The Leafcutter Ants is the most detailed and authoritative description of any ant species ever produced. With a text suitable for both a lay and a scientific audience, the book provides an unforgettable tour of Earth's most evolved animal societies. Each colony of leafcutters contains as many as five million workers, all the daughters of a single queen that can live over a decade. A gigantic nest can stretch 10 metres across, rise more than 1.5 metres above the ground, and consist of hundreds of chambers that reach eight metres below the ground surface. Indeed, the leafcutters have parlayed their instinctive civilisation into a virtual domination of forest, grassland, and cropland—from Louisiana to Patagonia.

Inspired by a section of the authors' acclaimed The Superorganism, this brilliantly illustrated work provides the ultimate explanation of what a social order with a half-billion years of animal evolution has achieved.

Regarded as one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists, Edward O. Wilson grew up in south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where he spent his boyhood exploring the region’s forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants—the latter to become his lifelong specialty. The author of more than twenty books and a professor at Harvard, he makes his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.