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| Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration | 
| Authors: Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy New: $13.49
You Save: $8.51 (39%)
New (18) from $13.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 15689
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0674485262
Dewey Decimal Number: 595
EAN: 9780674485266
ASIN: 0674485262
Publication Date: July 21, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Pub date: 1994. Hardcover. Condition: BRAND NEW / BRAND NEW. Brand new book. Minor wear to DJ. We are a tested and proven company with over 300,000 satisfied customers since 1997. Delivery confirmation on all US orders. Choose expedited shipping for deli
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 24 | | NEXT » |
Journey of the Ants July 14, 2008
I have to admit I did not expect to find this book as interesting as it turned out to be. I was only interested in identifying some species within my yard and discovered quite a bit about ants. This book won't make you an expert, but it has made me see ants from a whole new perspective, so much so that I have come to like them instead of disliking them. I can also see why it is possible to kill a colony so easily. Never knew that once the queen is gone, there is no colony. I think if ants had atom bombs they would have destroyed the earth by now - killing each other. I had no idea they were so aggressive towards one another. Anyway, great book to read.
Start point book June 18, 2008
Apart from being a great book for all kind of reader, it was, for me (eight years ago!), a start point and it was probably the cause I focus my career nowadays in these small insects. It's quite nice for a child (then better with adult, not to read alone) or young people interested in natural sciences.
Truly a fascinating adventure to another world January 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Journey to the Ants is a shorter version of the authors' monumental The Ants (1990), a 732-page tome aimed at professional biologists with a lot of technical language and a clear encyclopedic intent. This book, as Holldobler and Wilson explain in the Preface, is of "a more manageable length, with less technical language and with an admitted and unavoidable bias toward those topics and species on which we have personally worked."
It is a terrific book, lavishly illustrated with many color plates, line drawings, black and white drawings, photos, etc. Especially wonderful are the color prints of paintings by John D. Dawson showing ants in various activities. His style reminds me a bit of M.C. Esher. Also notable are the many photos taken by Holldobler and Wilson during their many travels and studies. They are both renowned experts on ants around the world.
The text is both informative and entertaining. Wilson in particular is a world class science writer as well as a great scientist, and his clarity of expression and enthusiasm show through. The chapters examine and illustrate how ants live in their colonies, how they hunt prey, tend aphid "cattle," cultivate fungi, raid other ant colonies; how they fight and how they reproduce. Other chapters focus on particular species, like army ants or leaf cutter ants, or "strange" ants. Still other chapters show how ants communicate especially through pheromones and touch. There is some theory on ant origins (about 100-120 million years ago) and their evolution and present distribution. I was particularly interested in and appalled by both the way some ants are parasites and how they themselves are exploited by parasites. Our esteemed authors show how ants, for all their power and evolutionary success, can be the most naive victims of beetles, flies, butterfly larva, etc. simply because they can be fooled by smells that mimic those of the colony and/or because they can be given irresistible concoctions of food or what might be called "drugs" that make them passive and acceptive of insects that will eat their eggs and larva. They are also tricked into feeding strangers on the trail and alien larva in the colony nest!
I purposely first read a couple of other books on ants (The World of Ants: A Science-Fiction Universe (1970) by Remy Chauvin, and Ants (1977) by M.V. Brian), written by myrmecologists of an earlier generation so as to be able to better appreciate this famous work. But you need not do that. Journey to the Ants is eminently accessible to just about any literate person.
While reading I had some thoughts (as Wilson famously has had) on the differences and similarities between ant societies and human ones. Ants are not governed as we are (and as was once thought) in any way by a central authority. (They are influenced by the queen's pheromones and her behavior.) Instead ants are examples of "swarm intelligence," that is purposeful and coordinated behavior that arises from each individual doing what comes naturally to that individual. This sort of intelligence was just beginning to be appreciated when Holldobler and Wilson wrote this book. The phrase "swarm intelligence" does not appear anywhere in the book, and yet it is clear that our present understanding of how this intelligence works was gleaned in part from the work of biologists and ethologists like Holldobler and Wilson.
Ants are famous for doing human-like things that no other animals or few can do, such as gardening, tending herds, making war, and constructing elaborate living spaces. It is usually said that ants do it from pure instinct whereas we use our intelligence and the experience. Humans and ants cannot be defined independently of their respective cultures. What I wonder is, is it an artificiality to say that their intelligence, spread out as it is among the individuals and their genetic endowments, is fundamentally different from our own? Clearly ants are limited in what they can construct, what they can understand, and what tools they can make and use. I read somewhere that ants never developed fire because no ant could get close enough to a sustainable fire to tend it.
A striking conclusion is that perhaps the real difference between us comes from our ability to grow a million times bigger in size which allows us not only to tend fires, but to develop brains large enough to handle abstract thought such as in language, which further allows us to develop and share ideas, concepts, practices, and all the other aspects of our culture in a way that is impossible for ants, whose brain size is limited by their anatomy.
So, although ants were here long before we arrived, and although they probably will be here long after we are gone, it is impossible to say which life form is the more successful. We do have at present the capability, which ants do not, of enhancing our ability to survive through genetic engineering and the development of biologically friendly machines, and even the ability to migrate away from this earth so that our genes and ourselves are not in one basket, so to speak. Should a planet-sterilizing event hit the earth, we could be on Mars and still survive.
But then there is this insidious thought: perhaps the ants, like our resident microbes, will find a way to come with us!
Don't miss this book. You are in for a treat.
amazing August 3, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
There is few to say that has not been said. It is very well written and the information is mind-boggling.
Wonderful! July 8, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved this book. After reading it I spent the next night telling my wife all I'd managed to remember.
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