Name: Journey to the ants
ISBN: 9780674485266

Journey to the ants

Hailed as "a masterpiece" by Scientific American and as "the greatest of all entomology books" by Science, Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson's monumental treatise The Ants also was praised in the popular press and won a Pulitzer Prize. This overwhelming success attests to a fact long known and deeply felt by the authors: the infinite fascination of their tiny subjects. This fascination finds its full expression in Journey to the Ants, an overview of myrmecology that is also an eloquent tale of the authors' pursuit of these astonishing insects. Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement. Accompanying Holldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants cooperate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they use propaganda and surveillance, and how they exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalence between allegiance and self-aggrandizement.

What Hacker News says

merryochaJul 2026

If you're interested in ants (and even if you're not) I highly recommend the book Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.

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senthil_rajasekAug 2024

If you find Ants interesting you would probably like E.O. Wilson's works. That's all he did his entire life, study ants.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_Ants

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aerovistaeMar 2022

It's not my field, but feels like an appropriate answer.

After the recent death of the myrmecologist EO Wilson, I decided to order a couple of his books and have spent the last few nights reading "Journey to the ants". It has been completely fascinating, I can't put it down.

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ANarrativeApeDec 2021

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond Journey to the ants - Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Lewis A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay (In addition to its inspiring message on overcoming adversity, it also taught me a powerful message on the difference between diversity and inclusion - the latter only happened afterwards when it was pointed out to me - another lesson...) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (keep a highlighter ready for each episode of altruism)

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martinpwJan 2022

Looks like The Ants is quite expensive ($200+). I see a couple of other books on ants by him, would you recommend either of these?

Journey to the Ants https://shop.harvard.com/book/9780674485266

Tales from the Ant World https://www.harvard.com/book/9781324091097_tales_from_the_an...

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Jun8Jun 2019

My son (he's 12) is currently infatuated with ants, he bought a colony from a GAN farmer through AntsCanada and is watching his videos all the time (they are great, by the way). We checked out Holldobler and Wilson's epic tome Ants (it's too expensive, even for a used copy, but a beautiful, large volume) but he found Wilson's Journey to the Ants much more readable, he's going through it page by page, taking notes, which I've never seen him to with a book before.

So, this led to some ant-related discussions with him. Did you know that ant colonies can have memories older than individual ants? (see this great Ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants?language=...) The bizarre concept of eusociality also came up, how did such a thing involve? If ants (and termites and bees) are so successful with this strategy why wasn't it adopted by more species? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality very few animals other than these exhibit eusociality (humans aside, which presents a complicated case).

There's fierce debate about the evolution of eusocial behavior, kin selection vs. other explanations. Wilson's theory presented in his 2010 Nature paper, co-written with two mathematical biologists [1], seems to be at odds with others and generated a strong reaction from other researchers [2] (see this Quora answer for a high-level intro to this technical discussion: https://www.quora.com/Does-EO-Wilson-Corina-Tarnita-and-Mart...).

My son is planning to put his mark on this debate in next year's science fair by trying to measure DNA similarity of worker ants from his colony :-)

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09836

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