Hoping to not lose all that I learned reading about ants for months, I wanted more. This book is part autobiography, part discovery, and part ant facts. With all due respect to Mr. Wilson’s autobiographical sections, my favorite parts were the latter two, especially the discovery. How did they discover one fact or another is often more fascinating than the facts themselves. For example, much of ant anatomy was discovered through histology, sectioning ants, and then reconstructing the insides.

Sometimes the experiments conducted can be a bit shocking. When studying the chemicals in the Dufour’s gland, Edward O. Wilson and his colleagues had to kill and harvest thousands of ants. Keeping in mind, however, that there are upwards of 200,000 ants per fire ant colony, it’s not more than a blip in the colony. Furthermore, no experiments have shown ants to have feelings and instead live only work to preserve the colony and create new ones, so it wasn’t cruel, but still somewhat gruesome. The real problem with this story is that it mentions a different scientist discovered that there are different chemicals to excite, to attract, and to lead the ants on a trail. But this book does not detail that experiment or where the other chemicals come from. The Ants may at times have been too thorough for a casual reader, this was often too sparse.

So in the end, I was somewhat disappointed with this book. Not because it was bad, but just lacked what I was looking for. It is an easy, casual read, and perhaps a decent introduction to further reading, but further reading is necessary.