By one of the world’s leading ant researchers, an eye-popping, page-turning tour of ants across the world and their surprisingly humanlike civilizations—from building megacities, to fighting disease, to farming livestock, to making war

Susanne Foitzik is an evolutionary biologist, behavioral scientist, and international authority on ants. After completing her PhD in ant evolution and behavior and conducting postdoctoral work in the US, she became a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She now holds a chair at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, where she studies the behaviors of slaveholding ants and different work roles in insect colonies. Her findings have been published in more than 100 scientific papers.
 
Olaf Fritsche is a science journalist and biophysicist with a PhD in biology. He was previously an editor at the German-language edition of Scientific American, is the author and coauthor of many books, and has been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. He lives in Germany.