This is a mammoth of a book and not for the casual reader. It straddles the line of book and text book, so be warned. Another warning is that it was published in 1990, meaning entire careers of myrmecologists have come and gone in that span. I doubt a similar book could be written today, as it is so encompassingly thorough, that to expand it would be to break your desk. Any subsequent books would naturally have to be more condensed and summarized. It is so big and dense, that I probably would not have chosen to read it, except winning the Pulitzer Prize is a pretty big deal.

As a giant book, there is much to be said both good and bad. Sometimes there are no perfect solutions to a structural issue, as any path taken has problems, but I will start with some of my problems. One issue that was both good and bad is the discussion of theory. I think it is fantastic that so much evolutionary theory is taught in this book, but sometimes when a theory is explained, I spent a lot of effort learning it, and then the authors state that it is wrong. I would prefer them to state first that it is wrong, so I don’t try to commit it to memory as truth. And of the open questions theorized, but never resolved, I often wondered how many of the questions have been solved by modern genetic analysis. Again, the theory is important, so I was still happy to receive it. Most of the books I read present some information, but this one develops theory throughout. So if I read about new developments in myrmecology, the theoretical frameworks that I have now studied should help me contextualize, even if I have forgotten many of the details.

Another issue that cropped up from time to time is the method of organization that the two authors chose. When writing comprehensively, you can either explain each term or subject as it arises in the discourse of something else, or wait to develop them only when the appropriate category is elucidated. The authors here chose the later, which means I often googled terms or ant anatomy as I read. Though I do favor the former method, this isn’t really a criticism, it’s just their technique. If I was reading it as someone already at least moderately knowledgeable of ants, I’m sure it would have been fine. I wasn’t, but now I am.

There was, of course, much to enjoy, especially with how thorough the book is, filled with thousands of interesting aspects of ant life. My favorite topic was how much ant larvae are put to work. We have child labor laws, but ants don’t have play or love, they have work. Of the many tasks larvae have include feeding adult ants. Larvae may produce secretions, regurgitations, or even a snack out of their rear ends from digested food. Many larvae are even something of a snack. Queen ants often drink hemolymph, ant blood, from larvae. In some ant species, larvae are even physically adapted for this.

Aside from basically farming their own young, ants cultivate all sorts of crops and cattle. Some ants have other insects basically as cattle, sometimes using them as food, but mostly for what comes out of them–like honeydew out an aphid’s rear end, or a scale insect’s, or a caterpillar’s, or from a host of other insects. Even some trees are adapted to secret snacks (outside of their flowers) specifically to attract ants, which will then defend the tree from herbivorous insects and animals. Some ants even farm fungus. Fortunately, before reading this book, I had had the pleasure of seeing them do this at the Natural History Museum in NYC. Though the description in the book was more thorough.

The labor divide among female ants is interesting, as well as between the sexes. The lazy ant you find is likely a male ant, which lives for the purpose of inseminating a queen and then dying shortly after. But queens may live decades, while the longest-lived male ants get about a year, so we should cut the males some slack. There were cases of male larvae contributing, and maybe cases of adult males helping out have been discovered since this book came out.

Most importantly, this book has already been useful in understanding news stories. While writing this review, a study was published and widely publicized regarding how ant colonies in Africa impact an entire ecosystem, and how invasive ants consequently impact every trophic level. When explaining the article to friends, I was able to include more information because of my background, so I did really enjoy that. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lions-are-changing-their-hunting-strategy-because-of-ant-invasion/

So in the end, I probably won’t continue to read text books, though I did get a lot more information from this one than even an equivalent number of pages from other books. It was, however, much more difficult to get through. From the fact that it never reads with ease, to trying to remember math for population genetics, to the sheer size of the book, it can be difficult. I am glad that someone at the library requested to check out this book while I had it in my possession, so it does still retain both relevance and readership, 34 years after publication.