The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants

This is one of the best overviews of ants and the people that study them ever written. Hoyt's text is clear and very readable. His biographies of ant scientists are interesting and well worth the time invested in reading the book alone. It is his synethesis of the work that scientists do that makes this book so valuable. He takes the information that science derives and recreates the facination of the animals in the field in a way that is very accessible to the reader. My only wish would have been more illustrations.

This book was very entertaining and I learned a lot about a few types of ants. The ant perspective was kind of a cool way to present the information. He does a good job of presenting ants and their ecological importance without getting so technical that it sounds like a paper in ecology. He did focus on Costa Rica but how can you blame somebody for doing that. I really got into it. The way he divided the story between the ants and the ant guys, E. O. Wilson namely, was a nice change of pace. It reads fast and the glossaries in the back help with any terms that aren't familiar. I really enjoy it. Buy the book, you'll learn lots and you will be entertained at the same time.

Wonder is in no short supply in The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants. Author Erich Hoyt tells us from the outset that this is going to be an ant's-eye view of things: "I have sought the perspective of viewing from less than an inch off the ground, as well as tunneling twenty feet below the earth and looking out from the inside of a hollow tree." A tribe of leafcutter ants becomes, not so much a brown river flecked with bits of green, but a MayDay parade of workers with leafy banners. The leafcutter ants are among the most fascinating of the incredible number of ant species. The leafcutter's tiny brain, amazingly, is capable of storing information on local landmarks to orient it's foraging (the chess-playing Deep Blue was nothing --let's see the gnomes at IBM replicate an ant's skills on a chip the size of a dot). The leafcutters, like all ant species, use pheromones -- chemical signals -- to communicate. This is sometimes exploited by other creatures: "Certain beetles, like highwaymen, wait to try to rob the ants of their food by giving them the ants own 'feed me' signal." The ants lay down trails with pheromones that allow others of their nest to follow. Hoyt chances upon once such trail -- "the long line of leafcutters now extends for hundreds of yards through this forest, along this ant highway swept clear of all debris. Two lanes, a regular speed land and a passing lane, lead toward the colony nest, while the third lane is for ants venturing out from the nest to cut more leaves." Ants aren't the only interesting characters in The Earth Dwellers. Hoyt spent several years in the field, tagging along with Harvard ant man Edward O. Wilson in the latter's effort to catalogue new species. The author gives an affectionate portrait of the gentle Wilson, whose love for living things found it's text in "the gospel according to Charles Darwin". Wilson "refers to the tropical rainforest as a cathedral, a place where the biologist makes pilgrimages, goes to worship and gape in wonder at the full flowering of evolution, the place where life is more diverse than anywhere else on earth." A biodiversity expert, Wilson is the most quoted scientist on our decimation of earth's life: according to his estimates up to 70 species are being killed off a day, for a sickening total of twenty-five thousand species a year. After the rancorous debate in the seventies on sociobiology, the science of genes and behaviour that he founded, Wilson is back with his "little things that run the world". Ants, to the Harvard prof, are DNA on the move, little Darwinian machines in exoskeletons. Hoyt quotes the professor : "The foreign policy of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighbouring colonies, wherever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week."