If you ever stopped in your tracks feeling like you’re getting way too old stop right now and reconsider. If an ant would do the same thing….this tiny insect would win in the “who is older” competition. It is easy to think that we hold the keys to this kingdom but humans are a relatively new species in comparison with the ants. Believe it or not but insects were the first creatures to colonize the land in the Devonian period, 400 million years ago. Damn, that’s old! Just to give you an even broader perspective ants have lived on Earth for more than 10 million of their generations; we have existed for no more than a hundred thousand human generations. So I believe that we owe a respectful attitude toward these tiny dinosaurs.
In the book that I am about to talk about you will encounter a new world. A micro world. The world of the most aggressive and war like creatures from this planet. The authors say humorously that if ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week. I can almost hear people saying “Thanks God that He made them so little”. Insects can be vicious and ants hold the crown when it comes to defending their territory.
The science of studying ants is called myrmecology and there are only 500 people in the world who dared to specialize in this field. Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson wrote this amazing book called Journey to the Ants. A story of Scientific Exploration. The collaboration between the two reunited decades of individual study of these creatures and it translated into this quite hefty book. Harvard hold the biggest ant collection in the world and the professors definetely grabbed onto this amazing opportunity.
Ants play an important role in the ecosystem. They move more soil than earthworms and they can keep pests at bay ( one wood-ant colony can harvest in excess 100.000 caterpillars in a day, something that helps the forests to stay healthy). Ants also strongly alter the abundance and local distribution of flowering plants.When they are removed from desert plots , annual plants grow in at double the ordinary density within just 2 seasons.
As I have mentioned insects are pretty old. And there are many species of them. Out of 13.500 species of highly social insects 9.500 are ants. There are still unknown species waiting to be discovered or ancient ones that are very rare ( for example Nothomyrmecia is an ancient ant that prefers cold temperatures and it was very rarely spotted in Australia).
How did ants appear? It seems that the society of ants arose from aggregates of Mesozoic solitary wasps that were already building nests in the soil. A colony of ants is a superorganism and the great strenght of these insects resides in their ability to create tight bonds and social complex arrangements with tiny brains. If we were to scale their operations at human level I doubt that we could make so many people get along to go in the same direction. So we have a couple of things to learn from the little vicious ones.
There are several sub-genres of ants. We have the army ants, those who change their nest sites regularly and kamikaze ants.We also have ants that grow their own food (Atta colony – they are unique among animals in their ability to grow fungi on fresh vegetation brought in their nest, they are true agriculturists). A myrmecologist will be able to identify each type of ant because they are all different although to the naked eye they all look the same. We also have extremely rare ants, for example the tropical species of Thaumatomyrmix which are among the rarest in the world.
I was utterly impressed to find out that ants have been doing what we call in vitro fertilization for ages. The ant queen has her own sperm bank. Yes. Shocking right? She has an oval bag near the tip of her abdomen called spermatheca where the male sperm is stored for years and activated when she needs it. So an ant will only need the male one time. The rest of her lifetime she is pretty much set . Isn’t that fascinating? And it took us humans a long , long time until we were able to do this process for ourselves.
Ants are powerful tiny creatures and they work within a very strict caste system. The caste of the workers is the most important, they do all of the heavy work. In order for their home to feel comfy they need the right humidity. It is not water or cold temperatures or excessive heat the biggest enemy of the ants. Drought and the lack of ideal humidity inside the nest is what can kill a colony.
The book also contains excellent visuals and I can’t help but mention two artists whose detailed drawings of ants really impressed me: John D. Dawson and Turid Forsyth.
You will find complicated scientific information but also fun facts about ants. This book requires time and patience because it is written by two specialists who are really proficient in what they do.
For me it was really intriguing to find out so much novelty about the tiny insects whose fate I did not care about that much. I think that we constantly need to learn new things about our surroundings as the natural world can be a really good teacher for our species.
I have made a long review of this book that you can watch here:
TheWriter 