Lo he contado ya muchas veces, pero yo no iba para traductora, mis opciones eran entomóloga y egiptóloga. Los bichos me dieron una infancia feliz llena de cajas de cerillas y botecitos con alcohol robado en el cuarto de baño. Entonces, hacerse con libros era mucho más difícil, pero estaban las enciclopedias, algún libro de texto, libros de mi abuelo sobre temas variados y las inevitables Selecciones del Reader’s Digest, que iban completando lo que no me daba la observación.

Las hormigas se llevaban la palma, he pasado muchas horas observando hormigueros o siguiendo la pista de esforzadas obreras entre las hierbas secas. A mis favoritas, les ponía en el abdomen un punto de laca de uñas para poder encontrarlas siempre. Es que a veces, me las llevaba al colegio y se me perdían.

Ya casi no persigo bichos (aunque una araña que ha puesto su tela en mi ventana me tiene procrastinando muy feliz), pero sigo leyendo todo lo que cae en mis manos. Este libro de Wilson ha sido un placer. Es corto, con capítulos también cortos, y se lee con mucho agrado.

Interesting vignettes on various ant species. ( )

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. ( )

> To my knowledge, only one species has evolved (without multiplying) in the Galápagos by itself: a carpenter ant given the scientific name Camponotus williamsi, after an earlier expedition leader. This ant apparently evolved on the islands, but has not split into multiple species.

> The number of species in relative terms exploded in many groups, including crane flies, damselflies, delphaeid leafhoppers, saldid bugs, Odynerus wasps, colletid bees, Hyposmocoma moths, and among birds, the fabulously diverse and beautiful drepaniid honeycreepers. In a few of these cases there are more species on Hawaii than in the rest of the world combined. All of this production is now shrinking because of the combined activities of humans and their invasive companions, especially ants

> Over the top of the arena he attached a roof that could be flooded with light from above. The roof was then covered with photos of the canopy taken in the Kenyan forest. The Paltothyreus were next allowed to forage into the altered arena, find food there, and carry it back to the artificial home nest. Were they using the photographs to find their way? If so, Hölldobler reasoned, he could perceive the direction they were walking by simply turning the roof on its axis, and seeing whether the ants changed their direction in the same way and amount. He did, and they did. The Paltothyreus ants, in short, can both learn and use maps.

> In 1955, early in my career as a field biologist, I had managed to identify about 175 ant species in a square kilometer of lowland rain forest in Papua New Guinea. This I believed likely to last as a world record. Not so. In later years, twice that number, 355, were collected by Stefan Cover and John Tobin at a single locality in the Amazon. ( )

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. ( )