Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari With A Cast Of Trillions (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
ANTS!!! This book is just fun. It's like following the epic stories/ kingdoms /lives of ants without actually having to endure the boredom of watching ants for hours or getting ant bites. And the photographs!! Just amazing. Mark Moffett isn't the best writer, however, sometimes he gets overly wordy or repetitive. You kind of get used to his flowery writing style after a while, though. Also, Moffett kind of gets off topic sometimes - twice he describes dreams he had about ants, which I found kind of weird. Overall Mark Moffett is not as cool as Edward O. Wilson, but he's still pretty cool. Favorite parts: "The smallest known ant colonies, of at most four individuals, are those of the minuscule tropical American ant Thaumatomytmex." (pg 9)"Among ants generally, the risks taken by workers tend to increase with age, demonstrating that their long-term value to a colony diminishes as they get older. Months-old fire ants engage in fighting in battles with nearby colonies, for example, whereas weeks-old workers run away and days-old individuals feign death." (pg 55)"With their bloated abdomens, repletes serve as living pantries, storing and then regurgitating liquid food to other colony members." (pg 57)"...ants at the small end of the spectrum, such as Carebara atoma, the 'atom ant,' are truly Lilliputian. I once dislodged a flake of bark from a tree in Singapore, only to expose four hundred yellow specks: an entire colony of its close cousin Carebara overbecki. The minor workers were almost the size of an atoma, their oval heads about as small as a single celled paramecium. The slightly larger soldiers have elongated heads with two little horns." (pg 143)Marauder ants:These are like warrior ants with a conscience. "When marauders kill another ant species in a skirmish, they cover the bodies with soil and abandon them. Despite this odd and unexplained aversion to cannibalism, the marauders evolved mass foraging in part for the same reason army ants did, as an aid in battle." (pg 47)"It seems the marauder ant workers likewise do the deed of disposing of excess queens, but in their case this occurs much later in the life of the colony. I learned this at the Botanic Gardens... At one point I noticed a group dragging a dusky object out of the nest and along their trail. Extracting it from them, I found in my hand a wingless queen with the worn mandibles and near-black pigmentation of an aged animal. She was very much alive but had apparently outlived her usefulness to the colony and was being evicted. Twice more I saw the same event at nests sizeable enough to suggest that marauder ant societies can retain more than one queen for a long time. Allowing these workers to finish their job, I watched them abandon the struggling queen at the side of their trail or in the garbage heap. Army ants:These guys are vicious, but not particularly smart. Their method of foraging: storm in, beat up the natives, grab whatever you can, and leave. Weaver ants: "Weaver ant nests are most common in the outer, often uppermost, sunlit branches of trees... There the ants bind adjacent living leaves into a kind of arboreal tent... To begin building a nest, a worker pulls at the edge of a leaf, and if she's successful in bending it, nearby ants join her... The name weaver ant comes from the next step, which involves a kind of child labor. In many ant species, the larvae spin silk cocoons in which they transform into adults. But a weaver ant larva does not make a cocoon. Instead, it produces silk at a young age, when still small enough to be held and manipulated by an adult worker." (pg 113)"'It can be said,' write Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, 'that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies'" (pg 115)Weaver ants also tend to "cattle"! Pg 119, weaver ants and Homoptera.Amazon ants:The slave makers! These ants steal pupae from other species colonies, and raise them in their own colony. When the pupae hatch, the new ants imprint in the new colony, and work for the colony as if it were their own. Leafcutter ants:My favorite. They cut leaves, bring the leaves back to their nest, mush up the leaves, and feed the leaves to their fungus that they grow underground. The ants then eat the fungus - although their primary source of energy is plant sap, the fungus contains protein - and also feed it to their larvae. These guys are super organized, and super clean. They spend a lot of time grooming themselves and each other, because any contamination in the nest could kill their fungus. Page 181 - I found it a little hard to believe that the ants would know that if they dropped their leaf pieces from up in a tree, their sisters would grab them from down below. But, I suppose if this behavior has been documented, it must be true. I wonder how it works?The dreaded phorid fly:"A phorid floats around leafcutter trails like a dust mote until it swoops down on a worker's head, inserting an egg through the ant's neck or mouth... The hatched maggot then consumes brain and muscle until finally the ant's head falls off -- hence once common name for the phorid: the decapitating fly." (pg 183)"Not surprisingly, the garbage-transport and garbage-processor ants can die from handling hazardous waste...To add insult to injury, the janitorial staff is treated as untouchables by the other ants, who evade infection by dropping off refuse at safely located waste-transfer centers and staying away from the trash heaps themselves, and by attacking any of the sanitation squad who approach them or their gardens. With no access to plant sap or fresh fungus meals, the waste-management ants... must either scavenge from the offal or starve." (pg 193)Argentine ants:These ants are scary invaders who have formed gigantic supercolonies in the western United States because they outmatch the local ants. I loved this book! The author has such enthusiasm for his subject that it is really infectious! I have always been fascinated by bugs and loved studying them, but this book can be interesting to anyone who enjoys the planet they live on. There are some big doses of philosophy in here, he questions our understanding of what an organism is, what a mind is, how we perceive the world around us based on our humanity. And of course there are lots of cool and funny stories about his adventures all over the world studying the ants he writes about. There are a few bits that get overly scientific, but nothing that is too hard to follow. It felt like it was so pointed in one direction (ants) that it illuminated all around it (the world and our thoughts about it). It also had amazing photographs, worth picking up just for those, they were groundbreaking, so much so that National Geographic featured them! So yeah, I loved it!
What do You think about Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari With A Cast Of Trillions (2010)?
Who would have thought ants could be so interesting? Some pretty amazing photos as well.
—uzielb123
If there is one book you want to read about ants - this is it
—Lorig
I couldn't help, but worship God as I read this book.
—marie
