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Summary

Edward O. Wilson recalls his lifetime with ants, from his first boyhood encounters in the woods of Alabamato perilous journeys into the Brazilian rainforest.“Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony,” writes Edward O. Wilson, one ofthe world’s most beloved scientists. “Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg.” In Tales from the Ant World, twotime Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson takes us on a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambiqueand New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dauphin Island, and even his parent’s overgrown urban backyard, thrillinglyrelating his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with many of the Earth’s more than 15,000 ant species.Animating his scientific observations with illuminating personal stories, Wilson homes in on twenty-five antspecies to explain how these genetically superior creatures talk, smell, and taste, and more significantly, belong tocolonies that fight to determine dominance. Wryly observing that “males are little more than flying sperm missiles” orthat ants send their “old ladies” into battle, Wilson eloquently relays his brushes with fire, army, and leafcutter ants, aswell as more exotic species. Among them are the very rare matabele, Africa’s fiercest warrior ants, whose female hunterscan carry up to fifteen termites in their jaw (and, as Wilson reports from personal experience, have an incrediblypainful stinger); Costa Rica’s Basiceros, the slowest of all ants; and New Caledonia’s bull ants, the most endangered ofthem all, which Wilson discovered in 2011 after over twenty years of presumed extinction.Tales from the Ant World is a fascinating, if not occasionally hair-raising, personal account by one of our greatestscientists and a necessary volume for any lover of the natural world

Duration: about 5 hours (05:24:22)
Publishing date: 2020-08-25; Unabridged; Copyright Year: 2020. Copyright Statment: —

• Science & Technology