Ants At Work: How An Insect Society Is Organized - Softcover

Gordon, Deborah

 
9781451665703: Ants At Work: How An Insect Society Is Organized
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1451665709 ISBN 13: 9781451665703
Verlag: Free Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

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, p

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deborah M. Gordon, Ph.D., studied at Oberlin College, Stanford University, and Duke University, and researched at Harvard University and the University of Oxford before joining the faculty at Stanford, where she is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences. She lives in Redwood City, California.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: The rhythms of the landscape

Red ant or ant of red abdomen

It is somewhat average in size, a little firm, a little hard, ruddy. It has a heap of sand, a mound of sand, a hill. It sweeps, makes itself sand heaps, makes wide roads, makes itself a home. It is the worst one to bite, if it bites the foot [the effect] extends to the groin; if it bites the hand, it extends to the armpit; it swells.

The Florentine Codex: Fray Bernardino de Sahagun,

General History of the Things of New Spain, 1590.

[Translation of Aztec description of the red harvester ant.]

25 acres

I study the ants at the side of a rough paved road that runs through a flat valley between the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains at the state line of Arizona and New Mexico. An enormous sky surrounds an endless reach of land. The Chiricahuas, to the west, are so close one can see the patches of rock change color during the day. The Peloncillos, to the east and north, form a jagged outline in the distance. To the south the desert stretches across the eighty miles to Mexico.

I stay at the Southwestern Research Station up in the Chiricahua mountains. The station belongs to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. At the peak of the summer season there might be fifty people staying there, mostly undergraduates who come to work either for the station or as research assistants for people like me. We get up at 4:30, when it is still dark, and meet in the dining room, where I usually wake myself up by industrious chewing of my Grape-Nuts. Then there is some antlike milling around while people make their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to get them through the morning, collect their water bottles and clipboards, and pile into the van. It's about a twenty-minute drive down into the desert. When I first came to work at SWRS, as a graduate student and then as a postdoctoral researcher, I rented cars, eventually moving from the aptly named Rent-a-Wreck to small rental cars that look embarrassed when covered with dust and turn out to have spare tires the size of a doughnut. But when I joined the faculty at Stanford, the university bought a huge air-conditioned van for the purposes of ant research, so we bump down the dirt road from the station in great style. Along the road I can usually avoid the rabbits that seem to throw themselves at the wheels of our van. Down in the flats, as I turn the corner at the Arizona-New Mexico state line, I adjust the visor to block the sharp glow of the rising sun.

You can recognize an ant researcher by looking at her ankles: We wear our socks over the cuffs of our pants. Experience with stinging ants teaches that you can see them on your hands, and feel them go down the back of your neck, but they can get up inside your pants faster than you can brush them off. However, in the desert, keeping off the sun is more difficult than keeping off the ants. Some people wear shorts, at least until they have been stung. Over the years I have evolved a costume that includes a long-sleeved shirt, a cap with a kind of curtain around its lower edge, and the largest sunglasses I can find. I look rather like an insect myself.

For the first few years my assistant and guide was Kristin Roth, who grew up at the station while her father was its director. Kristin taught me to distinguish landmarks in the desert. At first everything looked alike, and I could walk a hundred yards and have no idea how far I'd come. Kristin would stride past me in her cowboy boots, saying "Colony 81? It's right by that little bush over there." Since then, one to five students each year have come out to Arizona to work with me. Some love the desert; one year they happily played Frisbee with cow pies. Some are fascinated by ecology, enough to go on to graduate school. A few have been hooked for life on ants. Unfortunately, some discover that waking up at 4:30 a.m. to follow ants around and slowly roast is not their idea of fun. I do my best to warn everyone ahead of time that ant-watching in the desert is hard work, so anyone brave enough to come with me in the first place tends to stick it out.

The 25 acres I have inspected inch by inch, for the past seventeen summers, is part of a 7,000-acre cattle ranch. When I first saw the site in July 1981, it looked like an Alpine meadow, filled with a stunning variety of flowers. The land was owned by a rancher who fenced off areas of a few hundred acres each and rotated the cattle from one paddock to another. The profusion of flowers was the result of a few wet summers and a few years without cattle. In the late eighties the land was sold to another rancher who took down all the fences and stopped rotating the cattle. Because of heavy grazing and some dry summers, the site now looks very different from the flowery meadow of 1981. Much of the ground is bare, and only the toughest shrubs that cattle cannot eat survive: snakeweed (Guttieriza), Mormon tea (Ephedra), and acacia.

It rains in the spring and then more fiercely in July and August, when monsoon storms bring a few weeks of heavy rains, flash floods, and then, overnight, the first sprouts of green grass. In 1996 large areas of the site were underwater for a week after the heaviest rain, and then came a carpet of green grass. Some of the flowers returned, annuals whose seeds had waited out the many dry years since the early eighties.

On the first day there every summer, I park the van, get out, and walk on to the site with great relief and exhilaration; relief because once again the ants are still there -- no one has bought the land and built a convenience store on it; exhilaration at the prospect of shifting down from the human to the ant scale, from large to small and from the slow, emphatic tuba notes of human affairs to the light harpsichord trills of ant life. The ants are so busy; their business is so complicated; and on this little patch of desert they play out a perpetual rich drama, oblivious to all the other dramas that occupied me for the rest of the year. I discover again my irrelevance to the ants.

The Ants

The ants begin to come out at sunrise and stay out until about 11, when it gets so hot that they go back into their nests. Early in the morning we hear the calls of coyotes and the songs of desert larks. We see the occasional tarantula out for a morning walk along the warm asphalt road and, rarely, a rattlesnake too full and lazy to go back into its nest after a large nocturnal meal. Here and there is a collapsed kangaroo-rat mound; a few contain live rats, and recently ground squirrels have moved into some of the abandoned mounds. After rain the dung beetles earnestly roll their balls of cow dung much larger than themselves. Shiny black bombardier beetles point their rear ends in the air and threaten to spray acetic acid. The harlequin grasshopper has a red, blue, yellow, and green costume so much more like the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album than real life that when I first saw it I did not believe my eyes. The whiptail (Cnemidophorous) lizards undulate from the cover of one bush to another, offering brief flashes of their blue bellies, working up to the frenzy of the midday heat when they rush about so fast their tails don't touch the ground. Sometimes a desert tortoise walks by. For several summers an old jackrabbit came out from behind the same bush every few days to watch me, but he or she eventually disappeared, and the ones I have seen since are more reserved.

On the human scale, the site looks like a plain of chaparral scrub with mountains on either side. On the ant-colony scale, the site looks like a bumpy, sandy surface with lots of gray, orange, and pink boulders and the occasional bush or plant. By the time it gets warm, about 7:30 in the morning, the ground quietly...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451665709
ISBN 13 
9781451665703
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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