A Conversation With Bert Hölldobler – NYTimes

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 | Personalities

A Conversation With Bert Hölldobler

Insects Succeeding Through Cooperation

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: June 16, 2009

At 72, Bert Hölldobler, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University and a professor emeritus at the University of Würzburg in Germany, is one of the world’s great ant experts. Along with his collaborator, E. O. Wilson, Dr. Hölldobler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for “The Ants.” The two wrote a second book in 2008, “The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies.”

Q. DO YOU CALL AN EXTERMINATOR WHEN ANTS INFEST YOUR KITCHEN?

A. No, I don’t mind them. Listen, if you have ants in the house, you take a wet towel and detergent and you wipe over their trail. Do this a couple of times and they’ll stay out. People come up after speeches and say, “But what can we do, we have ants?” I say, “Buy a magnifying glass and enjoy watching them.”

Read the complete interview at the New York Time’s website here.