Evolution’s socialized winners: Review of The Lives of Ants by Keller & Gordon

Humans have always been fascinated by the massed societies of ants. I was no exception – as a child, I followed their trails and dug up their nests. A masterful new overview by a scientist-writer combo, Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon, has satisfied a recent urge to reexamine my boyhood infatuation. The Lives of Ants is pithy yet exhaustive, balanced yet passionate.

Ants are regarded as one of evolution’s most blatant success stories, one that illustrates the survival value of sociality. Although counting ants sounds, and is, nigh impossible, the best estimate is that our earth contains ten thousand trillion of them. The total weight of all ants is about the same as that of human beings. Ants are unable to thrive only in extreme cold, so we find them everywhere except in the far north and far south, and at the peaks of the largest mountains. Ant societies exist so the queens can eggs; in a lifetime, a queen of the African army ants can churn out three hundred million young. I was amazed to read what observation had suggested to me: in precise conditions (mild, a slight wind, just before or after rain), winged male ants fly off and then, perfectly synchronized minutes later, female queens follow them into the air to mate. The Lives of Ants is full of such breathtaking facts. The authors are not parochial. They spend a chapter relating how the Argentinean and fire ants, which have invaded (despite the best efforts of, for example, decades of Californian vigilance) large parts of Europe and America. Now ineradicable, they form supercolonies billions strong. The authors describe all facets of ant societies, then ponder how evolution produced such marvels, before concluding with a chapter surveying how humans are trying to make robots work by mimicking ants.

Do cable TV programs filming ant colonies intrigue you? Forget those fragmentary glimpses. Buy The Lives of Ants and understand.