Review of “Ant Mountain” (2017)

A super-colony of ants in the Swiss Jura mountains, exhibiting a number of interesting characteristics.

Wood ants live in one of the most highly organized and complex of insect societies. They fight wars over territory, they hunt in packs and farm other species. They build complex homes with central heating. They produce their own medicine.

And so on, extending to what presenter David Attenborough likens to shared myths in early human societies: Flying to a central meadow for mating, and then impersonating a different species (field ants) to chemically enslave the workers and establish a new colony of wood ants. The latter strategy is more typical of ordinary, warlike wood ants than of the super-colony.