Planet of Ants: I Bought the Book for My Son—and Read It Myself (#Books)

My middle son really wanted a small ant colony, so we bought one. Then ordinary parental logic kicked in: if he had a colony, a book about ants would make a good gift. I chose Edward O. Wilson’s Russian edition, “Planet of Ants,” but read it myself before giving it to him. And I genuinely loved it.

The Russian title is a little misleading. The original is called “Tales from the Ant World,” which is closer to “Stories from the World of Ants” and far more accurate. This is neither a myrmecology textbook nor a guide to running an ant farm, but a collection of short scientific stories, expedition adventures, and memories. Wilson studied ants for almost 80 years and published this book in 2020 as a late summation of his long scientific life.

The book is at its best when it keeps changing scale. An individual ant looks like a fairly simple creature. A colony, however, has reconnaissance, division of labor, logistics, defense, care for offspring, “animal husbandry,” wars, and complex chemical communication. From the outside it resembles a perfectly coordinated society, but Wilson quickly warns against sentimentalizing it: ant worlds are warlike and include slavery, parasitism, and cannibalism. Even risk is distributed ruthlessly. Young workers tend the brood and work inside the nest, while older ants become guards, foragers, and soldiers. Humans send the young to war; ants send old ladies. It is a matriarchy in which all worker ants are female, while males live briefly and rather sadly.

After this book, the popular advice to learn teamwork from ants no longer sounds quite so innocent.

One of the most beautiful stories describes Wilson’s attempt in 1958 to decipher the pheromone language of red imported fire ants. When a scout finds a large food source, it returns to the nest and leaves a chemical trail. The scent tells its nestmates what was found and where to go. Under a microscope, Wilson removed glands the size of specks of dust, made artificial trails from their secretions, and observed the colony’s response. Once he found the right gland, the ants poured out of the nest and followed the line he had drawn exactly. In effect, he had deciphered one word in an alien language: “Follow me.”

Alongside these almost science-fictional scenes is ordinary, living science: uncomfortable field trips, wrong hypotheses, accidental discoveries, and experiments that have to be repeated. Wilson writes about ants not like an encyclopedia author who already knows every answer, but like someone still astonished by the scale of the unknown.

The book is not much help with maintaining a colony: it will not explain how to set up a formicarium or what to feed a particular species. But it is not strictly an adult book either. In the introduction, Wilson writes that he especially hopes to reach readers aged ten and up who dream of becoming naturalists, and my middle son is exactly 10. I hope the book shows him how vast and alien a world lies beneath the familiar bustle of tiny insects.

In short, I bought the book for my son, but the recommendation is entirely my own: if you want to see an almost extraterrestrial civilization under our feet in an ordinary anthill, Wilson does an excellent job.

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