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?
The World Is Not as We Think It Is
