PLANET OF THE ANTS: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors, correction to the error tha Humankind rule the world

PLANET OF THE ANTS: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors
SUSANNE FOITZIK & OLAF FRITSCHE (tr. Ayça Türkoglu)
The Experiment
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Shortlisted for the 2022 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize

This sweeping portrait of the world’s uncontested six-legged conquerors will open your eyes to the secret societies thriving right beneath your feet—and shift your perspective on humanity.

Publisher’s note: Planet of the Ants was previously published in hardcover as Empire of Ants.

Ants number in the ten quadrillions, and they have been here since the Jurassic era. Inside an anthill, you’ll find high drama worthy of a royal court; and between colonies, high-stakes geopolitical intrigue is afoot. Just like us, ants grow crops, raise livestock, tend their young and infirm, and make vaccines. And, just like us, ants have a dark side: They wage war, despoil environments, and enslave rivals—but also rebel against their oppressors.

Engineered by nature to fulfill their particular roles, ants flawlessly perform a complex symphony of tasks to sustain their colony—seemingly without a conductor—from fearsome army ants, who stage twelve-hour hunting raids where they devour thousands, to gentle leafcutters cooperatively gardening in their peaceful underground kingdoms.

Acclaimed biologist Susanne Foitzik has traveled the globe to study these master architects of Earth. Joined by journalist Olaf Fritsche, Foitzik invites readers deep into her world—in the field and in the lab. (How do you observe the behavior of ants just millimeters long—or dissect a brain the width of a needle?) With more than sixty black-and-white photographs and illustrations throughout, Planet of the Ants will inspire new respect for ants as a global superpower—and raise new questions about the very meaning of “civilization.”

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My Review: Decidedly a book for those seeking information about ants, and the unbelievably complex natural world they rule over, manage, and allow us...quite graciously, I think after reading this book...to exist on.

If not for antkind, humanity would struggle to exist briefly, then wink out. This is not a supposition, as reading this analysis of exactly what ants get up to, and how important it is they get up to it, will elucidate for you.

Eminent German myrmecologist Foitzik explains with a fortuitous eye for the *telling* detail the ecological role of the ant species we've learned of so far, and who really knows how many more there are awaiting discovery? We *think* there are over 22,000 species, and we've classified by niches and relationships about two-thirds of those. We think there are tens of quadrillions of individual ants on Earth today: that's over 10,000,000,000,000,000.

Is your mind blown yet? Does the sheer biomass that ants represent now begin to dawn on you?

Translator Ayça Türkoglu turns the erudite prose by the learnèd expert in ant studies into very readable English. Olaf Fritsche's eye for the journalistically important details (he was an editor at the German-language edition of Scientific American), and long experience as a German-language writer of books for children, means the text is crisp and clearly organized. The photos are quite good at illustrating the points made in the text:

Ants occupy a vital position in the entire planet's ecology. I think this is underappreciated, even among the nature-minded folk who read widely. It really should be required of us that we take more important information about the true rulers of the Earth on board.

Anything else I could tell you is just a bastardized version of the authors' far more educated prose. What I'm here to tell you is that this read is packed with important and interesting facts, presented in a very readable way (you noticed the fact that this book was shortlisted for a German-English translation award, right?), about a very underappreciated genus of animal. It is fine for the science-mad fourteen-year-old and up as a #Booksgiving gift. I would encourage you to gift it to every young woman with a fondness for life sciences of any kind: Susanne Foitzik is world-ranked in her field, and a very prolific scientist with an excellent reputation.

A message we can, I trust, agree is one we need to send to the generation being educated in the US these days.

BLUE: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Color, gorgeous book about most people's favorite color

BLUE: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Color
KAI KUPFERSCHMIDT
The Experiment
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world—and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching color

Blue is a rare color—natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue—and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light.

Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany—home of the last Spix’s macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our “blue marble” planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Where do you fall on this infographic?

A solid plurality of the world's people are fondest of the color blue. (Red's my choice.) The amazing thing is, this is a really rare color whether as a pigment...a substance that stays blue even when altered...or as a structural color, when the way a surface reflects and/or refracts light causes the eye to perceive it as blue.

Blue light is rare on the surface of the Earth. Green is, as I imagine you can suss out, the most common color of light down here. That's how plants can afford to reflect it, so we see their leaves as green.

Cornflower blue is a very satisfying color, but I still prefer the stem myownself. The Table of Contents gives you a good, solid feel for this book's modus operandi. You're going to see beautiful images throughout, of course, but they're llustrating concepts about color, how it is made, seen, and used in the natural world.

Rocks are the primary sources of blue pigments. They are not always stable in their blueness, with many things impacting that stability. The kind of light and the amount and humidity of air the pigments are exposed to can impact the stability of the color perceived by our eyes.

Animals apearing blue to our eyes are using structural color, the kind that relies on properties of the surface of the animal to show as blue. Changing a factor in the environment, or simply moving one's angle of view, will cause the color to change or disappear.

The surface now being scratched, I hope you can appreciate the subtle way a color comes to exist in your mind is the actual subject of this book. Kai Kupferschmidt is a science journalist based in Berlin, with degrees in molecular biomedicine, so he's a reliable guide to the science he's discussing. What he isn't is a boring writer. He's equally facile at disccussing Picasso's Blue Period and how our eyes do the work of showing us color.

This book gets my vote for going into the stocking of young artists, biologists, physicists...reall, anyone who loves blue, likes learning, and can appreciate a beautiful browsing book that also repays solid reading time.