Discussion of The Fire Ants Book: Let’s Jump In

It appears that everyone who is interested in discussing The Fire Ants book has chimed in, and perhaps it is time to start discussing. I will start posting comments and discussion here at Wild About Ants. I’m planning to post once a week, hopefully on Tuesdays.

The Prelude on page 3 and the first three chapters go together well as a general introduction, so let’s start there. The first chapter is a quick overview of fire ant biology.

The second is a summary of the (confusing) state of Solenopsis taxonomy.

The third chapter is a very brief (one page) introduction to fire ant anatomy. Basically, Tschinkel is developing the vocabulary words needed to read the rest of the book.

This illustration from Wikimedia may be helpful for those of you who are unfamiliar with the specialized terminology used for ant anatomy.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

If you already read the chapters, try these other reviews of The Fire Ants for more information:

Entomological Society of America by Dr. S. Bradleigh Vinson

Harvard Press blog includes a link to this Washington Post article, plus has two related posts

The Kojo Nnamdi Show has a podcast of an interview

For those that don’t have a copy, excerpts of the book are available at Google Books. There are also reviews listed there.

Amazon also has reviews:

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