ANTS – Gary Skinner & Andrew P Jarman
Pelagic Publishing, 2nd edition, 2025
Paperback, 327 pages, identification guides, distribution maps, full price £31.99
One of the great natural history books of the last 50 years is The Ants by Edward O Wilson & Bert Hölldobler, but the scope of that is worldwide. Those who identify ants in Milton Keynes have the advantage that there are only around sixty or so species of ant in Britain & Ireland: and more than half of these are uncommon and unlikely to be found in the wider Milton Keynes area.
Ants by Gary Skinner provides an overview of ant biology and distribution, with 60 pairs of pages, each left page for one British species and a distribution map on the opposite page. 75 pages are devoted to identification of ants. There are three sets of identification keys, for: workers, queens, males; and two ‘quick-check’ diagrammatic field keys. There is a whole section on how to study ants, with explanations of useful equipment, and other useful sections on ant biology and ants and their environment.
The first edition of this book, published 30 years ago in 1996, was by the same main author, Gary Skinner, who took advantage of Covid lockdown to make substantial additions and updates to create a much more substantial second edition. For this new edition, a second named author (Andrew Jarman) has been added as a joint author. In addition, the Acknowledgements make clear that myrmecologists are a collaborative group and many of them have contributed, particularly by guiding Gary Skinner to where he could find some of the rarer species.
A former MKNHS member, Mike Killeby, was a keen insect identifier. He studied Moths and set a reference collection of them in a cabinet. He subsequently widened his interests to identify adult Caddisflies, then moved on to Ants and Harvestmen. With Ants, he explored which were in each of MK’s three Ancient Woodlands. He placed his records with BMERC, the Buckinghamshire & Milton Keynes Environmental Records Centre.
Ants by Gary Skinner & Andrew Jarman is full of practical and useful information and provides useable keys. There are plenty of colour photos and enough resources to enable a keen naturalist to find and observe ants in their local area.
Mike LeRoy
Copyright © M G LeRoy April 2026