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Hailed as "a masterpiece" by Scientific American and as "the greatest of all entomology books" by Science, Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson's monumental treatise The Ants also was praised in the popular press and won a Pulitzer Prize. This overwhelming success attests to a fact long known and deeply felt by the authors: the infinite fascination of their tiny subjects. This fascination finds its full expression in Journey to the Ants, an overview of myrmecology that is also an eloquent tale of the authors' pursuit of these astonishing insects.
Sichly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement. Accompanying Holldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants cooperate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they use propaganda and surveillance, and how they exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalence between allegiance and self-aggrandizement. This exotic tour of the entire range of formicid biodiversity - from social parasites to army ants, nomadic hunters, camouflaged huntresses, and energetic builders of temperature-controlled skyscrapers - opens out increasingly into natural history, intimating the relevance of ant life to human existence.
A window on the world of ants as well as those who study them, this book will be a rich source of knowledge and pleasure for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder about the miniature yet immense civilization at our feet.… (mere)
You'll learn a lot from this extremely interesting book. But first - couple of quotes.
- It can be said that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies.
- If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
In this book however you'll not only learn about the art of ant war, like: * Home turf matters - majority of battles are won on fields where future victors' droppings prevail. * They seal defenders in their nests, spraying their victims with poison squirts from the tips of their bodies (think flamethrowers) and hurling small stones into shafts. * suicide bombers is a routine practice, when an individual ant blasts itself in the midst of enemies, covering them with its highly toxic poison. * selective highway robberies * slave raids
But also about many ways these small creatures run their lives:
* intrigues among queens * use of silk from pupae * creation of live bridges * storage of excess nutrients in overblown bodies of receptacle ants * how cunning parasites exploit ants * how they specialize and mimic the environment * how they change the very environment they live in - from climate and humidity control of their nests to agriculture and pasturing that they pioneered zillions years before us.
You'll learn how they communicate and organize their foraging and warring activities. And much, much more :) ( )
About ten years ago, after having finished reading all of the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners to date, I considered tackling the general-non fiction winners, one of which is The Ants, the Wilson-Holldobler monograph, about 800 pages of folio. I got about a quarter of the way through it one summer before giving up. This book is much more approachable and reads like a series of National Geographic articles for the most part. ( )
Très bon ouvrage qui nous fait découvrir les fourmis par le biais de l'analyse scientifique dont elles font l'objet. L'ouvrage est à la fois pointu et accessible, avec des anecdotes qui illustrent bien les aventures des biologistes dans l'univers des fourmis. Les auteurs ont réussi à transmettre leur passion et à vulgariser intelligemment leurs recherches. ( )
Hailed as "a masterpiece" by Scientific American and as "the greatest of all entomology books" by Science, Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson's monumental treatise The Ants also was praised in the popular press and won a Pulitzer Prize. This overwhelming success attests to a fact long known and deeply felt by the authors: the infinite fascination of their tiny subjects. This fascination finds its full expression in Journey to the Ants, an overview of myrmecology that is also an eloquent tale of the authors' pursuit of these astonishing insects.
Sichly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement. Accompanying Holldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants cooperate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they use propaganda and surveillance, and how they exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalence between allegiance and self-aggrandizement. This exotic tour of the entire range of formicid biodiversity - from social parasites to army ants, nomadic hunters, camouflaged huntresses, and energetic builders of temperature-controlled skyscrapers - opens out increasingly into natural history, intimating the relevance of ant life to human existence.
A window on the world of ants as well as those who study them, this book will be a rich source of knowledge and pleasure for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder about the miniature yet immense civilization at our feet.
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- It can be said that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies.
- If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
In this book however you'll not only learn about the art of ant war, like:
* Home turf matters - majority of battles are won on fields where future victors' droppings prevail.
* They seal defenders in their nests, spraying their victims with poison squirts from the tips of their bodies (think flamethrowers) and hurling small stones into shafts.
* suicide bombers is a routine practice, when an individual ant blasts itself in the midst of enemies, covering them with its highly toxic poison.
* selective highway robberies
* slave raids
But also about many ways these small creatures run their lives:
* intrigues among queens
* use of silk from pupae
* creation of live bridges
* storage of excess nutrients in overblown bodies of receptacle ants
* how cunning parasites exploit ants
* how they specialize and mimic the environment
* how they change the very environment they live in - from climate and humidity control of their nests to agriculture and pasturing that they pioneered zillions years before us.
You'll learn how they communicate and organize their foraging and warring activities. And much, much more :)
(