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(More customer reviews)Southerners hate fire ants.Let alone that they are convinced that fire ants ruin land and ravage gardens: fire ants hurt.Anyone stung by just one knows that they deserve their name, but so often people are not stung by just one, but by a cluster.So it is alarming to find a southerner who ardently feels another way about the creatures."I love fire ants," is the first sentence in chapter one of _The Fire Ants_ (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) by Walter R. Tschinkel, who says he has written it for "professional biologists and for people still open-minded enough to be intrigued, charmed, or fascinated by the many results of biological research on fire ants."Besides, the stings aren't so bad.He cites the Pain Rating Scale of Justin O. Schmidt, a venom specialist.Bullet ants get a 4+ rating ("like walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail imbedded in your heel") but fire ants muster only a 1.2 ("Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for a light switch."I think he understates!)People who are allergic to stings of insects must beware, but even thousands of stings don't do any real damage: "Inebriated persons using a fire-ant 'bed' have sustained over 5000 fire-ant stings without signs of general toxicity (other than that of alcohol)."That sort of writing is typical of the amused, light touch that Tschinkel has brought to a 700 page, three pound volume which Edward O. Wilson declares in the foreword "a masterpiece".(Wilson was responsible, in 1962, for steering Tschinkel from biochemistry and organic chemistry to his current studies.)
There is much more to the fire ant than just the sting, and it is hard to imagine that this volume has left anything out, except for all the research that there is still to do about still-mysterious details.Fire ants were imported accidentally from South America between 1933 and 1942.They moved out concentrically from Mobile, and there is a famous map of their expanding range as the years went by, but it wasn't just a simple matter of expansive growth by a species that liked the new real estate.They had help from the same vector that brought them to the United States, the humans which Tschinkel says fire ants must regard as benevolent gods.Distant foci of infestation were established "when obliging nurserymen unwittingly gave rides to hitchhiking fire ants."Fire ants would have had trouble crossing the desert, for instance, without our help, and so they got to California.There are lovely essays on the behavior of ant researchers interspersed among the more numerous and scientifically dense chapters.It is really rather astonishing all that Tschinkel and his fellows have been able to ask the ants experimentally and get them to reply.They have used remarkable techniques, such as tagging individual ants permanently with little wire belts around their waists: "Tying a wire around an ant's waist is simple, at least in principle."
Tschinkel is often confronted by people who want him to tell them how to get rid of the ants.If you have a hypersensitive member of the family, yes, it might be time for poison baits, he suggests, but otherwise he advises simply leaving them alone.After all, he says, they don't do any harm.Now, anyone who has been stung by these critters might question that, but Tschinkel provides ample data to show that there is little demonstrable harm done by fire ants, and even some good; Louisiana sugarcane farmers, for instance, recognize that fire ants go after sugarcane borers and thus improve crop yields.There have been efforts, waves of chlordane and Mirex, that humans have used to eliminate the ants, and when that failed, just to control their spread, and when that failed, there was nothing for the humans to do but give up.The Ant Wars were "a complex brew of science, politics, journalistic hyperbole, public hysteria, and legal maneuvering" and the humans lost.Fire ants will be around for at least as long as we keep making them at home, it seems, and in reading this impressive volume, it is hard not to admire the sophisticated ways they have evolved to keep themselves going.Even if you have no chance of becoming a myrmecologist yourself, you will find it hard not to admire the cleverness and hard work of the researchers devoted to them.Tschinkel's volume is a beautiful monument to fire ants and to science.
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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 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.
(20060425)
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