Sex on six legs : lessons on life, love, and language from the insect world / Marlene Zuk

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? -- Six legs and a genome -- The inner lives of wasps -- Seinfeld and the queen -- Sperm and eggs on six legs -- So two fruit flies go into a bar -- Parenting and the rotten corpse -- Pirates at the picnic -- Six-legged language.

Insects have inspired fear, fascination, and enlightenment for centuries. They are capable of incredibly complex behavior, even with brains often the size of a poppy seed. How do they accomplish feats that look like human activity-- personality, language, childcare--with completely different pathways from our own? What is going on inside the mind of those ants that march like boot-camp graduates across your kitchen floor? How does the lead ant know exactly where to take her colony, to that one bread crumb that your nightly sweep missed? Can insects be taught new skills as easily as your new puppy? This book provides answers to these questions and many more. Zuk not only examines the bedroom lives of creepy crawlies but also calls into question some of our own longheld assumptions about learning, the nature of personality, and what our own large brains might be for.