Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions [Paperback]

This is an extremely impressive book in just about every way. It has a clever and beautifully designed jacket (like a movie poster for Pixar: "Cast of Trillions"!); the page layouts are crisp and artful; the colored fonts for headings are artistic without being glaring; the text is very well edited and proofed; the many color plates of the ants are world class (Moffett has done photography for National Geographic which features some of the best natural photography anywhere); the writing engages the reader and is dense with information and adventure. Yes, adventure as in the title.

With this book I believe that Mark Moffett will emerge as a superstar among naturalists. In addition to being a world class photographer whose photographs of ants are unique in their clarity and expressiveness, he is an intrepid traveler and explorer who has visited every continent except Antarctica looking for ants. (He'd probably go there too if there were any ants!) He has bivouacked on numerous islands as well, including Malaysia and Easter Island where he found that the island has become overrun with Argentine ants, the little black ants that live in our lawns and kitchens. But more than anything Moffett is a first class biologist who specializes in myrmecology and loves it.

Consequently this book is a tour de force, the result of many years of study, exploration and just plain hard work in difficult circumstances in jungles and other terrain the world over. The energy of that work comes gushing out of the pages in a torrent with enough force to make the reader enter not only the world of the ant but the world of the scientist who studies the ant and to realize the incredible labor that went into its production. The work requires the ability to endure hardships in the outdoors in all sorts of weather during long nights as well as sweltering days with patience and discipline, distant from the comforts of home in primitive and dangerous places.

Ah, to be young again and to embark upon such adventures!

The book is organized into six main parts: marauder ants, African army (driver) ants, weaver ants, Amazon slave master ants, leafcutter ants, and the ant that is taking over a good portion of the world, the Argentine ant. It was to this latter chapter that I first turned when I opened the book because I've had my own adventures among ants and most of those adventures involved Linepithema humile (formerly known as Iridomyrmex humilis) the Argentine ant which has taken over most of California where I live and a goodly part of the rest of the country.

If you have ants in the house and can't get rid of them, chances are they are Argentine ants. Moffett's two chapters on Linepithema humile explain why they have become so prolific, how they got started here and why you and the local "Bugs R Us" aren't likely to get rid of them. Small, blackish without much ability to bite (actually I have been bitten by Argentine ants, but their bite can't even get through the skin), their main trick is a kind of maniacal persistence that starves or otherwise out-competes other kinds of ants. Moffett estimates that the Very Large Colony(my "friends" for decades) in California may approach a trillion individuals spread across a thousand kilometers from San Diego in the south to Sacramento and beyond in the north.

One of things that Moffett confirmed is that Argentine ants milk aphids. I had a small vegetable garden and found aphids on my plants seemingly tended by Argentine ants. Moffett, who went to Argentine to study the ants in their ancestral home (so to speak) however did not quite confirm my belief that the ants become more active in the hot, dry summers not in a frantic search for water as some people believe but because that is the best time to forage for carrion which they love and that is the season when the waters recede. Of course Argentine ants do need water and thrive when they can get it, which is one of the reasons they flourish in our watered lawns.

My favorite part of the book though was the part on the New World leafcutter ants. To me they are the most sophisticated and most interesting of the many kinds of ants. Their underground fungal gardens and nest as described by Moffett "can extend 7 meters into the earth and contain nearly eight thousand chambers." (pp. 170-171) Their jaws are like can openers with "a zinc content of 30 to 40 percent." (p. 171) Surprisingly the adult workers get most of their energy from the sap of the leaves they cut. The protein-rich fungus in their gardens is mainly for their larvae and attendants. (p. 172) Their trunk trails are so wide and well maintained (to allow them to easily carry their "parasols" of leaves) that Moffett once mistook a trunk trail for a narrow human pathway and got momentarily lost. Additionally once he unknowingly pitched his tent on a nocturnal route only to be awakened in the night by rain seeping in because the ants had cut open his tent to maintain the trunk trail! (p. 179)

Moffett points to the similarities between humans and ants, and to the differences. Like Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson before him, he refers to ant colonies as superorganisms while in the final chapter giving us four ways of looking at ants.

First there is the ant as an individual. Unlike most of us, Moffett has stared at ants for so many hours that he can see something like individual personalities. Second there is the ant colony as a society whose individual respond to each other (mainly through touch and pheromones). Third there is the idea of the ant colony as an organism with individual ants being the equivalent of the cells in our bodies that comprise organs and then a unified whole. And fourth, there is the ant colony as a mind. This comes from the idea of swarm intelligence in which the actions of individual ants combine automatically without leadership to produce the intelligent behavior of the entire colony.

An interesting question is, could it be the case sometime in the distant future or elsewhere on another planet that there may develop swarm-intelligent superorganisms that are smarter than humans, and prove it by developing a more advanced culture?

I recently purchased this book from Amazon, and have found it is a fantastic book to read as the author has made it so that the reader feels they are actually there. The descriptive writing and wonderful colour photos make this book a true adventure, as you find yourself exploring the fascinating world of ants; and you almost believe you can reach out and touch them.
Being the owner of an ant web site myself (Ant Hill Wood), Mark and I have become friends through our mutual interest in ants and wildlife in general.
I would recommend anyone who loves ants and wildlife conservation, or a bit of an adventure safari in far away places, to buy this book. You won't regret it for a moment.

This is undoubtedly the best book I have read all year, and certainly among the best science books I can remember having read in a long time. It's also gorgeous to look, the striking photography makes it alluring as a coffee-table photography book, though it is in fact so much more than this. The book feels extremely comprehensive in its tour of the ant world, it really does feel like being introduced to a cast of trillions. While the book is full of nearly limitless fascinating facts which constantly amaze even my most bug-fearing friends it does not read anything like a textbook. The absolutely beautiful photographs on almost every page and the way the book is written, through personal experiences and stories, makes it read more like an adventure-thriller than standard nature writing. The wonder of the ants themselves really shines through and you feel like you are being transported to an alien world, very unfamiliar to the one we inhabit. The book also contains an overarching theme, drawing parallels between the structure of ant societies and our own. This added an extra layer of interest to the book and was truly thought provoking and insightful.

Most importantly it's changed the way I view ants. While before I saw them as a curious nuisance, not really sure what they were up to, now I take a closer look whenever I am sitting outside and notice a small black worker scurrying about. It's great to be able to look at these creatures with more informed eyes and an even greater sense of wonder having read this terrific book. This book is a true page turner and I could hardly put it down. Having done some fieldwork in Africa I have been bitten by several of the species described in this book. It's a pleasure to understand more about the lives of these ants and now I understand why the ants in question were totally justified in biting me, I was intruding on their amazing networks and road systems.

The combination of the author's mastery of the subject, gripping story driven writing style and noticeably professional and crisp book layout(something I normally never notice but in this case it's worth commenting on) alone make this worth reading. Combine this with world-class photography, probably the first time you'll be describing ants as beautiful, taken by the author himself, and you get something close to the book equivalent of a highly-polished nature documentary or summer blockbuster, only with much more content and substance. Highly, highly recommended.