A fascinating look into the life and social behaviors of ants. If you are going to read the entire book you may find some points a little repetitive. The simple language and story-telling approach is appealing for the general audience and makes this a quick read. For the scientist however, the format can come off as too informal. All in all, I learned a lot and think it was worth the read.

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

Ants! Ants are rad.

I like ants.

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".

Clear, sensitive, and readable

A pleasant little book almost exclusively about harvester ants of the American southwest. Gordon makes a special effort to be readable and to avoid jargon. There are a few charts and some drawings. She shows how harvester ants perform four kinds of work, foraging, patrolling, nest maintenance, and midden work (feeding the refuse pile). She gives details from her experiments in the Arizona desert where she studied harvester ant colonies for seventeen summers.

The fascinating thing about ants is that they are able to organize and accomplish their work without a central authority telling them what to do. Gordon's main purpose is to understand how they do this. She shows that pheromone messages and contacts among individual ants lead to a kind of group knowledge that is reflected in individual behavior. Each ant makes its own choice about what to do at any given time based on clues it gets from its environment, either its nest mates, the weather, or other changing circumstances, or from contacts with ants from other colonies. She shows that the life cycle of a colony and its overall behavior can be seen as that of an organism composed of individuals analogous (but without central management) to an animal made up of individual cells. The colony has a life span, and during that span behaves differently depending upon its age. Because disrupting the underground nests of the ants would alter their behavior, we don't get a very clear picture of how the nest appears. Gordon implies that nests maintained in labs are not the same thing. She makes it clear that such ants also behave differently than ants in a natural setting.

This is a fine book. My only quibble would be to say that I would like to read a book on ants with a wider focus, especially on the Argentine ants that dominate the urban environment here in southern California. Additionally it would be nice to know how the organization of harvester ant society compares and contrasts with that of other species.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”

Abandoned. While the title promises a great deal, the book does not deliver. It's much less about ants than it is about the researchers studying ants, and the very quaint methods they used to study ants. What took them 20+ years of hard summers in the field, wandering around with magnifying lenses following ants around the desert is the sort of thing we could automate today with a couple of cellphones and a little bit of software in a month. Being a grad student sucks in the 2020s, but it seems like it must have been much worse in the 90s.

A very disappointing book because the authors didn't really know many answers. This is a shame because they've done decades of research, but it seems that they only have arrived at superficial observations. The topic itself is very cool. I suppose if one is very interested in the topic and is willing to accept that they aren't going to learn many answers by reading this book, then it'd be okay.