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Original Title: Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized
ISBN: 0393321320 (ISBN13: 9780393321326)
Edition Language: English
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Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized Paperback | Pages: 192 pages
Rating: 3.8 | 172 Users | 29 Reviews

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Ants have long been regarded as the most interesting of the social insects. With their queens and celibate workers, these intriguing creatures have captured the imaginations of scientists and children alike for generations. Yet until now, no one had studied intensely the life cycle of the ant colony as a whole. An ant colony has a life cycle of about fifteen years—it is born, matures, and dies. But the individual ants that inhabit the colony live only one year. So how does this system of tunnels and caves in the dirt become so much more than the sum of its parts?


Leading ant researcher Deborah Gordon takes the reader to the Arizona desert to explore this question. The answer involves the emerging insights of the new science of complexity, and contributes to understanding the evolution of life itself.

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Title:Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized
Author:Deborah M. Gordon
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:Deluxe Edition
Pages:Pages: 192 pages
Published:October 17th 2000 by W. W. Norton Company (first published October 6th 1999)
Categories:Science. Nonfiction. Biology. Environment. Nature. Animals. Natural History

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Ratings: 3.8 From 172 Users | 29 Reviews

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Really interesting book with a ton of information about ants. The scientist who wrote this book has been working in the fields with ants for 17 YEARS! The book was kind of weirdly structured, as it first describes properties of the ant colonies, goes on to describe interactions of colonies, and then looks at individual colony behaviors. Personally, I would have preferred a complete bottom-up approach, but whatever. The book contains just about anything you want to know about red harvester ants,

I was disappointed to find this a relatively boring book. Not surprisingly, I put it down halfway through.

This book is an easy to read account of a series of several experiments observing harvester ant colonies in a small patch of land in the American Southwest. It's a great read even if your interests are not particularly ant-focused, as the author carefully describes her experimental methods and her well thought out methodology is itself a pleasant exercise in logical thinking. With any interest at all in ants this book is even more worth reading.

Just fascinating. Dispels what I thought I knew about ants, e.g., contrary to what Aesop (The Ant and the Grasshopper) and the Bible (Proverbs 6:6) said. Some of the ants in a colony just "standing around doing nothing".

While the writing is not superb, the ideas presented are. Overall, this is a great book. It is a fantastic exploration of how simple animals, with simple brains, can create and maintain complex societies, and accomplish complex goals.

An interesting but slightly less informative book than I expected. My main impression was, despite the author's clear enthusiasm for her topic,that studying ants is extraordinarily difficult and I'm amazed we know as much as we do! Surely there must be some clever method for estimating the number of ants in a colony, for example - no. Nope. You dig up the colony and count, by hand, all ten or fifteen thousand ants. The portions of the book detailing the author's research methods seemed to

Ants can become an addiction, and this book is a must-read demonstration of this apparently weird fact. Ants are rather simple agents, yet their colonies and even populations show stunning behaviors in terms of coordination, organization, task allocation, reaction to environmental events, survival strategy, co-existance with neighbors, flexibility and robustness (in one, adaptivity) that make them an outstanding case study for how complex socio-ecological behavior emerge from rather basic