E. O. Wilson Ants Quotations

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

Sstudying ants just quickly became part of me because I was allowed to wander, explore and find things and figure things out myself. And I saw how much was there and what could be done and how I could make a life of it.

Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.