About this item
Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, "the Indiana Jones of entomology," takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. In tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and a faster tempo. Moffett's spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles; warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them creating marketplaces and assembly lines and dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human--including hygiene, recycling, and warfare.
About the Author
Dr. Mark W. Moffett, called "the Indiana Jones of Entomology" by the National Geographic Society, is a tropical ecologist and research associate at the Smithsonian Institution and the Department of Human Evolution at Harvard with a passion for discovering new species and behavior in remote part of the world. Mark has sat on a deadly snake in Peru, been chased up trees by Indian elephants, defended himself with a blowgun in Colombia, been lost in Borneo and New Guinea, walked into Afganistan from Iran, seen 100 foot wide army ant swarms in the Congo, and placed a scorpion on Conan O'Brien's head. For Mark, nothing is better than a good story that presents a deep understanding of the world; his goal is to have people fall in love with the unexpected in nature, whether that's learning about the architecture of a rainforest or the life and death of societies. Mark has the Lowell Thomas Medal from the Explorers Club, the Distinguished Explorer Award from the Roy Chapman Andrews Society, Yale University's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, Harvard's Bowdoin Prize for writing, and numerous international awards in photography. His website is http://www.doctorbugs.com
