My son (he's 12) is currently infatuated with ants, he bought a colony from a GAN farmer through AntsCanada and is watching his videos all the time (they are great, by the way). We checked out Holldobler and Wilson's epic tome Ants (it's too expensive, even for a used copy, but a beautiful, large volume) but he found Wilson's Journey to the Ants much more readable, he's going through it page by page, taking notes, which I've never seen him to with a book before.

So, this led to some ant-related discussions with him. Did you know that ant colonies can have memories older than individual ants? (see this great Ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants?language=...) The bizarre concept of eusociality also came up, how did such a thing involve? If ants (and termites and bees) are so successful with this strategy why wasn't it adopted by more species? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality very few animals other than these exhibit eusociality (humans aside, which presents a complicated case).

There's fierce debate about the evolution of eusocial behavior, kin selection vs. other explanations. Wilson's theory presented in his 2010 Nature paper, co-written with two mathematical biologists [1], seems to be at odds with others and generated a strong reaction from other researchers [2] (see this Quora answer for a high-level intro to this technical discussion: https://www.quora.com/Does-EO-Wilson-Corina-Tarnita-and-Mart...).

My son is planning to put his mark on this debate in next year's science fair by trying to measure DNA similarity of worker ants from his colony :-)

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09836