The Ants is a Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction monograph of natural history and biological information about the Formicidae family of insects. As is typical of scientific monographs, individual personalities are deliberately kept to an absolute minimum.

The text includes a broad overview of information including: taxonomy; colony organization and structure; evolutionary elements; chemical and other communication methods; individual and colony life cycles; population and community ecology; symbiotic and other specializations; a review of the main types of ants; and collecting and observing techniques.

The large-format text contains 732 pages, is divided into twenty chapters, and also includes a glossary and an extensive annotated bibliography. The text is fully indexed, and includes nearly one thousand illustrations, photographs, charts, graphs, and also offers twenty-four, full-color plates. It is generally considered to be the definitive source of introductory scientific knowledge on ants, and is an authoritative encyclopedic reference for all myrmecologists. It has been extensively cited in biological and entomological literature and is frequently used as the text for graduate-level seminars in biology.