Table of Contents
Introduction Small But Mighty 1
Not all queens are created equal
Staggeringly small
The secret to success
Who really runs the world? Creepy-crawlies guaranteed
Chapter 1 Take Me To Your Leader! 7
Sisters are doing it for themselves
A creepy kind of nursery Mission: suicide
Trespassing in the name of science
A painful matter
A big head and a firm bite
Bagged up and carried away
Stung, bitten, and happy
Chapter 2 The Birth of a Colony 25
A queen's girlhood
Flying bundles of sperm
The queen meets her fate
Find your dream home Mom's hotel
Su casa es mi casa!
Chapter 3 Effective Anarchy 37
Wanted: 1,000-bed property with kitchen en suite
Six-legged computers
The wisdom of genes
You are all individuals!
Let's move house
Elective affinities
Community matters
Shortcuts to monarchy
Chapter 4 Communicative Sensuality 53
Seeing the light
A six-legged chemical plant
Do you speak chemistry?
The chemical code
Nose your place
The real chemtrails
Drums and strings
Chapter 5 Finely Tuned Navigation 71
Getting around the nest
A well-constructed road network
Behind the beech, right as far as the oak
Chasing the sun Sunshine on a cloudy day
Desert-dwelling masters of navigation Rewinding the tape
Celestial compasses
Chapter 6 Savage Hordes 89
No mercy
A special kind of tent
The queen is dieting again
This land is my land
Sausage flies and biting sutures
The Prince of Insects
Chapter 7 A Garden for a City of Millions 103
The flower children of the ant community
Birth of a megacity
A thousand rooms and three million inhabitants
The fungal issue
Advanced gardening
It's what's on the inside that counts
Small but deadly
Chapter 8 A Treehouse for the Nation 119
Theft = food
Will garden for room and board
An army of junkies
Inside the devil's garden
A flowering trash pile
A city in the trees
Chapter 9 Milking It: Ants and their Livestock 137
Manna from heaven
On land and on water
Team players
Adopted by ants
All good things come to an end
The oppressed becomes the oppressor
Keeping caterpillars
Behind enemy lines
Animal husbandry for dummies
Eating-and not getting eaten
Chapter 10 On Parasites and Slave-Makers 153
Gang warfare
The Magnificent Seven
The joys of living together
When ants just won't let go
When recruitment gets brutal
The fight for the honeypots
The queen is a Trojan horse
Professional slave-makers
It's all in the genes
The victims' bloody revenge
Six-legged Spartacus
The enslaved, but not as we know them
Chapter 11 Physician, Heal Thyself 177
Boils, pimples, and lumps
False fruits
Long-lived and world-weary
That darn tapeworm!
Remote-controlled death wish
Part-time zombies
Vaccination or death
Inside the ants' medicine cabinet
Killer commandos-and nurses
Chapter 12 The Path to World Domination 195
Ants at home
All alone in a foreign land
We have come to conquer
It's those genes again
Shaking up the ecosystem
Thrown to the lions
Golfers beware: there's a new kid in town
Cold-hardy and proprietorial
Heat-loving germ propagators
Tackling them with technology
A surprise ending
Battle of the supercolonies
Barricades and aromatherapy
Chapter 13 Crazy Critters 217
Taking it too far
Skydiving without a parachute
… One giant leap for an ant
Married off young
A genetic rebellion
Keep out!
Ka-boom!
Swarm intelligence for all
And finally, the weather
A Journey's End 237
References 241
Image Credits 269
Index 270
About the Authors 280
