Journey to the ants : a story of scientific exploration
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Journey to the ants : a story of scientific exploration
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994
- : hard : acid-free paper
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Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This text combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement. Accompanying Hoelldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants co-operate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they employ propaganda and surveillance and exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalance between allegiance and self-aggrandizement. This tour of the entire range of formicid biodiversity - from social parasites to army ants, nomadic hunters, camouflaged huntresses, and builders of temperature-controlled skyscrapers - opens out increasingly into natural history, intimating the relevance of ant life to human existence. A window in the world of ants as well as those who study them, this book should be a source of knowledge and pleasure for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder about the miniature yet immense civilization at our feet.
Table of Contents
- The dominance of ants
- for the love of ants
- the life and death of the colony
- how ants communicate
- war and foreign policy
- the ur-ants
- conflict and dominance
- the origin of cooperation
- the superorganism
- social parasites - breaking the ode
- the trophobionts
- army ants
- the strangest ants
- how ants control their environment
- epilogue - who will survive?
- how to study ants.
by "Nielsen BookData"