Trailhead By Edward Osborne Wilson: Summary
While I was reading Trailhead, I felt like I am in a history class; sitting at a desk, listening to my professor… Because narrator tells us the story from the very beginning, start of the colony, the peak years as their civilization expands, the decline as the Queen goes weak, chaos as she dies and last of all collapse as a rival, vibrant colony senses their weakness and invades.
In Trailhead by Edward Osborne Wilson, the life of the Trailhead Colony ants is described. The story starts with the death of the queen ant. Then it explains how the colony was created by her. It was not easy but it paid off with a successful colony that lasted decades. Then the queen ant died, she was replaced by the new Soldier-Queen, but the colony doomed to die,
because she only produced male drones; “contributing nothing to the welfare of the colony”. At the end, a dynamic neighboring colony ultimately took over.
“She has become a perfect statue of herself” Wilson writes. I liked the way how he describes death in this sentence, I had never think of a dead body this way. He mentions ants as pioneers, “guided entirely by instincts” he continues; because “no one existed to teach them.” This reminds me of “Myth of the Ant Queen” by Steven Johnson, because both Wilson and Johnson talk about ants as the creatures who just doing things by instinct of what their genetic genes tell them to do.
According to me, this is a well-written, documentary like story about ants. It is also instructive, we learn the lives of ants; how they communicate, interact, feed and reproduce from a world renowned expert on these insects. We see ants in every period of their lives which is worth to learn. I have to say that “Trailhead” was different and interesting to read because it consists of facts, it’s not just the creation of Wilson's imagination. But at the same time, unfortunately, sometimes these facts took me away from this fictional world and throw me into the world of popular science.
To sum up, this story is a dramatization of lifecycle of an ant colony in a hostile environment, full of unknowns, full of misfortune, who have only themselves on which to depend. I finished the story not excited to read more of this, but rather interested in reading a scientific book on ants.
In Trailhead by Edward Osborne Wilson, the life of the Trailhead Colony ants is described. The story starts with the death of the queen ant. Then it explains how the colony was created by her. It was not easy but it paid off with a successful colony that lasted decades. Then the queen ant died, she was replaced by the new Soldier-Queen, but the colony doomed to die,
because she only produced male drones; “contributing nothing to the welfare of the colony”. At the end, a dynamic neighboring colony ultimately took over.
“She has become a perfect statue of herself” Wilson writes. I liked the way how he describes death in this sentence, I had never think of a dead body this way. He mentions ants as pioneers, “guided entirely by instincts” he continues; because “no one existed to teach them.” This reminds me of “Myth of the Ant Queen” by Steven Johnson, because both Wilson and Johnson talk about ants as the creatures who just doing things by instinct of what their genetic genes tell them to do.
According to me, this is a well-written, documentary like story about ants. It is also instructive, we learn the lives of ants; how they communicate, interact, feed and reproduce from a world renowned expert on these insects. We see ants in every period of their lives which is worth to learn. I have to say that “Trailhead” was different and interesting to read because it consists of facts, it’s not just the creation of Wilson's imagination. But at the same time, unfortunately, sometimes these facts took me away from this fictional world and throw me into the world of popular science.
To sum up, this story is a dramatization of lifecycle of an ant colony in a hostile environment, full of unknowns, full of misfortune, who have only themselves on which to depend. I finished the story not excited to read more of this, but rather interested in reading a scientific book on ants.