Insect (DK Eyewitness Books)
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Killer Ants
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The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
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News
Insect (DK Eyewitness Books)
|
Killer Ants
|
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
|
Here is a spectacular and informative guide to the extraordinary world of insects. Superb color photographs of beetles, bugs, bees, butterflies, and more give the reader a unique “eyewitness” insight into the variety and complexity of insects, their structure, life cycles and behavior. See a queen wasp building her nest, a caterpillar devouring a leaf, a cockchafer beetle taking off, two stag beetles fighting over a mate, and a damselfly nymph emerging as an adult. Learn why bees make honey, how to identify insects, why leafcutter ants build underground nests, how diving beetles live and breathe in water, and how mosquitoes spread disease. Discover how a wasp’s compound eyes work, which insects have ears on their knees, how wasp grubs feed on living caterpillars, how a butterfly can smell with its wings, and much, much more!
Deep in a tropical forest, a million soldiers are on the march. They hold their heads high. Their huge hooked jaws are wide open. They are ready to do battle. Nothing can stand in the way of the flesh-eating killer ants, who bite their victims and tear them to pieces to carry to their nests for food. These ferocious ants live all over the world–different killer ant species include army ants in Central and South America, red fire ants in the southern United States, and bulldog ants in Australia. This intriguingly written and intricately ilustrated picture book about the varied appearances, development processes, habitats, social behavior, and hunting behavior of killer ants will make readers shudder deliciously with fear as they marvel at the ants’ extraordinary lives.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of The Ants render the extraordinary lives of the social insects in this visually spectacular volume. The Superorganism promises to be one of the most important scientific works published in this decade. Coming eighteen years after the publication of The Ants, this new volume expands our knowledge of the social insects (among them, ants, bees, wasps, and termites) and is based on remarkable research conducted mostly within the last two decades. These superorganisms—a tightly knit colony of individuals, formed by altruistic cooperation, complex communication, and division of labor—represent one of the basic stages of biological organization, midway between the organism and the entire species. The study of the superorganism, as the authors demonstrate, has led to important advances in our understanding of how the transitions between such levels have occurred in evolution and how life as a whole has progressed from simple to complex forms. Ultimately, this book provides a deep look into a part of the living world hitherto glimpsed by only a very few.