The uncle's cellar that swallows everyone
Jonathan Wells moves his family into the Paris apartment of his late uncle Edmond, an entomologist who left a note warning never to go into the cellar. Jonathan goes down anyway and does not come back.
Empire of the Ants
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The colony as a superorganism without command
In the red wood ant city, the queen lays eggs but does not rule. The colony's behavior comes from individual ants trading chemical signals and sharing food mouth to mouth, which spreads information and hunger through the whole nest. Intelligence and decisions live in the pattern of local exchanges rather than in any directing mind, so the city acts like one distributed brain.
Scale turns the ordinary into the cosmic
The ants investigate a mysterious 'secret weapon' that wiped out an expedition without a trace. It turns out to be human hands and fingers, which the ants experience as an incomprehensible natural force. Seeing events from the smaller creature's scale shows that the same act can be trivial from above and a world-ending catastrophe or a religious mystery from below, and that each side's picture of reality depends on its size.
Six matches, four triangles: leave the plane
The recurring riddle asks how to make four equilateral triangles from six matches, which cannot be done on a flat surface. The answer is a tetrahedron, a pyramid built in three dimensions. The rule it teaches is that when a problem is unsolvable, look for the unstated assumption, here that the answer must lie flat, and solve it by adding a dimension of thought the question never ruled out.