Customer Reviews

The Fire Ants

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Southerners hate fire ants. Let alone that they are convinced that fire ants ruin land and ravage gardens: fire ants hurt. Anyone stung by just one knows that they deserve their name, but so often people are not stung by just one, but by a cluster. So it is alarming to find a southerner who ardently feels another way about the creatures. "I love fire ants," is the first sentence in chapter one of _The Fire Ants_ (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) by Walter R. Tschinkel, who says he has written it for "professional biologists and for people still open-minded enough to be intrigued, charmed, or fascinated by the many results of biological research on fire ants." Besides, the stings aren't so bad. He cites the Pain Rating Scale of Justin O. Schmidt, a venom specialist. Bullet ants get a 4+ rating ("like walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail imbedded in your heel") but fire ants muster only a 1.2 ("Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for a light switch." I think he understates!) People who are allergic to stings of insects must beware, but even thousands of stings don't do any real damage: "Inebriated persons using a fire-ant 'bed' have sustained over 5000 fire-ant stings without signs of general toxicity (other than that of alcohol)." That sort of writing is typical of the amused, light touch that Tschinkel has brought to a 700 page, three pound volume which Edward O. Wilson declares in the foreword "a masterpiece". (Wilson was responsible, in 1962, for steering Tschinkel from biochemistry and organic chemistry to his current studies.)

There is much more to the fire ant than just the sting, and it is hard to imagine that this volume has left anything out, except for all the research that there is still to do about still-mysterious details. Fire ants were imported accidentally from South America between 1933 and 1942. They moved out concentrically from Mobile, and there is a famous map of their expanding range as the years went by, but it wasn't just a simple matter of expansive growth by a species that liked the new real estate. They had help from the same vector that brought them to the United States, the humans which Tschinkel says fire ants must regard as benevolent gods. Distant foci of infestation were established "when obliging nurserymen unwittingly gave rides to hitchhiking fire ants." Fire ants would have had trouble crossing the desert, for instance, without our help, and so they got to California. There are lovely essays on the behavior of ant researchers interspersed among the more numerous and scientifically dense chapters. It is really rather astonishing all that Tschinkel and his fellows have been able to ask the ants experimentally and get them to reply. They have used remarkable techniques, such as tagging individual ants permanently with little wire belts around their waists: "Tying a wire around an ant's waist is simple, at least in principle."

Tschinkel is often confronted by people who want him to tell them how to get rid of the ants. If you have a hypersensitive member of the family, yes, it might be time for poison baits, he suggests, but otherwise he advises simply leaving them alone. After all, he says, they don't do any harm. Now, anyone who has been stung by these critters might question that, but Tschinkel provides ample data to show that there is little demonstrable harm done by fire ants, and even some good; Louisiana sugarcane farmers, for instance, recognize that fire ants go after sugarcane borers and thus improve crop yields. There have been efforts, waves of chlordane and Mirex, that humans have used to eliminate the ants, and when that failed, just to control their spread, and when that failed, there was nothing for the humans to do but give up. The Ant Wars were "a complex brew of science, politics, journalistic hyperbole, public hysteria, and legal maneuvering" and the humans lost. Fire ants will be around for at least as long as we keep making them at home, it seems, and in reading this impressive volume, it is hard not to admire the sophisticated ways they have evolved to keep themselves going. Even if you have no chance of becoming a myrmecologist yourself, you will find it hard not to admire the cleverness and hard work of the researchers devoted to them. Tschinkel's volume is a beautiful monument to fire ants and to science.

A technical book on fire ants is not really my thing. I'm a physicist living in country too cold for fire ants. But my son is doing a senior research project with fire ants and he started gushing about this book. Impressed that anything could make him put down his texting cell phone for a minute, I had a look.

This is, hands down, the best technical book I have ever read. Not only does Tschinkel move you through the story of fire ants with a pacing that more resembles a blockbuster novel than a biological textbook, he is very, very funny. I know for a fact I have laughed out loud more reading this book than I did for many a supposedly "humorous" book.

It is a rare writer who can compel a mostly disinterested reader to stay with him through nearly 700 pages of technical information. Looking back, I can't believe he did it. Yet he did, and I am grateful for the experience. I know a WHOLE lot more about fire ants than I ever dreamed I would want to know. And I can't wait for the sequel.

Not only is the author, Walter Tschinkel, an expert on Fire
Ants he is a skillful writer. His ability to spinkle humor
in every chapter makes the book enjoyable even to the non-
scientific reader. He will expell many false claims of the
Fire Ant menace and enlighten the reader with facts gathered
from over 30 years of observations and experiments. The text
documents the larger problems caused when uniformed political
groups try to fix a problem they don't understand. This book
should me mandatory reading for all environmentalist!
Bill Denni

Very few humans, accept for some aboriginal communities, respect earth's natural processes. Walter gets it. It is us humans, who want to exploite the earth to our benefit that is throwing the planet out of balance. Dr. Walt realizes that fire ants have learned to thrive on our disturbances of the ecosystem. Anyone who is willing to take the time to write a 750+ page large format, fine print book on such a hated insect must be respected. What a phenomenal composition. Take a chance on this book.