The Ants [Hardcover]

Bert Hölldobler (Author), Edward O. Wilson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 3540520929 | ISBN-13: 978-3540520924 | Publication Date: September 7, 1998

From the Arctic to South Africa - one finds them everywhere: Ants. Making up nearly 15% of the entire terrestrial animal biomass, ants are impressive not only in quantitative terms, they also fascinate by their highly organized and complex social system. Their caste system, the division of labor, the origin of altruistic behavior and the complex forms of chemical communication makes them the most interesting group of social organisms and the main subject for sociobiologists. Not least is their ecological importance: Ants are the premier soil turners, channelers of energy and dominatrices of the insect fauna.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is the definitive scientific study of one of the most diverse animal groups on earth; pretty well everything that is known about ants is in this massive work. But books do not win Pulitzer Prizes, as this one did in 1991, for exhaustiveness; besides being the last word in science, this work is beautifully written, and accessible to the lay reader. Wilson, of Harvard, and Holldobler of the University of Wurzburg, may inspire a whole new generation of budding entomologists. Every branch of biology is covered, from evolution to taxonomy to physiology to ecology. Lavishly illustrated, it is full of amazing facts, many concerning the incredible social behavior of these creatures. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

"The Ants should be in every University and High School library." (TREE) "The book is truly comprehensive; very little ant biology that I am aware of has been omitted....Many of the illustrations are art in their own right. Rarely has a group of organisms been represented so well. (The Quarterly Review of Biology)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 732 pages
• Publisher: Springer (September 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540520929
• ISBN-13: 978-3540520924
• Product Dimensions: 12.6 x 10.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,489,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Ants" is THE ant book, October 2, 1997

By 

Mark Fitzsimmons (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ants (Hardcover)

by Mark Fitzsimmons

This is a fascinating, indispensible book for anyone interested in ants. It was everything I hoped it would be and more. I have owned this book for three years and still haven't stopped reading it, probably never will. It is jam-packed with interesting and little known aspects of eusocialism in the ants, easily as diverse as its subject.

This is a semi-technical book, and entomological scientific jargon is used ubiquitously, so if you aren't interested in using the glossary frequently just to understand what you're reading, it may not be for you, but for the avid ant-watcher or scientist interested in social evolution, this is it. With the incredible drawings (including representative pictures from every known ant genera) and informative graphs and charts that shed light on even the most complex and difficult to understand socio-biological patterns, it is beautiful to behold and fun to browse and just pluck little tidbits at random. Even the expanded table of contents is thought-provoking and fun to read.

"The Ants" does more than simply summarize current knowledge about ants. It goes into details of the many different ways in which ants have evolved social structures and critically evaluates theories of ant colony dynamics and eusocial evolution.

37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, January 5, 2002

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ants (Hardcover)

This is a book that makes you want to drop everything and dedicate all your time to the study of ants. There are not too many books out there that are so well-written that they induce such emotions. It is a sizable book, and for those outside the field of myrmecology, it probably would not be read cover-to-cover. But every page of this book is fascinating, and considering the time and effort the authors put into it, it is no surprise that it has been the target of numerous awards. The authors dedicate the book to the "next generation of myrmecologists", and no doubt they have convinced many individuals to take up the field. The authors convey to the reader that the study of ants is a thriving field, and there are lots of research questions unanswered in their study.
Space prohibits a detailed review, so I will list instead the parts of the book that I consider most interesting: 1. The variation in the mode of colony founding among the different species of ants. 2. The mating habits of ants, in particular the female-calling and aggregation syndromes. 3. The description of the experiment showing the role of male pheromones in carpenter ants. 4. The statistical analysis of the time of swarming. 5. The comparison between different hypotheses for polyandry. 6. The universal occurence across species of 'nanitics' or 'minims' in the first brood and their ergonomic advantages. 7. The parental manipulation and offspring consent hypotheses for the origin of worker castes. 8. Eusociality and chromosome number as a strategy for reducing genetic variance. 9. The role of learning in colony-level recognition. 10. The presence of conflict between queens and workers in the management of new queens and males. 11. The existence of modulatory communication in ants (this was definitely the most interesting discussion in the book ). 12. The steps in the evolution of physical castes. 13. The result that colony-level selection is the opposite of what one would expect from individual-level selection, the later tending to improving phenotypes. 14. The use of allometric space to model evolutionary optimization. 15. The capability of associative learning in ants. 16. Ant-termite warfare. 17. The entire chapter on army ants.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not for the amateur, November 15, 2002

By 

"sminthian1" (around Philly) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ants (Hardcover)

Of course this is a great book. But it's also very big...and very technical. I know more about insects than the normal person and I was lost after the first couple pages. If you want a neat ant book read Journey to the Ants. It's more down to earth and easier to read and written by the same people. I wouldn't try to tackle this until you got a few entomology courses under your belt....