'The Lives of Ants' by Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon
I first became more interested in ants a few years ago when reading Steven Johnson's book Emergence (http://amzn.com/0684868768), where he used the social behavior of ant colonies as a natural world example of how complex and desired outcomes can arise from the actions self-organizing systems without the need for top down planning.
The Lives of Ants (http://amzn.com/0199541868) is a fast reading, nicely structured and engaging survey of the family of ants, who are one of the great success stories in evolution. Given its recent publication, the book incorporates current research - including the perspective of genetics and molecular biology - about these insects from a broad range of sources.
In their ~100 million year history, ants have been able to colonize all parts of the earth save for Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica. There are at least 12,000 species of ants and despite their small size, they are estimated to represent about 10% of the animal biomass on earth - roughly equal to all humans. There's lots of information in the book about the causes and effects of ants self-organizing social behavior as well as a wealth of fascinating details about how ants have adapted to so many ecosystems in a myriad of ways.
One of the things I did not realize about ants is how much variability there is between species and how they can differ greatly in the conduct and complexity of their social behavior. Also, it seems like any generalization which can be made about ants has at least one species that contradicts the norm.
The final section of the book, which draws parallels between the 'swarm intelligence' of ant and IT/robotics, does not work very well. Johnson's book is more effective in that regard. Also, this book was originally published in French and the translation seems a bit awkward in a few spots. That's really it for any criticisms I have.
