours straight in a forgotten corner of a botanic garden, through sunburn and rain, to really understand a little corner of an ant’s world. If I really wanted to do it right, I’d need a camera with a lens that worked as a magnifier, and a waterproof field notebook, and patience like steel. I’m not that patient, so my front-yard taste of ant science would have to do. Besides, I’d already found a shortcut to ant insight, in the form of Mark Moffett’s new book Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, released in May 2010 by the University of California Press.
“Wherever we notice parallels between ant colonies and our own societies, we should remember that the ant societies came first,” writes Moffett. Adventures Among Ants (or AAA, as Moffett, AKA Doctor Bugs, calls it on his blog) is partially a memoir and travelogue from three decades of stalking ants around the world. Moffett’s had an interesting life—he earned his Ph.D. under the legendary Edward O. Wilson, earned his living in part as a photographer for National Geographic, and earned the title of the “Indiana Jones of entomology” by capering through jungles around the world—but what makes the book a worthy read is its other half: his close and thorough telling of the stories that belong to the ants.
Moffett’s first accomplishment is that he differentiates the teeming invertebrate mass that the ant world seems to the uninitiated. In the tropics of Asia, large marauder ants carry “minor” workers of their own species on their heads; the minor workers weigh 500 times less than the large ones. The marauders work as a group to swarm out from their nest, capture prey, and bring it home. The minors lead the swarm and immobilize the victims, from termites to pill bugs to lizards, by pulling on them in dozens or hundreds of places at once. Then the larger ants arrive to smash and dismember the prey as needed. When the marauders chance to encounter another colony, they fight, but mostly the more expendable minors. “After some minutes of struggle,” Moffett writes, “one of the ant’s limbs will pop off like the arm of a medieval torture victim stretched on the rack. Slowly, surely, the workers pull each other apart.”
Contrast that to the life of the temperate-zone Amazon ant, Polyergus breviceps, an orange pumpkin seed-sized species that only leaves home on slave raids. The Amazons follow a scout to the nest of gray Formica, invade, and steal their brood. Arriving home at their own nest, the Amazons hand off their burdens to adult Formica workers who have grown up indentured to their captors as part of the Amazon colony. It’s the gray Formica who raise the young of both species, scavenge for food, maintain the nest, and generally keep life running. Imprinted on the scent of the Amazons from birth, the Formica likely have no idea that the queen they toil for is not their mother.
“Is it reasonable to apply the word slavery to ant practice?” Moffett muses, in a long meditation on what the Amazon behavior means. He takes inventory of animals who practice slavery, including humans and a large Australian bird. He enumerates the differences between ant slavery and human slavery, the most important of which being that the ants likely don’t realize that they’re slaves. “Among animals other than ourselves,” Moffett concludes, “actions are neither right nor wrong. They just are.”
Yet how they are can teach us, as humans, about what works, or about who we are. Ant colonies get faster paced and the labor gets more specialized as they get larger, just like in human cities. Colonies can accomplish complex tasks, like building and maintaining roadways, without any centralized leadership but with well-networked, redundant communication. Moffett illustrates each of these concepts with concrete examples and fascinating stories of ants simply being remarkably themselves.
The scientific process is in plain view throughout, as Moffett makes and tests hypotheses right in front of his readers. He strikes a good balance between clear and precise science and an accessible tone. In addition to describing many of his own experiments, Moffett refers to discoveries by other scientists, and gives them warm credits and cameos. Extensive endnotes to peer-reviewed research should satisfy anyone wanting to explore more in depth. The work is not for the total beginner, but it could have been—a labeled diagram of ant parts and the ant lifecycle would have cleared up a lot for me, for example.
Though it is filled with stories, the book lacks a larger story arc to push you to keep turning pages. But gorgeous photographs and smaller-scale mysteries make up for the lack of momentum. (Why do the Amazons mill around outside their own nest for a while before going on their raids? SPOILER: They’re waiting for a scout to show them a better place to mill around.) Apart from the occasional far-fetched metaphor, Moffett’s prose is smooth and goes down easy. He’s charmingly enveloped in the tiny world he studies, and through his eyes the ants grow huge. “Like a lion,” Moffett observes, “an ant is easiest to approach and photograph when it is preoccupied.” That sentence is best read in an Australian accent.
Most of all, Moffett’s discoveries left me wanting to make my own, even in my own yard. His stories reminded me of what’s possible in the natural world. For those of us who dream of far-flung explorations, Moffett’s explorer’s life may inspire a bit of jealousy, but he redeems himself by leaving us the richer for having encountered him, our world enlarged as our focus shrinks. He reminds us to pay attention, and that even among ants, there’s adventure. Give this book to any eleven year old dreaming big about science, and go ahead and keep a copy for yourself. Just now you may wind up together, face down on the driveway.
August 24, 2013
ANTS!!!
This book is just fun. It's like following the epic stories/ kingdoms /lives of ants without actually having to endure the boredom of watching ants for hours or getting ant bites. And the photographs!! Just amazing. Mark Moffett isn't the best writer, however, sometimes he gets overly wordy or repetitive. You kind of get used to his flowery writing style after a while, though. Also, Moffett kind of gets off topic sometimes - twice he describes dreams he had about ants, which I found kind of weird. Overall Mark Moffett is not as cool as Edward O. Wilson, but he's still pretty cool.
Favorite parts:
"The smallest known ant colonies, of at most four individuals, are those of the minuscule tropical American ant Thaumatomytmex." (pg 9)
"Among ants generally, the risks taken by workers tend to increase with age, demonstrating that their long-term value to a colony diminishes as they get older. Months-old fire ants engage in fighting in battles with nearby colonies, for example, whereas weeks-old workers run away and days-old individuals feign death." (pg 55)
"With their bloated abdomens, repletes serve as living pantries, storing and then regurgitating liquid food to other colony members." (pg 57)
"...ants at the small end of the spectrum, such as Carebara atoma, the 'atom ant,' are truly Lilliputian. I once dislodged a flake of bark from a tree in Singapore, only to expose four hundred yellow specks: an entire colony of its close cousin Carebara overbecki. The minor workers were almost the size of an atoma, their oval heads about as small as a single celled paramecium. The slightly larger soldiers have elongated heads with two little horns." (pg 143)
Marauder ants:
These are like warrior ants with a conscience. "When marauders kill another ant species in a skirmish, they cover the bodies with soil and abandon them. Despite this odd and unexplained aversion to cannibalism, the marauders evolved mass foraging in part for the same reason army ants did, as an aid in battle." (pg 47)
"It seems the marauder ant workers likewise do the deed of disposing of excess queens, but in their case this occurs much later in the life of the colony. I learned this at the Botanic Gardens... At one point I noticed a group dragging a dusky object out of the nest and along their trail. Extracting it from them, I found in my hand a wingless queen with the worn mandibles and near-black pigmentation of an aged animal. She was very much alive but had apparently outlived her usefulness to the colony and was being evicted. Twice more I saw the same event at nests sizeable enough to suggest that marauder ant societies can retain more than one queen for a long time. Allowing these workers to finish their job, I watched them abandon the struggling queen at the side of their trail or in the garbage heap.
Army ants:
These guys are vicious, but not particularly smart. Their method of foraging: storm in, beat up the natives, grab whatever you can, and leave.
Weaver ants:
"Weaver ant nests are most common in the outer, often uppermost, sunlit branches of trees... There the ants bind adjacent living leaves into a kind of arboreal tent... To begin building a nest, a worker pulls at the edge of a leaf, and if she's successful in bending it, nearby ants join her... The name weaver ant comes from the next step, which involves a kind of child labor. In many ant species, the larvae spin silk cocoons in which they transform into adults. But a weaver ant larva does not make a cocoon. Instead, it produces silk at a young age, when still small enough to be held and manipulated by an adult worker." (pg 113)
"'It can be said,' write Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, 'that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies'" (pg 115)
Weaver ants also tend to "cattle"! Pg 119, weaver ants and Homoptera.
Amazon ants:
The slave makers! These ants steal pupae from other species colonies, and raise them in their own colony. When the pupae hatch, the new ants imprint in the new colony, and work for the colony as if it were their own.
Leafcutter ants:
My favorite. They cut leaves, bring the leaves back to their nest, mush up the leaves, and feed the leaves to their fungus that they grow underground. The ants then eat the fungus - although their primary source of energy is plant sap, the fungus contains protein - and also feed it to their larvae. These guys are super organized, and super clean. They spend a lot of time grooming themselves and each other, because any contamination in the nest could kill their fungus.
Page 181 - I found it a little hard to believe that the ants would know that if they dropped their leaf pieces from up in a tree, their sisters would grab them from down below. But, I suppose if this behavior has been documented, it must be true. I wonder how it works?
The dreaded phorid fly:
"A phorid floats around leafcutter trails like a dust mote until it swoops down on a worker's head, inserting an egg through the ant's neck or mouth... The hatched maggot then consumes brain and muscle until finally the ant's head falls off -- hence once common name for the phorid: the decapitating fly." (pg 183)
"Not surprisingly, the garbage-transport and garbage-processor ants can die from handling hazardous waste...To add insult to injury, the janitorial staff is treated as untouchables by the other ants, who evade infection by dropping off refuse at safely located waste-transfer centers and staying away from the trash heaps themselves, and by attacking any of the sanitation squad who approach them or their gardens. With no access to plant sap or fresh fungus meals, the waste-management ants... must either scavenge from the offal or starve." (pg 193)
Argentine ants:
These ants are scary invaders who have formed gigantic supercolonies in the western United States because they outmatch the local ants.
This book is just fun. It's like following the epic stories/ kingdoms /lives of ants without actually having to endure the boredom of watching ants for hours or getting ant bites. And the photographs!! Just amazing. Mark Moffett isn't the best writer, however, sometimes he gets overly wordy or repetitive. You kind of get used to his flowery writing style after a while, though. Also, Moffett kind of gets off topic sometimes - twice he describes dreams he had about ants, which I found kind of weird. Overall Mark Moffett is not as cool as Edward O. Wilson, but he's still pretty cool.
Favorite parts:
"The smallest known ant colonies, of at most four individuals, are those of the minuscule tropical American ant Thaumatomytmex." (pg 9)
"Among ants generally, the risks taken by workers tend to increase with age, demonstrating that their long-term value to a colony diminishes as they get older. Months-old fire ants engage in fighting in battles with nearby colonies, for example, whereas weeks-old workers run away and days-old individuals feign death." (pg 55)
"With their bloated abdomens, repletes serve as living pantries, storing and then regurgitating liquid food to other colony members." (pg 57)
"...ants at the small end of the spectrum, such as Carebara atoma, the 'atom ant,' are truly Lilliputian. I once dislodged a flake of bark from a tree in Singapore, only to expose four hundred yellow specks: an entire colony of its close cousin Carebara overbecki. The minor workers were almost the size of an atoma, their oval heads about as small as a single celled paramecium. The slightly larger soldiers have elongated heads with two little horns." (pg 143)
Marauder ants:
These are like warrior ants with a conscience. "When marauders kill another ant species in a skirmish, they cover the bodies with soil and abandon them. Despite this odd and unexplained aversion to cannibalism, the marauders evolved mass foraging in part for the same reason army ants did, as an aid in battle." (pg 47)
"It seems the marauder ant workers likewise do the deed of disposing of excess queens, but in their case this occurs much later in the life of the colony. I learned this at the Botanic Gardens... At one point I noticed a group dragging a dusky object out of the nest and along their trail. Extracting it from them, I found in my hand a wingless queen with the worn mandibles and near-black pigmentation of an aged animal. She was very much alive but had apparently outlived her usefulness to the colony and was being evicted. Twice more I saw the same event at nests sizeable enough to suggest that marauder ant societies can retain more than one queen for a long time. Allowing these workers to finish their job, I watched them abandon the struggling queen at the side of their trail or in the garbage heap.
Army ants:
These guys are vicious, but not particularly smart. Their method of foraging: storm in, beat up the natives, grab whatever you can, and leave.
Weaver ants:
"Weaver ant nests are most common in the outer, often uppermost, sunlit branches of trees... There the ants bind adjacent living leaves into a kind of arboreal tent... To begin building a nest, a worker pulls at the edge of a leaf, and if she's successful in bending it, nearby ants join her... The name weaver ant comes from the next step, which involves a kind of child labor. In many ant species, the larvae spin silk cocoons in which they transform into adults. But a weaver ant larva does not make a cocoon. Instead, it produces silk at a young age, when still small enough to be held and manipulated by an adult worker." (pg 113)
"'It can be said,' write Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, 'that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies'" (pg 115)
Weaver ants also tend to "cattle"! Pg 119, weaver ants and Homoptera.
Amazon ants:
The slave makers! These ants steal pupae from other species colonies, and raise them in their own colony. When the pupae hatch, the new ants imprint in the new colony, and work for the colony as if it were their own.
Leafcutter ants:
My favorite. They cut leaves, bring the leaves back to their nest, mush up the leaves, and feed the leaves to their fungus that they grow underground. The ants then eat the fungus - although their primary source of energy is plant sap, the fungus contains protein - and also feed it to their larvae. These guys are super organized, and super clean. They spend a lot of time grooming themselves and each other, because any contamination in the nest could kill their fungus.
Page 181 - I found it a little hard to believe that the ants would know that if they dropped their leaf pieces from up in a tree, their sisters would grab them from down below. But, I suppose if this behavior has been documented, it must be true. I wonder how it works?
The dreaded phorid fly:
"A phorid floats around leafcutter trails like a dust mote until it swoops down on a worker's head, inserting an egg through the ant's neck or mouth... The hatched maggot then consumes brain and muscle until finally the ant's head falls off -- hence once common name for the phorid: the decapitating fly." (pg 183)
"Not surprisingly, the garbage-transport and garbage-processor ants can die from handling hazardous waste...To add insult to injury, the janitorial staff is treated as untouchables by the other ants, who evade infection by dropping off refuse at safely located waste-transfer centers and staying away from the trash heaps themselves, and by attacking any of the sanitation squad who approach them or their gardens. With no access to plant sap or fresh fungus meals, the waste-management ants... must either scavenge from the offal or starve." (pg 193)
Argentine ants:
These ants are scary invaders who have formed gigantic supercolonies in the western United States because they outmatch the local ants.
March 30, 2011
Moffett knew from a young age that he wanted to be a field biologist – traveling the world in search of the most interesting animals he could find. And ever since his childhood, he’s had an abiding interest in ants.
And who could blame him? There are thousands of species of ants, found all around the world, and once you get down and really look at them, they display some amazing behaviors. They communicate through a series of smells, functioning almost as a group organism to take care of the nest, forage for food, and move from place to place. Some species of ants live their whole lives without touching the ground, while others ravage the ground they walk on, devouring everything in their paths. Ants are nature’s workhorses, utterly communistic in their behavior and presenting a model of order that humans should envy.
We follow Moffett as he travels around the world to find the most interesting representatives of ant-dom. In India, he found the marauder ant, a vicious species of ant that goes on raids to find food near its nest. Connected by a complex system of trails, the marauder sends out every able-bodied ant it can muster, from the tiny workers to the (comparatively) giant soldier ants. They find, subdue, and dismember their prey with frightening efficiency, and carry it back to the nest, all without a leader to give them instructions or make sure they’re going the right way. Each ant just knows what her job is, and just does it. In that way, the ant super-organism takes care of itself.
In Africa, he hunts the famous African army ant, a species that is famous for its terrifying raids and voracious appetites. They swarm out around their nest, devouring anything in their path, sometimes raiding other nests for food and larvae. When army ants come, the lucky prey gets out of the way.
Ants are not confined to the ground, of course. The weaver ant is a tree-borne species that has mastered its domain with harshness and efficiency. The Amazon ant kidnaps pupae from neighboring nests and raises the young ants as their slaves. The leafcutter ant invented agriculture fifty million years before humanity even walked the earth, and the Argentine ant lives in supercolonies that cover hundreds of square kilometers and engage in violent, no-quarters war with each other.
The sheer variety of ants on this planet is astounding, and Moffett shows an unstoppable enthusiasm for the little critters. What’s more, he’s an outstanding photographer, who has developed his technique and equipment to be able to get some remarkable shots of these tiny, tiny creatures in action. The hardcover edition that I have is printed on nice, glossy paper, pretty much in order to showcase Moffett’s photographic work, which he has regularly done for National Geographic Magazine.
What’s more, he continually seeks to find connections between ants and humans, who have more similarities than one might expect. We both live in large, complex societies, where individuals take on specific roles that often last that individual’s lifetimes. We engage in wars, slavery, and varied communal activities that benefit both the individual and the society at the same time. Like us, the ants build highways and infrastructure, communicate over distances, tend gardens, hold territory, plan for the future and learn from the past. And they started doing all this thousands of millennia before we even thought about standing upright. We are not the same as ants, of course – ants are unmoved by things such as status, greed, or ambition, but their instinctual dedication to the greater good of their colony is probably something that we could use a good dose of.
For all that, however, I don’t think this was the right ant book for me. Written by a person who truly loves ants, I think that would be the best kind of person to read it. I don’t have a particular fondness for the little buggers, and there were a lot of times where I had to stop and start over, or where I found myself looking for anything else to do rather than continue reading, which is never a good sign. It isn’t Moffett’s fault, I think. He put a lot of work and detail into this book, assuming that the reader would find ants just as fascinating as he does.
And I don’t.
Oh sure – I find them fascinating in abstract, but not quite fascinating enough to get into the down-and-dirty details about how they construct trunk trails out of their nests, or the exact division of labor that exists between one class of ant and another. I’m not sure what I thought the book would be when I saw Moffett on The Colbert Report, but it wasn’t quite enough for me to sit down and devour the way I hoped it would be.
If you like ants – or you know someone who does – this is a great book, and it gives an excellent insight into what it means to be a field biologist (lots of staying in one place, apparently). For anyone who really loves insects in general, and ants in particular, this book will be a welcome addition to their bookshelf.
---------------------------------------
“Is [an ant] intelligent? To my way of thinking, yes. We know a worker can evaluate the living space, ceiling height, entry dimensions, cleanliness, and illumination of a potential new home for her colony – a masterly feat, considering that she’s a roving speck with no pen, paper, or calculator.”
- Mark Moffett, Adventures Among Ants
And who could blame him? There are thousands of species of ants, found all around the world, and once you get down and really look at them, they display some amazing behaviors. They communicate through a series of smells, functioning almost as a group organism to take care of the nest, forage for food, and move from place to place. Some species of ants live their whole lives without touching the ground, while others ravage the ground they walk on, devouring everything in their paths. Ants are nature’s workhorses, utterly communistic in their behavior and presenting a model of order that humans should envy.
We follow Moffett as he travels around the world to find the most interesting representatives of ant-dom. In India, he found the marauder ant, a vicious species of ant that goes on raids to find food near its nest. Connected by a complex system of trails, the marauder sends out every able-bodied ant it can muster, from the tiny workers to the (comparatively) giant soldier ants. They find, subdue, and dismember their prey with frightening efficiency, and carry it back to the nest, all without a leader to give them instructions or make sure they’re going the right way. Each ant just knows what her job is, and just does it. In that way, the ant super-organism takes care of itself.
In Africa, he hunts the famous African army ant, a species that is famous for its terrifying raids and voracious appetites. They swarm out around their nest, devouring anything in their path, sometimes raiding other nests for food and larvae. When army ants come, the lucky prey gets out of the way.
Ants are not confined to the ground, of course. The weaver ant is a tree-borne species that has mastered its domain with harshness and efficiency. The Amazon ant kidnaps pupae from neighboring nests and raises the young ants as their slaves. The leafcutter ant invented agriculture fifty million years before humanity even walked the earth, and the Argentine ant lives in supercolonies that cover hundreds of square kilometers and engage in violent, no-quarters war with each other.
The sheer variety of ants on this planet is astounding, and Moffett shows an unstoppable enthusiasm for the little critters. What’s more, he’s an outstanding photographer, who has developed his technique and equipment to be able to get some remarkable shots of these tiny, tiny creatures in action. The hardcover edition that I have is printed on nice, glossy paper, pretty much in order to showcase Moffett’s photographic work, which he has regularly done for National Geographic Magazine.
What’s more, he continually seeks to find connections between ants and humans, who have more similarities than one might expect. We both live in large, complex societies, where individuals take on specific roles that often last that individual’s lifetimes. We engage in wars, slavery, and varied communal activities that benefit both the individual and the society at the same time. Like us, the ants build highways and infrastructure, communicate over distances, tend gardens, hold territory, plan for the future and learn from the past. And they started doing all this thousands of millennia before we even thought about standing upright. We are not the same as ants, of course – ants are unmoved by things such as status, greed, or ambition, but their instinctual dedication to the greater good of their colony is probably something that we could use a good dose of.
For all that, however, I don’t think this was the right ant book for me. Written by a person who truly loves ants, I think that would be the best kind of person to read it. I don’t have a particular fondness for the little buggers, and there were a lot of times where I had to stop and start over, or where I found myself looking for anything else to do rather than continue reading, which is never a good sign. It isn’t Moffett’s fault, I think. He put a lot of work and detail into this book, assuming that the reader would find ants just as fascinating as he does.
And I don’t.
Oh sure – I find them fascinating in abstract, but not quite fascinating enough to get into the down-and-dirty details about how they construct trunk trails out of their nests, or the exact division of labor that exists between one class of ant and another. I’m not sure what I thought the book would be when I saw Moffett on The Colbert Report, but it wasn’t quite enough for me to sit down and devour the way I hoped it would be.
If you like ants – or you know someone who does – this is a great book, and it gives an excellent insight into what it means to be a field biologist (lots of staying in one place, apparently). For anyone who really loves insects in general, and ants in particular, this book will be a welcome addition to their bookshelf.
---------------------------------------
“Is [an ant] intelligent? To my way of thinking, yes. We know a worker can evaluate the living space, ceiling height, entry dimensions, cleanliness, and illumination of a potential new home for her colony – a masterly feat, considering that she’s a roving speck with no pen, paper, or calculator.”
- Mark Moffett, Adventures Among Ants
August 15, 2010
Part exotic travel-log and part exploration of sublime evolutionary splendor, "Adventure Among the Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions," turns its humble subject into a super star. Mark Moffett, "The Indiana Jones of the Ant World," mixes a memoir of his far flung journeys with the fascinating complexity and variety of ants; his passion for his subject isn't merely palpable, it's infectious. If his goal is to make you pause and appreciate the next time an ant crawls on your kitchen counter, he has succeeded mightily.
The variety of species he explores are literally legion and reads like the stuff of science fiction. An ant suicide bomber that explodes acid upon its nests enemies? A species that enslave other ants who in turn do most of their colonies work? Superhighways stretching vast distances to facilitate travel and foraging? Super colonies the size of half of California? This is just a sampling of the varied cast of this entertaining informative book, only further enhanced by Moffett's award winning photographs that quite literally take us down to their level. Written with a combination of humor, reverence, and a devotion to hard science "Adventure Among Ants" is that rarest of species, a scientific page turner that you will want to read and recommend to a friend.
The variety of species he explores are literally legion and reads like the stuff of science fiction. An ant suicide bomber that explodes acid upon its nests enemies? A species that enslave other ants who in turn do most of their colonies work? Superhighways stretching vast distances to facilitate travel and foraging? Super colonies the size of half of California? This is just a sampling of the varied cast of this entertaining informative book, only further enhanced by Moffett's award winning photographs that quite literally take us down to their level. Written with a combination of humor, reverence, and a devotion to hard science "Adventure Among Ants" is that rarest of species, a scientific page turner that you will want to read and recommend to a friend.
February 26, 2011
I loved this book! The author has such enthusiasm for his subject that it is really infectious! I have always been fascinated by bugs and loved studying them, but this book can be interesting to anyone who enjoys the planet they live on. There are some big doses of philosophy in here, he questions our understanding of what an organism is, what a mind is, how we perceive the world around us based on our humanity. And of course there are lots of cool and funny stories about his adventures all over the world studying the ants he writes about. There are a few bits that get overly scientific, but nothing that is too hard to follow. It felt like it was so pointed in one direction (ants) that it illuminated all around it (the world and our thoughts about it). It also had amazing photographs, worth picking up just for those, they were groundbreaking, so much so that National Geographic featured them! So yeah, I loved it!
November 19, 2010
A remarkable book illustrated with the most astonishing photos of ants. The author is enamoured, even obsessed with these little creatures.
It's a long book and I've only read a bit. Have to return it and go to the end of the reserve list line to read more. Incredible detail, yet written entertainingly and with real flair.
His premise: Most ant colonies are actually super-organisms with each ant behaving rather like a single cell.
Certainly worth looking at the pictures, even if you don't read every word.
It's a long book and I've only read a bit. Have to return it and go to the end of the reserve list line to read more. Incredible detail, yet written entertainingly and with real flair.
His premise: Most ant colonies are actually super-organisms with each ant behaving rather like a single cell.
Certainly worth looking at the pictures, even if you don't read every word.
September 22, 2017
Good stuff if you like detailed, accurate and mildly humorous real science, and especially ants. Ants are fascinating and diverse creatures to begin with, and Moffett's devotion to studying and understanding them brings their captivating society alive for the reader. I only took off one star because not everyone is as entranced with narrative detail as I, but if you are, you're going to enjoy it.
May 12, 2014
So good! And the pictures are amazing. Although it was not a slim volume, it left me wanting to know even more.
March 27, 2016
I agree with another reviewer. The photos deserve a 5+, but the text only merits a 3. Still, depending on your expectations, this has a very good chance at meeting them.
March 7, 2021
Myrmecologist Mark W. Moffett takes the reader on a journey through a few key ant species and their specialized ways of forging an existence on the planet. This book is filled with some of his National Geographic-featured photography of ants engaged in a multitude of behaviors that serve to illustrate these small beings in a new light, bringing importance and magnitude to their day-to-day activities.
The book is smartly laid out in a way that mimics the various human societies throughout history, starting with a long slog with the ant that was the focus of PhD study, the Marauder ant of Southeast Asia. We see ‘big game’ hunter society in the voracious African Army ant. We marvel at the tree-dwelling Weaver ants, with their ant-gardens and aphid ‘cattle.’ We experience shock and horror at the slavemaking Amazon ant and her Formica slaves, stolen from their nests as broods for a life of servitude to the Amazon. We awe at the mastery of agriculture by the underground dwelling Leafcutter ant, with their catacomb nests filled with fungus gardens. And we end up with the cosmopolitan Argentine ant, with its four massive supercolonies in the midst of a renewed conquest of California.
The chapters include a lot of philosophical insight into ideas of what constitutes individual will, what makes a society, what is a superorganism (what the ant colony as a whole is often referred to as). Comparisons are drawn to the machine learning of computers and neuronal networks of brains, with each individual ant engaging in some non-autonomous decision making that results in colony-scale behaviors. Each chapter is filled with a rich cast of friends and colleagues that Moffett makes along the way and a descriptive cultural rundown of the global adventures his study of ants has brought him on. Like Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life” did with fungi, “Adventures Among Ants” has left me with a more complete view of these insects that are often disregarded as an unwanted pest. A very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable academic read.
The book is smartly laid out in a way that mimics the various human societies throughout history, starting with a long slog with the ant that was the focus of PhD study, the Marauder ant of Southeast Asia. We see ‘big game’ hunter society in the voracious African Army ant. We marvel at the tree-dwelling Weaver ants, with their ant-gardens and aphid ‘cattle.’ We experience shock and horror at the slavemaking Amazon ant and her Formica slaves, stolen from their nests as broods for a life of servitude to the Amazon. We awe at the mastery of agriculture by the underground dwelling Leafcutter ant, with their catacomb nests filled with fungus gardens. And we end up with the cosmopolitan Argentine ant, with its four massive supercolonies in the midst of a renewed conquest of California.
The chapters include a lot of philosophical insight into ideas of what constitutes individual will, what makes a society, what is a superorganism (what the ant colony as a whole is often referred to as). Comparisons are drawn to the machine learning of computers and neuronal networks of brains, with each individual ant engaging in some non-autonomous decision making that results in colony-scale behaviors. Each chapter is filled with a rich cast of friends and colleagues that Moffett makes along the way and a descriptive cultural rundown of the global adventures his study of ants has brought him on. Like Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life” did with fungi, “Adventures Among Ants” has left me with a more complete view of these insects that are often disregarded as an unwanted pest. A very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable academic read.
August 19, 2019
Should be a serious candidate for best science book of the year
This is an extremely impressive book in just about every way. It has a clever and beautifully designed jacket (like a movie poster for Pixar: "Cast of Trillions"!); the page layouts are crisp and artful; the colored fonts for headings are artistic without being glaring; the text is very well edited and proofed; the many color plates of the ants are world class (Moffett has done photography for National Geographic which features some of the best nature photography anywhere); the writing engages the reader and is dense with information and adventure. Yes, adventure as in the title.
With this book I believe that Mark Moffett will emerge as a superstar among naturalists. In addition to being a world class photographer whose photographs of ants are unique in their clarity and expressiveness, he is an intrepid traveler and explorer who has visited every continent except Antarctica looking for ants. (He'd probably go there too if there were any ants!) He has bivouacked on numerous islands as well, including Malaysia and Easter Island where he found that the island has become overrun with Argentine ants, the little black ants that live in our lawns and kitchens. But more than anything Moffett is a first class biologist who specializes in myrmecology and loves it.
Consequently this book is a tour de force, the result of many years of study, exploration and just plain hard work in difficult circumstances in jungles and other terrain the world over. The energy of that work comes gushing out of the pages in a torrent with enough force to make the reader enter not only the world of the ant but the world of the scientist who studies the ant and to realize the incredible labor that went into its production. The work requires the ability to endure hardships in the outdoors in all sorts of weather during long nights as well as sweltering days with patience and discipline, distant from the comforts of home in primitive and dangerous places.
Ah, to be young again and to embark upon such adventures!
The book is organized into six main parts: marauder ants, African army (driver) ants, weaver ants, Amazon slave master ants, leafcutter ants, and the ant that is taking over a good portion of the world, the Argentine ant. It was to this latter chapter that I first turned when I opened the book because I've had my own adventures among ants and most of those adventures involved Linepithema humile (formerly known as Iridomyrmex humilis) the Argentine ant which has taken over most of California where I live and a goodly part of the rest of the country.
If you have ants in the house and can't get rid of them, chances are they are Argentine ants. Moffett's two chapters on Linepithema humile explain why they have become so prolific, how they got started here and why you and the local "Bugs R Us" aren't likely to get rid of them. Small, blackish without much ability to bite (actually I have been bitten by Argentine ants, but their bite can't even get through the skin), their main trick is a kind of maniacal persistence that starves or otherwise out-competes other kinds of ants. Moffett estimates that the Very Large Colony(my "friends" for decades) in California may approach a trillion individuals spread across a thousand kilometers from San Diego in the south to Sacramento and beyond in the north.
One of things that Moffett confirmed is that Argentine ants milk aphids. I had a small vegetable garden and found aphids on my plants seemingly tended by Argentine ants. Moffett, who went to Argentine to study the ants in their ancestral home (so to speak) however did not quite confirm my belief that the ants become more active in the hot, dry summers not in a frantic search for water as some people believe but because that is the best time to forage for carrion which they love and that is the season when the waters recede. Of course Argentine ants do need water and thrive when they can get it, which is one of the reasons they flourish in our watered lawns.
My favorite part of the book though was the part on the New World leafcutter ants. To me they are the most sophisticated and most interesting of the many kinds of ants. Their underground fungal gardens and nest as described by Moffett "can extend 7 meters into the earth and contain nearly eight thousand chambers." (pp. 170-171) Their jaws are like can openers with "a zinc content of 30 to 40 percent." (p. 171) Surprisingly the adult workers get most of their energy from the sap of the leaves they cut. The protein-rich fungus in their gardens is mainly for their larvae and attendants. (p. 172) Their trunk trails are so wide and well maintained (to allow them to easily carry their "parasols" of leaves) that Moffett once mistook a trunk trail for a narrow human pathway and got momentarily lost. Additionally once he unknowingly pitched his tent on a nocturnal route only to be awakened in the night by rain seeping in because the ants had cut open his tent to maintain the trunk trail! (p. 179)
Moffett points to the similarities between humans and ants, and to the differences. Like Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson before him, he refers to ant colonies as superorganisms while in the final chapter giving us four ways of looking at ants.
First there is the ant as an individual. Unlike most of us, Moffett has stared at ants for so many hours that he can see something like individual personalities. Second there is the ant colony as a society whose individuals respond to each other (mainly through touch and pheromones). Third there is the idea of the ant colony as an organism with individual ants being the equivalent of the cells in our bodies that comprise organs and then a unified whole. And fourth, there is the ant colony as a mind. This comes from the idea of swarm intelligence in which the actions of individual ants combine automatically without leadership to produce the intelligent behavior of the entire colony.
An interesting question is, could it be the case sometime in the distant future or elsewhere on another planet that there may develop swarm-intelligent superorganisms that are smarter than humans, and prove it by developing a more advanced culture?
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
This is an extremely impressive book in just about every way. It has a clever and beautifully designed jacket (like a movie poster for Pixar: "Cast of Trillions"!); the page layouts are crisp and artful; the colored fonts for headings are artistic without being glaring; the text is very well edited and proofed; the many color plates of the ants are world class (Moffett has done photography for National Geographic which features some of the best nature photography anywhere); the writing engages the reader and is dense with information and adventure. Yes, adventure as in the title.
With this book I believe that Mark Moffett will emerge as a superstar among naturalists. In addition to being a world class photographer whose photographs of ants are unique in their clarity and expressiveness, he is an intrepid traveler and explorer who has visited every continent except Antarctica looking for ants. (He'd probably go there too if there were any ants!) He has bivouacked on numerous islands as well, including Malaysia and Easter Island where he found that the island has become overrun with Argentine ants, the little black ants that live in our lawns and kitchens. But more than anything Moffett is a first class biologist who specializes in myrmecology and loves it.
Consequently this book is a tour de force, the result of many years of study, exploration and just plain hard work in difficult circumstances in jungles and other terrain the world over. The energy of that work comes gushing out of the pages in a torrent with enough force to make the reader enter not only the world of the ant but the world of the scientist who studies the ant and to realize the incredible labor that went into its production. The work requires the ability to endure hardships in the outdoors in all sorts of weather during long nights as well as sweltering days with patience and discipline, distant from the comforts of home in primitive and dangerous places.
Ah, to be young again and to embark upon such adventures!
The book is organized into six main parts: marauder ants, African army (driver) ants, weaver ants, Amazon slave master ants, leafcutter ants, and the ant that is taking over a good portion of the world, the Argentine ant. It was to this latter chapter that I first turned when I opened the book because I've had my own adventures among ants and most of those adventures involved Linepithema humile (formerly known as Iridomyrmex humilis) the Argentine ant which has taken over most of California where I live and a goodly part of the rest of the country.
If you have ants in the house and can't get rid of them, chances are they are Argentine ants. Moffett's two chapters on Linepithema humile explain why they have become so prolific, how they got started here and why you and the local "Bugs R Us" aren't likely to get rid of them. Small, blackish without much ability to bite (actually I have been bitten by Argentine ants, but their bite can't even get through the skin), their main trick is a kind of maniacal persistence that starves or otherwise out-competes other kinds of ants. Moffett estimates that the Very Large Colony(my "friends" for decades) in California may approach a trillion individuals spread across a thousand kilometers from San Diego in the south to Sacramento and beyond in the north.
One of things that Moffett confirmed is that Argentine ants milk aphids. I had a small vegetable garden and found aphids on my plants seemingly tended by Argentine ants. Moffett, who went to Argentine to study the ants in their ancestral home (so to speak) however did not quite confirm my belief that the ants become more active in the hot, dry summers not in a frantic search for water as some people believe but because that is the best time to forage for carrion which they love and that is the season when the waters recede. Of course Argentine ants do need water and thrive when they can get it, which is one of the reasons they flourish in our watered lawns.
My favorite part of the book though was the part on the New World leafcutter ants. To me they are the most sophisticated and most interesting of the many kinds of ants. Their underground fungal gardens and nest as described by Moffett "can extend 7 meters into the earth and contain nearly eight thousand chambers." (pp. 170-171) Their jaws are like can openers with "a zinc content of 30 to 40 percent." (p. 171) Surprisingly the adult workers get most of their energy from the sap of the leaves they cut. The protein-rich fungus in their gardens is mainly for their larvae and attendants. (p. 172) Their trunk trails are so wide and well maintained (to allow them to easily carry their "parasols" of leaves) that Moffett once mistook a trunk trail for a narrow human pathway and got momentarily lost. Additionally once he unknowingly pitched his tent on a nocturnal route only to be awakened in the night by rain seeping in because the ants had cut open his tent to maintain the trunk trail! (p. 179)
Moffett points to the similarities between humans and ants, and to the differences. Like Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson before him, he refers to ant colonies as superorganisms while in the final chapter giving us four ways of looking at ants.
First there is the ant as an individual. Unlike most of us, Moffett has stared at ants for so many hours that he can see something like individual personalities. Second there is the ant colony as a society whose individuals respond to each other (mainly through touch and pheromones). Third there is the idea of the ant colony as an organism with individual ants being the equivalent of the cells in our bodies that comprise organs and then a unified whole. And fourth, there is the ant colony as a mind. This comes from the idea of swarm intelligence in which the actions of individual ants combine automatically without leadership to produce the intelligent behavior of the entire colony.
An interesting question is, could it be the case sometime in the distant future or elsewhere on another planet that there may develop swarm-intelligent superorganisms that are smarter than humans, and prove it by developing a more advanced culture?
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
September 1, 2012
Simply a fantasic popular natural history book, just first rate. The text is both informative and accessible, not watered down but just technical enough. The author does a good job of weaving in stories of his trips abroad to study ants and even brings in some humor from time to time along with some of the personalities he met. Having said that, it is a science book, not a travel book, and ants are always the focus.
There are gorgeous color photos thoughout the book of the ants, some of them just amazing. Though not a "picture book" per se, it does not lack for photographs, often of ants in action, taking down prey, tending to gardens (yes, gardens), or interacting (or often fighting with, but not always) other ant species.
The author divides the book up into six sections (each with 2-5 chapters), each section devoted to a particular type of ant (after a section titled "A Brief Primer on Ants"). Within each section Moffett skillfully uses each ant, each one a "type" of sorts, with a different lifestyle, to make points about other ant species and about ant biology in general.
Which sections or rather which ants? The first one is on one he dubbed the marauder ant, found in Asia, the one he spent the most time studying and one he clearly has an affection for. After that we get the African army ant, the weaver ant (fascinating, its lifestyle could not be more different than that of the army ant), the Amazon ant (the slavemaker!), leafcutter ants (my personal favorite), and finally the Argentine ant (the global invader, creator of colonies as big as states, such as the Very Large Colony, a single colony that stretches from the Mexican border to San Fransisco).
I had no idea there there was such variety in the ant world. Though not the stars, we get to meet some strange ones indeed. There are cleaner ants of a sort, smaller ants of one species that provide hygenie serves for other ant species. There are ants that free dive into the digestive juices of pitcher plants to retrieve prey (and contrary to what you might think, this actually helps the pitcher plant). There are ants that will kill any vegetation of any type that comes anywhere near "their" acacaia tree that they live on, creating the weird spirit gardens of Peru. There are ants so small that an entire colony can fit inside an acorn. There are even suicide bomber ants.
I realize not everyone may be curious about ants, but if you are intereted in natural history I think this book will be something you might want to look into.
There are gorgeous color photos thoughout the book of the ants, some of them just amazing. Though not a "picture book" per se, it does not lack for photographs, often of ants in action, taking down prey, tending to gardens (yes, gardens), or interacting (or often fighting with, but not always) other ant species.
The author divides the book up into six sections (each with 2-5 chapters), each section devoted to a particular type of ant (after a section titled "A Brief Primer on Ants"). Within each section Moffett skillfully uses each ant, each one a "type" of sorts, with a different lifestyle, to make points about other ant species and about ant biology in general.
Which sections or rather which ants? The first one is on one he dubbed the marauder ant, found in Asia, the one he spent the most time studying and one he clearly has an affection for. After that we get the African army ant, the weaver ant (fascinating, its lifestyle could not be more different than that of the army ant), the Amazon ant (the slavemaker!), leafcutter ants (my personal favorite), and finally the Argentine ant (the global invader, creator of colonies as big as states, such as the Very Large Colony, a single colony that stretches from the Mexican border to San Fransisco).
I had no idea there there was such variety in the ant world. Though not the stars, we get to meet some strange ones indeed. There are cleaner ants of a sort, smaller ants of one species that provide hygenie serves for other ant species. There are ants that free dive into the digestive juices of pitcher plants to retrieve prey (and contrary to what you might think, this actually helps the pitcher plant). There are ants that will kill any vegetation of any type that comes anywhere near "their" acacaia tree that they live on, creating the weird spirit gardens of Peru. There are ants so small that an entire colony can fit inside an acorn. There are even suicide bomber ants.
I realize not everyone may be curious about ants, but if you are intereted in natural history I think this book will be something you might want to look into.
March 10, 2018
I wanted to be interested in this, but honestly the writing killed it for me. It was an exercise in endurance to get through the author's sentences at times. He likes to bury his verbs in some kind of Escherian puzzle, and one filled with Latin names for bugs. It's not fun. You almost get the sense he is really trying to impress his colleagues with his erudition.
The most interesting parts were when the author just stepped back from the ants and related his adventures in foreign lands. The best parts of the book are thus not about the ants themselves but about the author, and the extreme lengths he will go to to study something that most of us might find trivial. One has to giggle at the scenes where he is hanging in a tree and suddenly finds himself bursting into a weaver ant colony, or waking up terrified to find he has fallen asleep in the middle of an army ant raid, or dealing with high-handed Kenyan park authorities. This would have worked much better as a biography/adventure travelogue.
This kind of thing should be told as a story (which is kind of what the title promises but fails to deliver). Tell us about the author and why he cares so much about these little creatures, and what obstacles is he trying to overcome, and therefore, why the reader should care. More often than not, however, I found myself struggling through great walls of academic text describing the behavioral minutiae of ants, only to end the chapter wondering "who gives a sh**?" It's clear that the author does. Unfortunately, not so clear for the reader.
The most interesting parts were when the author just stepped back from the ants and related his adventures in foreign lands. The best parts of the book are thus not about the ants themselves but about the author, and the extreme lengths he will go to to study something that most of us might find trivial. One has to giggle at the scenes where he is hanging in a tree and suddenly finds himself bursting into a weaver ant colony, or waking up terrified to find he has fallen asleep in the middle of an army ant raid, or dealing with high-handed Kenyan park authorities. This would have worked much better as a biography/adventure travelogue.
This kind of thing should be told as a story (which is kind of what the title promises but fails to deliver). Tell us about the author and why he cares so much about these little creatures, and what obstacles is he trying to overcome, and therefore, why the reader should care. More often than not, however, I found myself struggling through great walls of academic text describing the behavioral minutiae of ants, only to end the chapter wondering "who gives a sh**?" It's clear that the author does. Unfortunately, not so clear for the reader.
October 2, 2018
Ant lovers will enjoy this ant professor's travels across the planet, including his literal stumbles into ant nests. Humorous digressions lighten up the book's theories and conclusions--some original, others well known among ant fans. Ultimately, the comparisons to human society are probably what most readers will appreciate.
I was saddened to read how invasive ant species are jeopardizing many ant-plant symbiotic relationships. My main gripe was after I read the brief two page section "The Battle of the Super Ants" I wanted more details! This epic clash between Argentine ants and red imported fire ants is fascinating. Will ant wars leave just a handful of ant species left?
Alas, as stated in the beginning, the author's philosophy to have a career in biology was "to find a little-known group of organisms and claim it." With fire ants being a well-known ant menace, I thus see why they weren't profiled like other ant species. Nor can anyone perhaps project ant victors, despite invasive ants threatening the world's food supply and biodiversity.
Not to be missed are many top notch photos by the author too. The close-ups reveal Moffet's patience, passion, and pain tolerance for ants. Overall, an enjoyable read for ant lovers and researchers like myself.
I was saddened to read how invasive ant species are jeopardizing many ant-plant symbiotic relationships. My main gripe was after I read the brief two page section "The Battle of the Super Ants" I wanted more details! This epic clash between Argentine ants and red imported fire ants is fascinating. Will ant wars leave just a handful of ant species left?
Alas, as stated in the beginning, the author's philosophy to have a career in biology was "to find a little-known group of organisms and claim it." With fire ants being a well-known ant menace, I thus see why they weren't profiled like other ant species. Nor can anyone perhaps project ant victors, despite invasive ants threatening the world's food supply and biodiversity.
Not to be missed are many top notch photos by the author too. The close-ups reveal Moffet's patience, passion, and pain tolerance for ants. Overall, an enjoyable read for ant lovers and researchers like myself.
June 11, 2016
The pictures are wondrous, and I would definitely buy a new book of Moffett's which contain a majority of pictures.
The text and style could be improved. Each chapter is an analysis of a different ant, and the end is a slim summary. This leaves you with a mishmash feeling. I would have enjoyed it more, and also had a better understanding of ants, had it gone chapter by chapter about ant's different behaviors, showing examples of ants which, e.g, perform slavery, farming, and other unique characteristics.
Moffett also over-compares ants to humans. Yes, only humans and ants wage wars (and they both have very complex societies), but sometimes it feels like he's overdoing it, with nothing to support his assertions. Also, he likes to interject stories of his own life that never seem that related. We want more about the fascinating ants!
The text and style could be improved. Each chapter is an analysis of a different ant, and the end is a slim summary. This leaves you with a mishmash feeling. I would have enjoyed it more, and also had a better understanding of ants, had it gone chapter by chapter about ant's different behaviors, showing examples of ants which, e.g, perform slavery, farming, and other unique characteristics.
Moffett also over-compares ants to humans. Yes, only humans and ants wage wars (and they both have very complex societies), but sometimes it feels like he's overdoing it, with nothing to support his assertions. Also, he likes to interject stories of his own life that never seem that related. We want more about the fascinating ants!
December 29, 2010
great book on ants, and humans. very nice end notes too. some things seem pretty far fetched, for instance that leaf cutter ants have over the millenniums domesticated crops just as have humans with our wheat and maize. cept the ants have figured out how to grow huge populations with just the sweat of their exoskeletons and can farm fairly carbon-neutrally, while humans farm with the sweat AND burning obscene amounts of fossil fuel, hence changing world climates. Author never does really explain how research found that leaf cutter ants once had very primitive agriculture, but now have specialty crops that will only grow if they tend them. very extensive endnotes though if one wants to pursue that or any other fantastical aspects of ant world.
December 11, 2021
Ants are amazing - a massive civilization going on right under our feet. I mean, if they build homes and roads, feed each other, farm plants and animals, have divisions of labor, and go to war, can't we call that civilization? The author's extreme enthusiasm for ants is infectious. He goes to extreme lengths, and all over the world, to find the specific ants he wants to see and to catalog their behavior.
The book is dense; I couldn't read much at a time, so it took me a couple of months to finish it. During that time, my house was invaded both by some very persistent ants and by termites (which apparently the ants kind of prey on). I'm not saying the book had anything to do with it. But reader beware.
The book is dense; I couldn't read much at a time, so it took me a couple of months to finish it. During that time, my house was invaded both by some very persistent ants and by termites (which apparently the ants kind of prey on). I'm not saying the book had anything to do with it. But reader beware.
February 24, 2020
When I visited exhibition in Drumheller, AB in July 1992, there was not too much known about the ants. No wonder, since conducting field observation is a very tedious work. I'm very glad I read this book. The concept of ant societies as superorganisms is a very intricate idea from the psychological point of view. It puzzles me that marauder ants usually don't cannibalize the other ants, and if they happen to kill some, they just bury them. Communication through release of chemicals seems to me to be also worth further exploring. The book is full of factual information and splendid photographs. I don't think I'll ever pass ants during my many hikes, and don't stop to see what they are up to now.
January 20, 2020
This book started out a little slow but I ended up loving it by the end. The book was incredibly interesting and the author does a great job explaining the lives of different species and groups of ants. My personal favorite section was on leaf cutter ants but weaver ants came in at a close second. I would definitely recommend for anyone interested in ants as the author is a world expert on them and has had a tremendous amount of experience watching and studying then.
January 1, 2012
The pictures are interesting, and some of the stories about ants are good, but I couldn't finish it.
February 12, 2018
It was an informative book. I would have liked it more if it didn't speak of the author as much and if it flowed better. But if you like ants, I do highly suggest it.
March 23, 2019
The book is totally fantastic.
March 25, 2019
Really good non-fiction book about ants. Lots of science stuff, yet pretty readable by the average idiot, like me. Lots of interesting anecdotes, too.
December 24, 2024
Ants are fascinating insects. Depending on the type of ant, you may find they have more in common with human society than you would think with their tiny brains. The book is Adventures Among Ants. Author Mark W. Moffett goes over six different species of ants and compares them to humans.
How does he do that? Humans and ants are similar, but only in groups and societies. Moffett covers the Marauder Ant, the African Army Ant, the Weaver Ant, the Amazon Ant, the Leafcutter Ant, and the Argentine Ant. For example, the Amazon Ant enslaves other ants, and the Leafcutter Ant participates in agriculture. The Marauder Ant and African Army Ant organize battalions to fight other ant species.
Moffett is an intrepid explorer who visits different lands and cultures to find fascinating species. Moffett was drawn to these little critters and their actions as a child. Moffett studied under the famed biologist Edward. O Wilson. Throughout the book, Moffett describes ant colonies by way of analogy. An ant colony is like human society, an ant colony is like an organism, and an ant colony is like a mind.
The book contains images of ants taken by Moffett. It adds vibrancy and life to the subject. It is gorgeous. As a final thought, Moffett addresses the anthropomorphism through which we judge other species. Consider the individual ant. Would she have thoughts?
I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
How does he do that? Humans and ants are similar, but only in groups and societies. Moffett covers the Marauder Ant, the African Army Ant, the Weaver Ant, the Amazon Ant, the Leafcutter Ant, and the Argentine Ant. For example, the Amazon Ant enslaves other ants, and the Leafcutter Ant participates in agriculture. The Marauder Ant and African Army Ant organize battalions to fight other ant species.
Moffett is an intrepid explorer who visits different lands and cultures to find fascinating species. Moffett was drawn to these little critters and their actions as a child. Moffett studied under the famed biologist Edward. O Wilson. Throughout the book, Moffett describes ant colonies by way of analogy. An ant colony is like human society, an ant colony is like an organism, and an ant colony is like a mind.
The book contains images of ants taken by Moffett. It adds vibrancy and life to the subject. It is gorgeous. As a final thought, Moffett addresses the anthropomorphism through which we judge other species. Consider the individual ant. Would she have thoughts?
I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
October 8, 2020
When you read books like Adventures Among Ants, there is a renewed sense of respect for people who take a vocation that requires them spending hours and hours studying creatures as minute as ants. The author narrates stories about ants from different parts of the world and their way of living, and in doing so, depicts the painstaking research that has gone behind bringing out the content of the book.
The detailing makes you sit up and take notice of the effort that has gone into its making; the pictures interspersed in between are a delight. The author's enthusiasm- a constant throughout the book keeps up the fun element and keeps the information-heavy book from becoming drab.
The detailing makes you sit up and take notice of the effort that has gone into its making; the pictures interspersed in between are a delight. The author's enthusiasm- a constant throughout the book keeps up the fun element and keeps the information-heavy book from becoming drab.
September 14, 2021
I long for the day goodreads isn't shit and loses my reviews immediately after submitting. Don't want to type that out again.
Here's the short of it:
- some ants are pretty crazy cool
- part of book is personal stories involving his ant stuff: fun to read
- part is basically scientific literature: less fun to read
- extra info footnote and citation references are mixed, which annoyingly forced me to click to expand every ref link just to see which it was
Here's the short of it:
- some ants are pretty crazy cool
- part of book is personal stories involving his ant stuff: fun to read
- part is basically scientific literature: less fun to read
- extra info footnote and citation references are mixed, which annoyingly forced me to click to expand every ref link just to see which it was
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