The Ant Collective: Inside the World of an Ant Colony

By Armin Schieb

Princeton University Press 204

As Armin Schieb makes clear in his magnificent 2022 book Das Ameisenkollektiv, the whole world of the red wood ant (Formica rufa, presumably, though Schieb doesn’t specify) begins with a queen in search of a castle. She’s on her own, roaming the scrublands and woodlands, letting nothing deter her (if the walking gets too awkward, she’ll detach her own wings to make it easier). Once she finds a likely ant colony, Something with good foraging potential and property values, she wades right in. 

That colony’s worker ants naturally fight back. But since she’s something new and unexpected, they often don’t have any experience coordinating against her, and since she’s bigger and tougher and smarter than they are individually, she can make short work of scattered individual defenders. 

She enters the nest with only one goal: to find that nest’s queen and tear her apart. That old queen, enervated by luxury and endless egg-production, usually doesn’t put up much of a fight. The victorious new queen sets up residence, douses the whole place in her powerful scent, and honestly, what are the hapless worker-ants to do? Take to the road and set up taco stands? No, they become slaves to the new queen, bringing her food and news, clearing out her waste, nursing her eggs, and caring for her larvae. The queen is the entire heart of any nest, and this one has had a transplant. 

The nest will go on to handle everything from extremes of weather (red ants are found in a wide swath of areas that prior to the 21st century often had very cold winters; they respond by huddling together at the very lowest levels of the nest and going completely dormant) to predators like woodpeckers hungry for the slave ants or wild boars hungry for larvae in their glistening white cocoons (some of the worker ants throw themselves at these intruders, climbing on them in search of vulnerable patches of skin or gum or eye, while others shoot them from a distance with sprays of formic acid, the smell of which draws more and more defenders to the fray).

All of these kinds of things have been described before, but there has never been an ant book anything like The Ant Collective. Schieb’s illustrations use 3-D enhancement rendering technology in order to bring the ants into incredibly sharp focus, from the tips of their pretarsus to the slope of their tergite. Schieb doesn’t merely tell the reader where ants are going (indeed, there’s hardly any sustained telling in the book, which has no actual text), he shows it all in such incredible detail that no review reproduction can do justice to the results. The details unobtrusively accumulate until the reader is moved to sheer wonder. This is the kind of alien world-building most science fiction authors never even approach in its combination of strangeness and familiarity. 

And yet, the wonders being shown in the pages of The Ant Collective (now produced in an uncredited English-language translation from Princeton University Press) aren’t relegated to unreachable alien worlds. Virtually anywhere on Earth where you finish this fantastic book, you can turn the final page, put the volume down, go to the nearest patch of field or ground, for once pay attention to it, and simply take up the story from there. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News