#55 The Leafcutter Ants

127 pages.

This is just another book that contains the elements of sociobiology that E. O. Wilson has been carefully explaining for decades, and I am only now scraping the surface.

I enjoyed this book because on each page I was presented with something completely new to me.  This was a very fruitful learning experience, as it turns out I didn't really know much about ants to begin with.  I remember watching documentaries of ants carrying leaves to their anthill, but I just assumed they ate them, but it turns out it is much more complicated than that.  They are actively culturing fungi with bio detritas.  The harvesters carry the bits of leaves to smaller worker ants who chop the harvest into smaller chunks and then they take those chunks to a fungus garden chamber and then place a fecal drop on the leave with promotes the growth of a certain type of fungus enjoyed by the colony.  I had no idea ants harvested and grew their own food, it is quite amazing.  And the life cycle of the colony is also amazing.  There is but one queen, who can live over a decade and lay between 150-200 million eggs in her lifetime!  Move over Hecuba!  All of the workers are females and do all of the work.  The only thing the males are good for is inseminating the queen, who will store their sperm her entire life.  After impregnating the queen the male dies.  The male never works or does anything other than go on a nuptial flight and dies!

This book was a little frustrating though, but I guess it was in a good way.  This was a short book at just over a hundred pages, I wished it were at least three times as long.  Every page would open my mind to wonder and raised all sorts of questions that were left unspoken in this little book.  Another frustrating aspect was that the authors would occasionally mention that scientists do not have the answer to this or that.  I had all of these questions and most of them can't even be answered.  Like, how does the queen know if she needs more workers or supersoldiers?  Do ants have different pheremones for different types of communication?  Basically I wanted to know more about communication.  I wanted to know the social structure of the superorganism.