The Book of Ant Records: Amazing Facts and Feats

Promotional material accompanying the review copy of The Book of Ant Records explains that, when Katja Bargum was contemplating writing a book about ants, she approached groups of children to find out what they most wanted to know about these insects, and she found that many of their content concerns were framed in terms of superlatives, such as “What is the biggest, fastest or strongest ant?” Bargum is certainly the right person to answer the children’s questions as she has a doctorate in evolutionary biology from the University of Helsinki, wrote her dissertation on the social life of ants, and worked as an ant researcher for a half dozen years. Though originally published in Finland in the Swedish language, the contents of The Book of Ant Records have world-wide applicability.

Following some introductory material, The Book of Ant Records consists of 19 “chapters”, with all but two being made up of pairs of facing pages. As can be seen in the above “Excerpt”, the chapter titles identify the ant-related superlative that is being focused upon in that portion of the book. Sometimes, a chapter’s content, after dealing with its principal concern, will add some related information. For example, after naming “The Longest Lived-Ant” as being the 30-year-old queen ant in a colony of narrow-headed ants, Bargum goes on to address the life span of worker ants, one year, and males, just a few weeks.

As can be seen on the cover, Lucander employs a quasi-cartoon style in her illustrations. Her artwork often provides the natural setting in which the pages’ ants would be found, and frequently she includes cross sections of ant nests. The cartoon-like ants sometimes get speaking parts via speech bubbles as in “The Longest Lived-Ant” where a male ant complains about its life expectancy, saying, “Unfair!” to which a worker ant responds, “Yes, but you don’t have to work for your whole life.”

Obviously, The Book of Ant Records is not intended to be a comprehensive work on ants. Rather, the individual chapters essentially stand alone; however, there is one place where Bargum needed some “linking” clarification. In “The Least Common Ant”, Bargum writes: “She [the queen] is the most important ant in the mound, because she is the one who lays the eggs so new ants are born.” Later in the same chapter, Bargum adds: “They [worker ants] can tell from the queen’s smell if she is healthy and can lay lots of eggs. If the queen stops smelling the way a good queen should, the workers stop taking care of her and start laying their own eggs instead.” In the next chapter, “The Laziest Ant”, which focuses on male ants, readers are told that the male ants “are born only once a year, at the same time as the ant princesses who will later become queens.” Both the males and the princesses have wings, and “[t]hey live in the mound for just a few weeks before they fly away to mate with princesses and males from other mounds. For the rest of the year, there are only females in the anthill. [Emphasis mine]. “How then are the eggs of the worker ants, who have replaced the ailing queen, fertilized?” may be a question from “knowledgeable” young readers?

The Book of Ant Records is a very quick read as the text portions are presented in bite sized bits. As my wife can unfortunately attest, it’s not wise to sit too near anyone reading The Book of Ant Records because its fascinating contents of “Amazing Facts and Feats” simply demand to be shared aloud. And, “Yes”, the “pee” Excerpt was one of my [too?] many sharings.