A scientific tour de force, Deborah Gordon's "Ants at Work" takes
us to the amazing world of an ant society and reveals a new and
original understanding of how these tiny animals get the work of
the colony done. Gordon's surprising and deceptively simple message
that the queen is not in charge represents a fundamental shift in
modern biology. It is no less than a revolution in our thinking on
the mystery of natural organization.
Based on the author's seventeen years of research on harvester ants
in the Arizona desert, "Ants at Work" overturns all standard ideas
of insect society hierarchy. Gordon shows that an ant colony
operates without any central control and that no ant has power over
another. Yet the ant colony, harmoniously performs extremely
complex tasks; including nest building, navigation, foraging, food
storage, tending the young, garbage collection, and on occasion,
even war. She shows that there are no territorial borders in the
way we understand them because ants are always ready to change.
Ants also switch from one task to another, which undermines the
standard view that insect societies are run on a caste system.
Gordon explores how ants use simple, local information to make the
decisions that generate the complex behavior of colonies. New
colonies are born, struggle to occupy a foraging area, grow larger,
start to reproduce, and then settle in among their lifelong
neighbors.
Superb drawings of ants and maps directly from Gordon's field notes
enrich the experience of reading this breakthrough work. In these
maps we discover what ants do when a neighboring colony disappears
behind an enclosure and what they do when their neighbors suddenly
reappear. We see where different tasks of ant daily life are
performed. Through Gordon's wry sense of humor and lucid voice, we
experience the delights and frustrations of spending blistering
days in the desert between the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains
of Arizona, pursuing the mystery of the fascinating behavior of
"Pogonomyrmex."
By focusing on chaotic patterns of behavior instead of searching
for fixed universal laws, Gordon signals the future of scientific
investigation. She boldly contends that ant communication is a
model of how brains, immune systems, and the natural world as a
whole organize themselves. Her discoveries have profound
implications for anyone who is interested in how organizations
work, from biologists and physicists to business leaders and
pioneers of cyberspace. "Ants at Work" brings to the natural world
the insights of a new era in the science of life.
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