4.0
The Leafcutter Ants
ByPublisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of The Ants comes this dynamic and visually spectacular portrait of Earth's ultimate superorganism.
The Leafcutter Ants is the most detailed and authoritative description of any ant species ever produced. With a text suitable for both a lay and a scientific audience, the book provides an unforgettable tour of Earth's most evolved animal societies. Each colony of leafcutters contains as many as five million workers, all the daughters of a single queen that can live over a decade. A gigantic nest can stretch thirty feet across, rise five feet or more above the ground, and consist of hundreds of chambers that reach twenty-five feet below the ground surface. Indeed, the leafcutters have parlayed their instinctive civilization into a virtual domination of forest, grassland, and cropland—from Louisiana to Patagonia. Inspired by a section of the authors' acclaimed The Superorganism, this brilliantly illustrated work provides the ultimate explanation of what a social order with a half-billion years of animal evolution has achieved.Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Leafcutter Ants Reviews
4.0
“I'll admit that some of this went over my head, especially when they started talking about pheromones and chemicals. However, a great deal was still understandable to the normal lay person (me), and having first seen these ants at the Mueseum of Natural History in NYC, I wanted to know more about them. I hadn't known that they ate fungus, or cultivated gardens, and composted the leaves for the fungus, nor that they really tend to this fungus very carefully, and can tell when poisons or something bad is in the leaves because the fungus tells them chemically. The most fascinating parts of this book were the the great photos, showing close ups of the ants and how they cut leaves, travel with them, make trails, and how big their colonies are! Amazing, 40 ton colonies and nests! This book is worth keeping purely for those photos - I got this from a used book store.”
About Bert Hölldobler
Bert Hölldobler is Foundation Professor at Arizona State University and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He lives in Arizona and Germany.
Edward O. Wilson
Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021) was the author of more than thirty books, including Anthill, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Conquest of Nature. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson was a professor emeritus at Harvard University and lived with his wife in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Other books by Edward O. Wilson
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