Interesting book that discusses in first person the author's work. It is written such anyone can understand it. It doesn't really delve into highly scientific terms. I like how it is written first person, and she puts in a few personal comments here and there. Not many, but enough that the book is not too analytical. I also like how in the epilogue she does not try to make her work some grand work that connects it to everything else. "And I have not learned much about people from watching ants." I love the honesty of that. She then goes to discuss the bigger picture though. ". . .[T]hey show how simple parts make couples living systems, and how those systems connect to the outside world."Interesting, fairly short read.

Strange but somewhat interesting little book with the emphasis on 'dry'. It is a mostly dry academic treatment with a bits of dry humor and set in a dry environment! The book tells of her 17-year study of Red Harvester ants conducted at the Southwestern Research Station located in eastern Arizona in the Chiricahua Mountains There is a lot of information packed into less than 200 pages and lots of little factoids--the ants stop all activity when soil temperature exceeds 52C (125F), ants live one year, there are about 10,000 ants in a colony (and yes only one Queen), colonies have a life cycle of about 15 years. There are detailed discussions of colony life-cycles, foraging patterns, 'foreign' policy (vis-a-vis other ant colonies), nest structure, queen behavior and the roles and activities of the various ants. A number of graphs and simple drawings help to explain and clarify both ant and colony-scale behavior. Among the worker ants there four basic tasks, patrolling, foraging, midden work, and nest maintenance. It was actually amazing how she and her teams were able to conduct the various analyses and experiments and the humor is embedded in these stories of working in the often blistering hot desert with biting ants as your constant companions! Still almost hard to believe you could spend 17 years at it but there is no accounting for taste as they say, and people get interested in more arcane things than this. I did not however learn enough to devise new methods to deal with the very recent appearance of ants (thankfully not Red Harvester ants!) in my kitchen except the tried and true and ant traps!

A short, fascinating read about ants. Gordon has studied ants, this is what she has observed and learned on her field trips. What I found most interesting was the different roles the ants play, and how it is decided which ones each does fill and when; how they forage, store and protect food, and defend and extend their territory. Great little book. Now I'm ready for more, something from E.O. Wilson, perhaps.

Very interesting book detailing a lot of information about Ant communities and how Ants communicate using pheromones. A lot of interesting study on the organization of different kinds of Ant communities.

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 involve vast patience and continual manual effort. I'm very impressed, but glad not to be a scientist myself.

Good little book. I’d say it’s about high school level or so, but it’s a good example of how science works. Observations are made, questions are asked, and experiments are designed to answer the questions. Didn’t learn as much about ants as I had wanted, but that’s okay. The book touches on a subject that we don’t know much about… colony behavior in social insects. She proposes possible explanations, but admits that we really don’t know why they act the way they do.

if you ever wanted to know about red harvester ants, heres the book for you. seeing as i did, i really enjoyed it. then i did experiments with the hill in my albuquerque backyard, seeing what sorts of seeds they would eat and which they would discard...i'm a nerd.

It did exactly what the title suggested, but went about it in a very boring manner. This just didn't grab my attention or interest - despite me being very jazzed to read it.

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 features of agents.
The author is devoted to the topic, which is apparent from is bio and from the writing style, too - smooth, reflexive, attentive and humorous at times. The book starts with the description of the setting of the field studies and the characteristics of the ants investigated, and goes on rather concisely to face important and general questions as: how is task allocation managed? How can the behavior of a colony change in time if the average life of each ant (except the queen, who just starts the colony and lays eggs for 15-20 years underground) is very much shorter than that of the colony itself? How do colonies coexhist within a population? How do ants reactively switch tasks? What is the role of the interactions pattern (apparently more fundamental than the physical (chemo-tactile) details of the inter-ant communication)?
The author describes a host of field experiments throughout years, both in the desert and in the lab, engineered to try to provide tentative answers to such and more questions. Models of task allocation, both neaural-network based and ecological, are provided. Ignorance is often admitted, which is to be counted as a plus, either.
Some lessons are finally learned (not on populations in general, though), particularly how the behavior of an agent cannot be studied in isolation, since it also depends critically on its interactions with other agents, (homo and/or heterogeneous). The old notion that the traits of the ants were such because of genetics and so little could be done to change them is more an ultimately false excuse to avoid the study of interaction networks than a timeless law.
A fashinating book, and must-read for complexity enthusiasts.

The book was a little to complicated for me. Or maybe I wasn't interested enough in the topic. Either way, I have more respect for ants. I am pretty sure now when ever I find an ant colony I will sit there and study them, instead of destroying them and their hill. That was one of the main reasons I started reading this book. I wanted to know more about ants... Or at least enough to fall in love with them a little. I guess it worked.

Good little book. I’d say it’s about high school level or so, but it’s a good example of how science works. Observations are made, questions are asked, and experiments are designed to answer the questions. Didn’t learn as much about ants as I had wanted, but that’s okay. The book touches on a subject that we don’t know much about… colony behavior in social insects. She proposes possible explanations, but admits that we really don’t know why they act the way they do.

Pretty good description of very interesting research. Started to drag a bit at the end, though.