The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies | 
| Author: Bert Holldobler
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
List Price: $55.00
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 1778
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.6
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 8.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 0393067041
Dewey Decimal Number: 595.71782
EAN: 9780393067040
ASIN: 0393067041
Publication Date: November 17, 2008
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
A Gorgeous, Comprehensive Update on Insect Societies December 8, 2008
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
29 out of 29 found this review helpful
We look at animals in natural domains and marvel at how well they get by, how they integrate themselves into the world, exploit their niches, and leave progeny. Anyone who examines social insects, like ants and bees, has to be particularly impressed. In fact, insect societies have been a particular inspiration to those who would like to see human societies operate just as smoothly, with every member dutifully fulfilling a role to the benefit of the larger group. Liberal and conservative politicians have turned to ants and bees for inspiration and for metaphors, but that's just because they don't know how basically weird such societies are. Let them read _The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies_ (Norton) by Bert Hoelldobler and E. O. Wilson. The authors are among the world's experts on ants, and in 1991 their book _The Ants_ won a Pulitzer Prize, so it is not surprising that ants get most of the pages here. Bees and termites are also covered, but naked mole rats, the closest mammalian example of this sort of colony life, are barely mentioned. This is a big book, beautifully produced with color pictures of insects in their home environments and drawings to show how they move, signal, and reply. It is also dense with serious scientific descriptions. It is not dumbed down for the lay reader, and could do for a textbook in an entomology course. Nonetheless, the descriptions are clear and the scholarship is deep, and any reader with an interest in science or nature will come away with an admiration for these strange societies and for the intensive research that is solving many of their mysteries.
The term "superorganism" for social insects was first used in a book in 1928, and the idea has waxed and waned over the decades, sometimes producing acrimony. It denotes a group of individual members that form a colony that has many attributes of a single organism. The authors' explanations of how the members of the colony function seems to be fully analogous with how an organism functions. Colony members, for instance, can be regarded as an organism's cells, and different castes can be organized as organs are in a single animal. These members can act, for instance, like a circulatory system, taking care of distribution of food, dispersal of waste, and transmission of chemical cues. The nest can be seen as the superorganism's skin or skeleton. The astonishing complexity of a colony does result from simple decision-making processes hard-wired into the colony members. As computers have shown, tiny repetitive algorithms can eventually yield astonishing complexity, and the tiny brains of ants and bees can store plenty of such programs. The result is that the colony can make decisions: Where shall we bivouac? Where does the next wall go? Where shall we roam for food? The decision-making and teamwork bring success. Social insects are hugely abundant; they are only 2% of the 900,000 insect species, but in total weigh more than all the others. A measurement in the Amazon rainforest showed social insects to be 80% of animal biomass, more than the sum of the mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.
This comprehensive book has one surprising fact after another about insect societies. It describes the now-famous waggle dance used by bees to inform the hive where a nectar source is, but research has revealed "other performances on the honeybee dance card". The returning bees do a shaking dance to get more bees onto an empty dance floor to get the news, or they do a tremble dance if they can't unload the incoming nectar, a dance that recruits more bees to be food handlers. Some ants engage in child labor. The queen of the Dracula ants pierces her own larvae to feed on their blood. Tropical weaver ants use the sticky threads produced by larvae, swinging the larvae back and forth like shuttles to bind leaves together to make a nest. There are over forty distinct glands in ant species that send hormones, mostly pheromones, out to communicate with others, but ants also "stridulate" (make a chirping sound like a cricket, although it is too small and high for us to hear) to get messages across. An ant grabs hold of another and shakes in a particular way to get the other to follow to a food trail, or shakes another way to get the other to go to a new nest site. Some ants have a "social stomach", a gastric crop within all the workers that holds nutrition to be shared with any other ant that does not have enough. Ants measure the way to a food source by counting their steps; researchers glued stilts onto foragers' legs as they went into the wilds, but took the stilts off before they could return. The ants returned the right number of steps, but found themselves short of home. These sorts of facts in such abundance here can only increase our wonder at the determination of the researchers prying out insect secrets. The authors end with a cheery recognition of how far this research has come, and how much more will be coming: "None of us now present can imagine the great advances certain to come. But of course, that is one reason we have future generations."
Rates Another Pulitzer Prize December 13, 2008
Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
This beautiful volume shows the amazing amount that naturalists have learned about eusocial insect species since the publication of the authors' Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ants, in 1990. The book is accessible to the lay reader, except for some introductory chapters that require some knowledge of genetics and population biology. These chapters can simply be skipped without compromising the understanding of other chapters. Both because of its breadth and the huge number of references to the professional literature, this book will likely become a reference for many researchers in sociobiology, including those whose specialty is eusocial insects.
From a theoretical standpoint, this book champions two ideas that E. O. Wilson has vigorously supported despite considerable criticism by biologists and social theorists. The first is that all social species share many traits in common, so that there is room for a special field, which Wilson calls "sociobiology," that charts the commonalities and differences among social species. This notion, laid out in Wilson's brilliant 1975 volume by that name, was greeted with scorn and contumely by social theorists who vehemently objected to including human sociality as a mere variant of biological sociality. The ensuing debate is brilliantly documented in Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford University Press, 2001). Of course, sociobiology has withstood the criticism of the ignorant and the intolerant, and is now a fully flourishing field.
More recently, E. O. Wilson has become an ardent supporter of group selection, which holds that Darwinian selection occurs on multiple levels, including the gene, the individual, and in species with a high level of sociality, on the level of the group itself. The central theme of this volume is that the eusocial insects are the product of biological selection on the level of the insect society (bee hive, termite mound, ant hill). Until recently biologists have considered this concept anathema, and many still choke on the idea of selection above the level of the gene, as forcefully expounded by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford: 1976). Lately he has teamed up with a long-time proponent of group selection, David Sloan Wilson, to produce a coherent defense of the notion, in the context of insect sociality. The chapter devoted to this issue in the book is a masterpiece that explains clearly the compatibility of gene-level and societal-level selection, and avoids all of the errors commonly committed by group selectionists of a previous generation.
This volume is a true tour-de-force, ably fulfilling two often incompatible goals, that of elegance, excitement and instruction for the general reader on the one hand, and a contribution on the level of basic research on the other.
The Life Behind Insect Societies December 16, 2008
Sacramento Book Review (Sacramento, CA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Eighteen years ago, Hoelldobler and Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for their book "The Ants." That book was an exhaustive study of the ant, yet written in an inviting enough way to gain popular readers. This new book expands past, but still includes, ants, and looks further into insect societies, including bees, wasps, and termites. Bringing in new research from the last two decades, "The Superorganism" explores the insect groups, bound together by complex communication, division of labor and altruism. By looking at insect societies less as a collection of individuals, and more as a part of a whole, our view of them, and of ourselves changes. Is a honey bee simply a mindless drone, existing only to support the queen, or a cell in a hive organism? This highly detailed, highly scientific and well illustrated book brings to light, and life, a much more complex insect world than most of us have ever considered.
Interesting and Educational! December 21, 2008
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book tells of the growth of knowledge concerning social insects over the past two decades. Super-organisms are colonies of individuals knit by cooperation, communication, and division of labor. Social insects - ants, bees, wasps, and termites - make up about 2/3 of insect biomass, but only 2% of the species. In a tropical rain forest, ants alone collectively weigh more than all the mammals and land vertebrates.
At maturity, each colony contains from 10-20 million members, according to species. In the great majority of instances, the colony members are all female. More than 905 of communications are chemical. Social insects distinguish their own nestmates from other colonies by using receptors on their antennae.
Particularly interesting is the authors' focus on leafcutter ants, who about 50-60 million years before man evolved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural life.
Multiply inseminated queens (the rule) create markedly lower disease susceptibility for a colony. In-breeding is kept down by the fact that different colonies breed at about the same time. After the mating flight, all males die. Mortality is also very high for the young queens - well over 98%. The new queen digs the beginnings of a nest, and cultivates the fungus garden she started herself at first with a piece of her "home" garden. At first she consumes 90% of the eggs she lays. Similarly, the first hatching larvae are also fed eggs. If the fungus started by the queen fails, the colony is doomed. After a week or so the young workers open the nest entrance, and start foraging.
The ultimate colony size may reach 5-8 million after 5 years. Younger workers tend to perform tasks within the nest. Vibratory sounds communicate to others nearby the quality of leaves being worked on.
A queen lives over ten years; each year, thousands of females grow up to potential queens, and several thousand short-lived males develop from unfertilized eggs. Overall, the queen lays about 20 eggs/minute (28,800/day, 10.5 million/year). Fungus-growing ants fertilize the fungal garden with their own feces. Waste management is mainly performed by older workers destined to die soon anyway; those exposed to waste material die at a higher rate.
A typical 6-year-old nest examined by experts contained 1,920 chambers, with 238 occupied by fungus gardens. The loose soil brought out weighted about 40 tons.
The authors then go on to also cover nest migration in the more nomadic species and the instance when disease among their fungus gardens has become a problem.
 Endlessly fascinating December 22, 2008
Victor Mark (Birmingham, AL USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This volume presents current evidence regarding social behavior among the social insects. Although it presents research findings, they style is easy to follow and it is well illustrated, such that the volume suits well also as a "coffee table book" for the layperson. It is, indeed, very hard to put down.
A minor quibble I have is that the volume deals almost exclusively with the ants, and thus bees and termites are seldom discussed, despite their being social insects also. No doubt, this bias reflects the specializations of the authors. However, I would have liked to have seen more balanced treatment among the various species of social insects.
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