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    Tales from the Ant World
    Tales from the Ant World
    Tales from the Ant World
    Audiobook5 hours

    Tales from the Ant World

    Written by Edward O. Wilson

    Narrated by Jonathan Hogan

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Edward O. Wilson recalls his lifetime with ants, from his first boyhood encounters in the woods of Alabama
    to perilous journeys into the Brazilian rainforest.

    “Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony,” writes Edward O. Wilson, one of
    the world’s most beloved scientists. “Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg.” In Tales from the Ant World, twotime Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson takes us on a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique
    and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dauphin Island, and even his parent’s overgrown urban backyard, thrillingly
    relating his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with many of the Earth’s more than 15,000 ant species.

    Animating his scientific observations with illuminating personal stories, Wilson homes in on twenty-five ant
    species to explain how these genetically superior creatures talk, smell, and taste, and more significantly, belong to
    colonies that fight to determine dominance. Wryly observing that “males are little more than flying sperm missiles” or
    that ants send their “old ladies” into battle, Wilson eloquently relays his brushes with fire, army, and leafcutter ants, as
    well as more exotic species. Among them are the very rare matabele, Africa’s fiercest warrior ants, whose female hunters
    can carry up to fifteen termites in their jaw (and, as Wilson reports from personal experience, have an incredibly
    painful stinger); Costa Rica’s Basiceros, the slowest of all ants; and New Caledonia’s bull ants, the most endangered of
    them all, which Wilson discovered in 2011 after over twenty years of presumed extinction.

    Tales from the Ant World is a fascinating, if not occasionally hair-raising, personal account by one of our greatest
    scientists and a necessary volume for any lover of the natural world
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 25, 2020
    ISBN9781980091714
    Tales from the Ant World

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    Reviews for Tales from the Ant World

    4/5

    34 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 1/5
      I wanted to learn about ants, not this dudes boring thoughts on Jesus.
    • 3/5
      Interesting vignettes on various ant species.
    • 4/5
      Edward O. Wilson was a highly respected and accomplished myrmecologist, i.e., an expert on ants.You may not think ants are fascinating, but in this book, narrated by Jonathan Hogan, Wilson geeks out about them with joy. In this short book, he gives us overviews of twenty-five different species of ants. Fire ants and leafcutter ants, the fastest-moving ants and the slowest-moving ants, ants who conduct slave raids to steal juveniles who will emerge into adulthood in the raiders' colony and grow up as part of that colony. Ants who farm and ants who keep "cattle." Ants who fight over territory, and ants who enter into peaceful alliances with other colonies, establishing peaceful "civilizations" over relatively large territories.Ants who live in caves, which seems counterintuitive, and yet can be a quite welcoming environment for them. Even more counterintuitive, why you should welcome the presence of house ants in your home.This isn't an intense, serious work of science. It's lively and interesting, and interspersed with Wilson's personal stories about his travels and research. It's both educational and fun.I wasn't thrilled with the narrator, but my initial irritation faded fairly quickly, as I became caught up in the substance of the book.Recommended.I bought this audiobook.
    • 3/5
      A light overview of a career as much as of the ants - a short book consisting of short chapters. I liked that it covered a good number of ants, but it didn't go in-depth into any of them, instead mentioning only their names and a fact or two about a) their most interesting characteristic and b) how much trouble it took the author to collect a specimen. Sadly the part where I felt the most excited by something I learned was when he off-handedly mentioned snapping shrimp (as another eusocial species) and I put the bookmark in while I looked them up on Wikipedia.