Each colony of leafcutters contains up to five million workers, all the daughters of a single queen that can live for over a decade. A nest can stretch nine metres across, rise one and a half metres or more above ground and can reach over seven metres below ground. The leafcutter ants have expanded their instinctive civilisation into a virtual domination of the land from Louisiana to Patagonia.
This book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, is the ultimate explanation of what a social order with a half-billion years of animal evolution has achieved.
Bert Hölldobler is the Foundation Professor at Arizona State University. Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard University professor for nearly five decades, was the author of more than twenty books. Both are the recipients of numerous awards.