Reviews for Soul of the White Ant

The average rating for Soul of the White Ant based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-02 00:00:00 Anthony Davis (Just found out, you can get this book in its entirety online ) This is a wonderful book on termites, though I have yet to compare it with other books on termites. Marais clearly has a love for these creatures (or creature, as we shall talk about) and describes their behaviour diligently and with humour from the first flight of the queen and king to the soldiers. The major contention of this work is that a termitary is essentially a single organism composed of discrete parts. The argument is many-pronged and too complex to go into in a review but it is fairly convincing. He theorises that the queen, encased in a small cell in the center of the termitary, is the source of all the actions of the other termites. The many experiments to prove this include: 1) separating areas of the termitary with a large sheet of metal and watching the workers build an arch that matches near perfectly on either side. 2) stunning the queen and watching how all normal behaviour instantly ceases (including one particularly disturbing example in which as soon as she is stunned all nearby workers and the king leap upon her and suck all the fluid from her body, leaving her withered. She eventually recovers from this but I have rarely come upon something so frightening). 3) killing the queen, which causes all other termites to die unless there is another termitary nearby in which case they will simply serve that termitary. (It is necessary for the termites to be familiar with the others beforehand; if simply introduced into another termitary at random they will be instantly attacked.) The whole book is fascinating in a way that I would not have expected and I am very curious to find out what further research has revealed, especially with regard to the impenetrable mysteries dotted throughout. One such mystery is the termite queen's cell, in which she first begins to grow and bear children and grow, growing until she fills the cell, at which point she is moved to a bigger cell and then the process is repeated. The mystery in this is the fact that the opening of the cell would be impossible to get the queen through, the walls are not damaged and it is the same queen (unlike with other species with queens, where the queen may simply be killed and replaced). I have tried to find out what conclusions have been reached since then but it's hard to do (with a simple internet search, anyway). The book, originally written in Afrikaans, was only ever widely read in South Africa, and later a French(?) writer put forward his own, apparently new, 'the termitary is a single organism' theory to wide acclaim. Just a wonderful book, every moment, to the extent that I feel I need to mention many unnecessary facts from it, like that the queen must fly, even if it is only for a second or the amount of illusory flight caused by having your wings caught in a branch and flapping wildly; if she does not she will simply die. Any good termite books since the 30s please? Coherence would only be possible if left only with the first 6 words.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-29 00:00:00 Rusty Rose First published in 1925, this book is an extraordinary mix of careful scientific observation, brave and insightful hypothesis, and polemical rave. Eugene Marais was himself an extraordinary man who spent many years in the early 1900s combining professional work as a advocate with painstaking observation of animal behaviour including termites, baboons and snakes. He was also addicted to morphine for most of his life. Growing up in South Africa I've known about his writing for a long time but only now have I actually managed to read his first and most famous book. Among his observations are: * Termite mounds are entirely dependent on the queen, who spends her days deep in the nest, unable to move but constantly served by a stream of workers bringing her food, carrying away the eggs she lays (a the rate of thousands per day), and also apparently ferrying a secretion of fluid gleaned from her skin that feeds the pupae. Her male "royal consort" remains in constant attendance by her side. * If the queen is injured, the whole nest knows in minutes and redirects all energy to her care. If she dies, the entire community comes to a halt immediately and every termite dies within days. * The termites are able to create "boreholes" of 30 metres or more in depth through hard dry earth to collect water for the lifeblood of the nest. Individual workers in their thousands make half-hour journeys down this channel ferry up moisture a drop at a time to feed the queen, irrigate the "nurseries" and for use in construction of the nest. In the bigger picture, Marais identifies and explores the remarkable collective behaviour of the community which he sees as a "group soul" that manifests the life of the termitary through the highly-differentiated functions of workers, soldiers and royalty. This is akin to the different parts of a human body doing separate functions that create an organic whole. And he points out that this is all done through an energetic field that is not (or was not at his time) measurable with human instruments. The worker and soldier termites have no eyes or ears and yet they know instantly if something happens to the queen. It reminds me of what humans refer to as "relationship systems intelligence" - a third entity which is greater than the sum of its parts. And it makes me deeply curious to know more about termites!