Next!, Observing the Ants

Next!, Observing the Ants PDF Author: Joanna Korba
Publisher: Benchmark Education Company
ISBN: 145093014X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
The school production of Peter Pan must go on . . . but how can it when the lead actors can't be found? What will the director do? Jesse likes observing an ant hill with his new friend Derek. That is, until Jesse's other friends make fun of it. What will Jesse learn about friendship and being true to himself? Read these plays to find out.

Next!, Observing the Ants

Next!, Observing the Ants PDF Author: Joanna Korba
Publisher: Benchmark Education Company
ISBN: 145093014X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35

Get Book Here

Book Description
The school production of Peter Pan must go on . . . but how can it when the lead actors can't be found? What will the director do? Jesse likes observing an ant hill with his new friend Derek. That is, until Jesse's other friends make fun of it. What will Jesse learn about friendship and being true to himself? Read these plays to find out.

Ants at Work

Ants at Work PDF Author: Deborah Gordon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393321326
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Ants have long been regarded as the most interesting of the social insects. With their queens and celibate workers, these intriguing creatures have captured the imaginations of scientists and children alike for generations. Yet until now, no one had studied intensely the life cycle of the ant colony as a whole. An ant colony has a life cycle of about fifteen years--it is born, matures, and dies. But the individual ants that inhabit the colony live only one year. So how does this system of tunnels and caves in the dirt become so much more than the sum of its parts?Leading ant researcher Deborah Gordon takes the reader to the Arizona desert to explore this question. The answer involves the emerging insights of the new science of complexity, and contributes to understanding the evolution of life itself.

Secret Lives of Ants

Secret Lives of Ants PDF Author: Jae Choe
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404281
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
All of nature is revealed through the secret lives of the amazing ants.

The Ants

The Ants PDF Author: Bert Hölldobler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040759
Category : Ants
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
From the Arctic to South Africa - one finds them everywhere: Ants. Making up nearly 15% of the entire terrestrial animal biomass, ants are impressive not only in quantitative terms, they also fascinate by their highly organized and complex social system. Their caste system, the division of labor, the origin of altruistic behavior and the complex forms of chemical communication makes them the most interesting group of social organisms and the main subject for sociobiologists. Not least is their ecological importance: Ants are the premier soil turners, channelers of energy and dominatrices of the insect fauna. TOC:The importance of ants.- Classification and origins.- The colony life cycle.- Altruism and the origin of the worker caste.- Colony odor and kin recognition.- Queen numbers and domination.- Communication.- Caste and division of labor.- Social homeostasis and flexibility.- Foraging and territorial strategies.- The organization of species communities.- Symbioses among ant species.- Symbioses with other animals.- Interaction with plants.- The specialized predators.- The army ants.- The fungus growers.- The harvesters.- The weaver ants.- Collecting and culturing ants.- Glossary.- Bibliography.- Index.

The Fire Ants

The Fire Ants PDF Author: Walter R. Tschinkel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674072405
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
Walter Tschinkel’s passion for fire ants has been stoked by over thirty years of exploring the rhythm and drama of Solenopsis invicta’s biology. Since South American fire ants arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1940s, they have spread to become one of the most reviled pests in the Sunbelt. In The Fire Ants, Tschinkel provides not just an encyclopedic overview of S. invicta—how they found colonies, construct and defend their nests, forage and distribute food, struggle among themselves for primacy, and even relocate entire colonies—but a lively account of how research is done, how science establishes facts, and the pleasures and problems of a scientific career. Between chapters detailed enough for experts but readily accessible to any educated reader, “interludes” provide vivid verbal images of the world of fire ants and the people who study them. Early chapters describe the several failed, and heavily politically influenced, eradication campaigns, and later ones the remarkable spread of S. invicta’s “polygyne” form, in which nests harbor multiple queens and colonies reproduce by “budding.” The reader learns much about ants, the practice of science, and humans’ role in the fire ant’s North American success.

The Evolutionary Ecology of Ant-Plant Mutualisms

The Evolutionary Ecology of Ant-Plant Mutualisms PDF Author: Andrew James Beattie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521252814
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This important work explores the natural history, experimental approach, and integration of evolutionary and ecological literature of ant-plant mutualisms.

A Field Guide to the Ants of New England

A Field Guide to the Ants of New England PDF Author: Aaron M. Ellison
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300188905
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This book is the first user-friendly regional guide devoted to ants—the “little things that run the world.” Lavishly illustrated with more than 500 line drawings, 300-plus photographs, and regional distribution maps as composite illustrations for every species, this guide will introduce amateur and professional naturalists and biologists, teachers and students, and environmental managers and pest-control professionals to more than 140 ant species found in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. The detailed drawings and species descriptions, together with the high-magnification photographs, will allow anyone to identify and learn about ants and their diversity, ecology, life histories, and beauty. In addition, the book includes sections on collecting ants, ant ecology and evolution, natural history, and patterns of geographic distribution and diversity to help readers gain a greater understanding and appreciation of ants.

Adventures among Ants

Adventures among Ants PDF Author: Mark W. Moffett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520945417
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, "the Indiana Jones of entomology," takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. In tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and a faster tempo. Moffett’s spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles; warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them creating marketplaces and assembly lines and dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human—including hygiene, recycling, and warfare. Adventures among Ants introduces some of the world’s most awe-inspiring species and offers a startling new perspective on the limits of our own perception. • Ants are world-class road builders, handling traffic problems on thoroughfares that dwarf our highway systems in their complexity • Ants with the largest societies often deploy complicated military tactics • Some ants have evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating other insects and growing crops for food

The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions

The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions PDF Author: Victor Rico-Gray
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226713547
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Ants are probably the most dominant insect group on Earth, representing ten to fifteen percent of animal biomass in terrestrial ecosystems. Flowering plants, meanwhile, owe their evolutionary success to an array of interspecific interactions—such as pollination, seed dispersal, and herbivory—that have helped to shape their great diversity. The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions brings together findings from the scientific literature on the coevolution of ants and plants to provide a better understanding of the unparalleled success of these two remarkable groups, of interspecific interactions in general, and ultimately of terrestrial biological communities. The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions synthesizes the dynamics of ant-plant interactions, including the sources of variation in their outcomes. Victor Rico-Gray and Paulo S. Oliveira capture both the emerging appreciation of the importance of these interactions within ecosystems and the developing approaches that place studies of these interactions into a broader ecological and evolutionary context. The collaboration of two internationally renowned scientists, The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions will become a standard reference for understanding the complex interactions between these two taxa.

The Guests of Ants

The Guests of Ants PDF Author: Bert Hölldobler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674276442
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
A fascinating examination of socially parasitic invaders, from butterflies to bacteria, that survive and thrive by exploiting the communication systems of ant colonies. Down below, on sidewalks, in fallen leaves, and across the forest floor, a covert invasion is taking place. Ant colonies, revered and studied for their complex collective behaviors, are being infiltrated by tiny organisms called myrmecophiles. Using incredibly sophisticated tactics, various species of butterflies, beetles, crickets, spiders, fungi, and bacteria insert themselves into ant colonies and decode the colonies’ communication system. Once able to “speak the language,” these outsiders can masquerade as ants. Suddenly colony members can no longer distinguish friend from foe. Pulitzer Prize–winning author and biologist Bert Hölldobler and behavioral ecologist Christina L. Kwapich explore this remarkable phenomenon, showing how myrmecophiles manage their feat of code-breaking and go on to exploit colony resources. Some myrmecophiles slip themselves into their hosts’ food sharing system, stealing liquid nutrition normally exchanged between ant nestmates. Other intruders use specialized organs and glandular secretions to entice ants or calm their aggression. Guiding readers through key experiments and observations, Hölldobler and Kwapich reveal a universe of behavioral mechanisms by which myrmecophiles turn ants into unwilling servants. As The Guests of Ants makes clear, symbiosis in ant societies can sometimes be mutualistic, but, in most cases, these foreign intruders exhibit amazingly diverse modes of parasitism. Like other unwelcome guests, many of these myrmecophiles both disrupt and depend on their host, making for an uneasy coexistence that nonetheless plays an important role in the balance of nature.