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The book can be a bit technical at times. It used advanced (to me anyway) entomological terms that can sometimes make understanding some of the topics difficult. Though it is clearly targeted at an adult audience, I would not hesitate to give this book to a bright child who is particularly interested in ants.

Just about anything you might want to know about the ant is covered. The book did a good job of explaining some questions that I had always had of ants. For example, how can the queen continue to lay fertilized eggs endlessly without a "partner".

The only topic I might have liked seen described at greater length would have been keeping ants. How to excavate a colony. How to obtain a queen. And son on.


Not for the amateur   November 16, 2002
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....


The definitive ant book   March 21, 2002
I received a copy of this book back in the early 1990s and have gone back to read it on several occasions. The book is massive consisting of over 730 pages in a large 12 x 10 format. It contains hundreds of illustrations including several color plates and some really amazing paintings of various types of ants and hive culture.

The information is exhaustive ranging from the extremely technical to the conversational. Parts of the book will be mainly of interest to the hardcore entomologist but the majority of the book is easily understood by the layman, well maybe not always easily but it's not too difficult and it's worth the effort.

I can't imagine a better or more complete text on the subject of ants. Anyone with any real interest in the subject should not be without this book.


Excellent   January 5, 2002
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.


a fantastic read   December 4, 2001
I was given this in 1992 for my birthday and spent a week reading it from cover to cover...and have returned to for pleasure ever since. Admittedly I was already fascinated by ants, but this is quite simply the best book I have ever seen about any group of animals. The authors write authoritatively and very readably about every aspect of ant evolution and behaviour, with humour and a clear passion for their subject; the illustrations are lavish and beautiful. Probably most readers will skip some of the more technical aspects, as this is also a work of reference with (beautifully illustrated) keys to all the major ant genera; but there are entire chapters on life-history, evolution, symbiosis and behaviour which are simply unrivalled in modern literature. From the awesome to the utterly bizarre, the ants are one of the pinnacles of animal evolution. This book is a labour of love, which does justice to the fantastic diversity of these insects, by authors who are the masters of their subject. A pleasure in every respect.