A beautifully illustrated, short account of the leafcutter ants, which doesn't quite manage to thread the needle between a technical scientific account and a popular one (there were a few bits I had to read more than once to make sure I got it). ( )

I doubt there is a better and more interesting short book about ants that has ever been published. ( )

This book is a spinoff from The Superorganism, which I haven't read. The context might've been helpful. 100 years ago, entomologist William Morton Wheeler described an ant colony as an organism: the queen is the reproductive organ, the workers are the supportive tissue, the exchange of food and liquid is the circulation system. As an analogy this was provocative but limited, and fell apart in the details. Since then though, increasing knowledge about both organisms and colonies has led to increasing acceptance of the superorganism as a level of biological organization. The question of general interest for biology is the similarities, the joint rules and algorithms, arising between morphogenesis and sociogenesis. The leafcutter ants are an example. This book summarizes research on leafcutter life cycle, castes, communication, agricultural activity, and symbiotic relationship between the ants and the fungus they cultivate. The photos are gorgeous. The illustrations by Margaret Nelson are striking. There's an evolutionary tree of fungus tending ants, which arose 50-60 million years ago. There's a diagram of the ant brain. The text, alas, after a promising start, is jargony (e.g. The sound comes from a stridulatory organ, composed of a cuticular file on the first gastric tergite and a scraper situated on the postpetiole.), culled from journal articles and often more tedious than illuminating. So don't get too caught up in the minutiae of the text; the book is worthwhile for its other features.

(read 30 Mar 2012)