Customer Reviews

Ants At Work: How An Insect Society Is Organized

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

My science teacher had this book out in the laboratory, along with several other books and guides that are current and invited us to spend that period browsing and reading. I checked this book out and also the one on Nabokov's butterfly work-- Nabokov's Blues-- for Thanksgiving holiday. Ms. Gordon's book is much better than a textbook or fieldguide because it provides an exciting story about ants and how they work. The vivid desciptions personalize ants and make it more like a book verson of "A Bug's Life" movie-- but SERIOUS about the science; so is the story about Nabokov the scientist, which reads with a plot. Ants at Work was easy to read, extremely interesting and probably taught me more about ants than I could have learned from a textbook or lab manual. If it had one drawback against the Nabokov story it was only that Nabokov's exciting work on butterflies, as told by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Coates, had an ongoing plot-- about the famous writer's life and other scientists too. But, Ms. Gordon's book was fascinating and I thought my teacher's idea to have us learn about ants and butterflies by reading these more exciting books was a great idea. Both Ants at Work and Nabokov's Blues are perhaps best suited for adults after high school but I had no trouble with either book and sure felt I learned more about insects reading these books than I would have studying a dry textbook. It was a good suggestion by our teacher for the holidays.

I used to collect ants when I was younger, putting them into fishbowls filled with dirt to watch them build their nests. I think the various behaviors they exhibit are fascinating and I find it quite enjoyable to read Ms. Gordon's book. She's obviously not a novelist, but her writing style is easy to read, to the point, and displays a sense of humor and good-naturedness. I agree with the earlier reviews- this is a lot easier and more interesting to read than a dry textbook, yet it is an excellent source of information about the particular types of ants she studied. If you've never given much thought to these little creatures, reading this book will give you an appreciation of what an amazing world exists within an ant colony and its environs.

I'm a bit surprised by some of the negative comments about this book, because they seem to have missed its point. This isn't a formal presentation of the author's research. It therefore lacks many details, does not review the full range of other relevant literature, and it has not been honed by a committee of reviewers. What it DOES do is to give the reader who doesn't know anything about ants a very readable narrative account of how one might go about finding out something about them. This book is as much about how to apply the scientific method to the messy world of animal behavior as it is about ants in particular. Gordon's account of how to do that seems to have been mistaken by some as self indulgence. If you're looking for a detailed account of ants, you should see Holldobler and Wilson's 700+ page "The Ants." If you want an introduction to what's interesting about ants and how people go about studying them, Gordon's book is a great read.

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

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

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

I LOVE this book. What a rare peek over the shoulder of a true scientist with an inquisitive mind and appreciation for the art and beauty of science, applied to these tiny but incredibly interesting creatures. Within the same nest reside 5 or more ant types based on function. In that nest, some live up to 20 years while others "don't live long enough to EVER eat." I will never look at ants the same. Thank you for an insightful and wonderful story that makes life worth living.

What I loved in this book is that it doesn't just tell you how smart colonies are and how well the self-organization works. As a mathematician with a background in alife and ant-like models, this wouldn't surprise me in 2000. What's new and interesting is the focus on the colony as the metha-organism, as the new unit-of-selection for evolution, leaving in a field populated by a lot of colonies; this leads to the question of the morphology and morphogenesis of the colony as such, which fascinating questions and possible answers. One of the ideas which the author proposes, with a clever insight, is about the relation between the size of the colony and the task-allocation dynamics, through the use of a same response to the interaction frecuency... An idea which, as a mathematician, I'm eager to explore.

Yes, sometimes ants work hard. They ALWAYS look like they work hard - until you look real closely - and maybe put up a few roadblocks.

Deborah Gordon spent 17 summers virtually memorizing the same 25 acres in Arizona with her students, fooling around with about 300 colonies of harvester ants. She chose them for the scientific reason that they were big enough to see without glasses.

They are efficient? On page 105, Gordon includes a delightful excerpt from Mark Twain about ants. "They pick up something too large, go over obstructions instead of around, when and if they finally drag the prize into the nest, half the time it's worthless and has to be dragged off by midden workers," - the garbage collectors of antdom.

They are subservient to the queen? "Look to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways and be wise: Which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provides her meat in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest." Proverbs 6:6. Gordon agrees with the good book...there is no guiding force. They just seem to know what to do and frequently change jobs as needed.

They have an elaborate means of communication? Not that we can see. Their eyesight is poor and they communicate by touching antennaes, and by sensing perhaps 12 different chemicals on each other.

At 4:30 AM Gordon et al get up, eat breakfast, and take a 20 minute trip out of the mountains to the site, where they set up the experiment they have agonized over, or analyze the one in progress. Before noon, as the heat sets in, they go back up the mountain and the ants go back into their mound - their foraging done, and the ant watchers' practical jokes accomplished and recorded. The rest of the day is spent tabulating and analyzing data and dreaming up new tricks in order to tease out more secrets of anthood.

Gordon's process is a good example of the tedious, meticulous work of science. As she developed her data of the mindless pseudo-efficiency of an ant colony, a correllation occured to me about the self organization of stem cells as they differentiate, specialize, and mindlessly create a living entity, guided by only partially known processes (admittedly not a perfect analogy).

This is a good read, an easy read and refreshingly out of the ordinary.

Does anarchy work?

After reading this fascinating book, you may be tempted to answer "Yes." Granted, Gordon doesn't even tiptoe near such topics. She is a careful, articulate scientist with a penchant for patient and precise observation and the ability to resist any temptation to leap to interesting conclusions.

For years, we've been fed stories about the Ant and the Grasshopper, "It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow." Proverbs 6:6 urges us to "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." The Koran advises us, "Not so much as the weight of an ant in earth or Heaven escapes from the Lord . . ." If Big Brother wants us to work, so Big Brother can relax while we labor, then Big Brother has a hundred ways to tell us about the virtues of being as industrious as ants.

So, Gordon spent 17 years in the summer Arizona desert to discover just how hard ants really do work. She learned that no ant would be as dedicated as her and her students; for one thing, ants tend to knock off work when the day gets too hot, and many tend to goof off a lot. However, when they do work, they accomplish a lot without a need for bosses or ideologies.

"No ant is able to assess the global needs of the colony, or to count how many workers are engaged in each task and decide how many should be allocated differently. The capacities of individuals are limited. Each worker need make only fairly simple decisions. There is abundant evidence, throughout physics, the social sciences, and biology, that such simple behavior by individuals can lead to predictable patterns in the behavior of groups," Gordon writes.

In other words, chaos works in organizing basic survival tasks. To me, it suggests a means by which wandering hunters and gatherers organized the first communities, many of which do not appear to have a recognizable hierarchy. Her observations suggest that people, from the earliest days to today's neighborhood self-help groups and corporate world, are able to achieve specific tasks without needing a hierarchy of bosses and motivational experts -- provided they know what is expected of them. In brief, "You know why you were hired -- go do it."

Gordon didn't write this to suggest "Here's how to run your company" or as a new way to organize society. It's a book to make readers ask, "If ants function in this manner, will people do the same if left alone?" Rather than managers frantically scurrying about to prod worker ants to get a job done, the conclusion from this book might be called the Little Bo Peep School of Personnel Managers, "Leave them alone, and they'll come home . . . wagging their tails behind them."

Ants "know" what needs to be done; a home, food, security against thieves and more ants to keep the system going. Every ant, presumably, has an equal interest in achieving these goals. Our society is much more complex, because of our dependence on material goods and genetically modified foods. We may need good managers to outline specific tasks. However, Gordon's work suggests that we don't need ideologues to dictate a course of action for a whole society.

In 1934, Lewis Mumford summed up the need to boss people around, "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." Instead of such outside control, Gordon's studies suggest the key for knowledge workers is, "Leave people alone." Perhaps today Mumford would say, "The ant, not a pushy boss, is a key example for the modern knowledge society."

Gordon isn't so foolhardy as to suggest any specific outcomes. A careful scientist, she limits her observations to observations of ants. But the wealth of information she presents will persuade everyone who reads `Ants at Work' to think for themselves. It's more than can be said for many books.

This book I found in a used book store, under a table, in San Luis Obispo, CA. Somehow, it jumped out at me (like all good books do -- they seem to choose their own readers).

I found this to be fascinating! Ms. Gordon and her colleagues went to an enormous amount of work to gather the data, and she compliled it in a most interesting way. It was intriguing to me how ants mange their colony lives, with foraging and hunting, etc. Also how ants cooperate primarily by some sort of chemical process, one that can change as conditions vary.

The graph of colony population vs. age was especially interesting. It shows a real-life application of the Logistics Function. Who would ever have thought such a thing would apply to an Ant Colony, of all things???? But it does. Remarkable.

Mostly, though, the analysis of ant colonies seems to have many parallels to human organizations. Like, at a theme park, why do people go stand in long lines at McD's, when an equal-caliber establishment -- right next door -- has very few customers? Or how is it that organizations such as factories really work? And on and on.

I'm really glad I found this book. It will be in my collection permanently, and I will read it again in the future.

Deborah's starts with the idea Ant colonies have no one in charge, instead a collection of events lead to a coordinated system, that meets the colony's needs (vii). AS such, she goes on to show, Ants provide a subject to study mulch-resolution social interactions: individual to colony to population (vii). The gradiations of scale, as a result highlight The decision processes of ants as interesting as examples of the ant to colony colony to ant interactions(viii).
Though the 100 million year history of ants hinges on the reproductive success of the ant colonies through time (viii-ix), because of the human ignorance we assume what we see in colonies today are the only success stories. This is a massive leap of faith, but one that has a positive outcome. We can study how ants feed, reproduce, and disperse, in a word their livelihoods, and trace these trajectories. (ix).
In order to demonstrate patterns while studying livelihoods its necessary to do longitudinal studies (ix). One such pattern is that older colonies are more staid and prudent (x). This among other questions leads the author to a basic question that motivates the rest of the book, how do these inept creatures without leaders at all "create a colony that gets stuff done?" (x).
This premise is concluded in the epilogue with the hope that these ideas can shed light on complex natural systems in general. And while she doesn't have much to say on humans based on her observations, she does hold out the hope that more understanding of natural processes may show us something about ecology or neural networks.

In general I found the book stimulating but will go to the primary literature to get the details. Its science light, but engaging at the fine line between expert and accessible.