Speaker 1: You're on the bus an hour from home, and bumper
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Speaker 1: someone's kids are screaming, and suddenly your back is too. Luckily,
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Speaker 1: read the label or leaflet.
Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your grandma's new boyfriend who just wants
Speaker 2: to show you some magic tricks. Ali Ward back with
Speaker 2: another episode. Apologies, so it's Tuesday, man, Let's learn about
Speaker 2: some aunts. They're tiny, they're mighty, they're harmless, sometimes not,
Speaker 2: and they're more organized than all of the clowns on
Speaker 2: your slack thread. But you know what, maybe you don't
Speaker 2: want to see thousands of tiny ladies having an all
Speaker 2: night rave in your cereal pantry. But to quote common parlance,
Speaker 2: can a bitch live? Let's learn about these little creatures,
Speaker 2: and more importantly, let's suck some self help and organizational
Speaker 2: strategies out of them. With a mirroracologist, which is a
Speaker 2: word you only know about if you're a mirrorcologist. But first,
Speaker 2: per usual, you know the drill. I say thank you
Speaker 2: to people who let me keep the podcast going. All
Speaker 2: the patrons at patreon dot com slash ologies who pay
Speaker 2: a buck or more a month, All the folks who
Speaker 2: put ologiesmerch dot com things on their bodies, including a
Speaker 2: ton of very dare I say delicious fall designs like
Speaker 2: vintage looking college sweatshirts and bird print mugs and train shirts,
Speaker 2: brand new enamel pins for epidemiology. And as always, thank
Speaker 2: you to the folks who say, you know what this
Speaker 2: pod is worth, mashing the star button on the iTunes
Speaker 2: app and maybe leaving a review for dad word to
Speaker 2: creep in the night when she feels lonesome, and then
Speaker 2: read aloud to you to prove that I read them.
Speaker 2: So this week's fresh review is in from someone calling
Speaker 2: themselves don't know yet, They say, my only problem with
Speaker 2: this podcast is that every episode makes me want to
Speaker 2: go do all of the things, and I don't have
Speaker 2: time in my day to do all of it, like
Speaker 2: hike the railroad lines, scale a volcano, conserve the ocean,
Speaker 2: redefined beauty standards. Ah I freaking love this podcast. Have
Speaker 2: shared it with everyone I know. Currently writing this in
Speaker 2: myology shirt. That is all. Don't know yet one thing
Speaker 2: I know. You seem cool. Thanks for listening. Thank you
Speaker 2: for the reviews. Dad Ward loved it. Oh okay, Mermacology.
Speaker 2: I said that all strung out like a line of
Speaker 2: ants to do you like it? Good? Okay? So I'm
Speaker 2: writing this before looking up the etymology. I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: say I wrote this before I looked it up. I
Speaker 2: took a wild guest that it was Greek for aunt.
Speaker 2: Hold on, I google it, damn it. I'm right. But
Speaker 2: it wasn't coined until nineteen o six, when naturalist William
Speaker 2: Morton was like, dang it out love ants. I need
Speaker 2: a title that sounds like a wizard. So he took
Speaker 2: Mrma and put Mycologists. There you go, Mirimacologists done. Now
Speaker 2: this ologist I had followed on Twitter for months and
Speaker 2: months and months and months, and our schedule is never
Speaker 2: quite aligned to do an episode. And finally he was
Speaker 2: back from the rainforest on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and
Speaker 2: I was so excited to sit down and chat. So
Speaker 2: he spends part of his time in the rainforest of
Speaker 2: Costa Rica studying tropical ants, and is also a biology
Speaker 2: professor at cal State University Domingus Hills, which has over
Speaker 2: ten thousand students, seventy percent of whom are first generation
Speaker 2: college students. I think that is awesome. Now. The result
Speaker 2: of this is a whole nest of facts about invasive
Speaker 2: species and colony communications and the bizarre genetics of queen ants,
Speaker 2: and why army ants are your new squad, and what
Speaker 2: it really really really feels like like for real, to
Speaker 2: get stung by a bullet ant? Isn't that bad? And
Speaker 2: what we can learn about our own strength and work
Speaker 2: ethic from these lovely ladies and some dudes we call ants.
Speaker 2: So get ready, make a bee line, make an ant
Speaker 2: line for this chat with Mrmacologist Doctor Terry McGlenn. Yes,
Speaker 2: did I say it right?
Speaker 3: Mycologists? Mrmacologist? I think well, like all these words, there's
Speaker 3: no proper way of saying it. It's just the ones
Speaker 3: that are socially acceptable among people who do so. You
Speaker 3: can't say a word wrong. You just say a word
Speaker 3: different than other people say.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, how long have you been
Speaker 2: a Mrmacologist?
Speaker 3: I started working on ant it's in nineteen ninety four
Speaker 3: when I started grad school. So a minute, Yeah, so
Speaker 3: that's a couple decades, right, level decades.
Speaker 2: Of ants, not literally under your belt, in your pants,
Speaker 2: but just in your life. So what was it about ants?
Speaker 3: So I realized, Okay, this is the one question that
Speaker 3: I knew you're going to ask, was why did you
Speaker 3: work on? Answer? When I was in college, I started
Speaker 3: out as a psychology philosophy double major, and then I
Speaker 3: ended up being like pre med. Although I even interviewed
Speaker 3: at med school, took the MCAT, the whole thing. I
Speaker 3: have no idea why. But then I had this epiphany
Speaker 3: when I was flying home for my first med school interview,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, this is not what I want to do.
Speaker 3: These people are not my people. I didn't want to
Speaker 3: do that for a living. And the whole time in
Speaker 3: college I was taking all these courses about organismal biology, ecology, evolution, conservation.
Speaker 3: I was auditing a class in insect biology, and I
Speaker 3: was like, well, that's what I think is really cool.
Speaker 2: Actually, So before getting his PhD in Colorado, Terry majored
Speaker 2: in biology for undergrad at Occidental College, Obama's alma mater
Speaker 2: here in La and when he was thinking about grad school,
Speaker 2: he was considering Europe, and he ended up interviewing with
Speaker 2: a Swiss professor who studied ants. He even flew out
Speaker 2: to interview, the first time he'd ever left the country. Now,
Speaker 2: in the end, he didn't study at that lab, but
Speaker 2: the experience of emailing back and forth with this Swiss
Speaker 2: dude unveiled the tiny, wonderful world of meremacology.
Speaker 3: And it seemed really, really, really cool. So after that
Speaker 3: I decided, Wow, I want to work on the evolution
Speaker 3: of social behavior in insects and answer you know, you know,
Speaker 3: use social insects ants that have this colonial lifestyle.
Speaker 2: Now, let's unpack this really quick. Do you think having
Speaker 2: an interest in social science and philosophy plus a little
Speaker 2: biology interest like those were married perfectly in a social insect?
Speaker 3: Maybe because I think my interest original, like you know,
Speaker 3: the angsty teenager that just went to college. We're interested in, Well,
Speaker 3: what makes us human? I was wondering, and I still wonder, like,
Speaker 3: how is it that we are way we are? That
Speaker 3: we you know, they think we feel, we love, we perceive,
Speaker 3: but we are just mere meat, like we are just
Speaker 3: somehow this tissue of our brain is what we are.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's just amazing to me that everything we
Speaker 3: experience is that meat. And it still is amazing to me,
Speaker 3: And I think I wanted to study that, and I
Speaker 3: realized I don't think neurobiology was there or is there
Speaker 3: yet to do.
Speaker 2: That so quick as I at first I thought he
Speaker 2: was saying mere me, as in like merely myself, But
Speaker 2: I think he's saying mere meat like that we're meat,
Speaker 2: which is so much more metal. What a metal way
Speaker 2: to look at our delicate existence, I approve.
Speaker 3: And so I think what fascinates me about ants is
Speaker 3: it if you just look at it a different level
Speaker 3: of organization, like what is a what is an organism?
Speaker 3: What is a super organism? What is an ant? Colony?
Speaker 3: How do you have something which is so well organized
Speaker 3: out of small pieces that are really really dumb.
Speaker 2: So many ants right now are sipping oat milk cortados
Speaker 2: over the economist just being like wow, wow, really.
Speaker 3: Right, Like ants are really stupid, But colonies often do
Speaker 3: complex tasks really well. I mean they have small little brains.
Speaker 2: Walk me through a little bit of a colony. Because
Speaker 2: we had an episode on melotology bees and so we've
Speaker 2: covered some social insects. But what are the similarities between
Speaker 2: bees and ants? Are they all mostly women? Are they
Speaker 2: all like driven by pheromones or behavior or vision? Like
Speaker 2: what's going on down there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so all kinds of bees are complex, just like
Speaker 3: all kinds of ants are complex. So the way that
Speaker 3: honey bees organize the division of labor and so that
Speaker 3: thing where you do one task, then you get promoted
Speaker 3: to another task and you get promoted to another task,
Speaker 3: that's the temporal polyethism.
Speaker 2: So that means at different times you do different things,
Speaker 2: like your chores as a kid may have gone from
Speaker 2: feeding the cat to doing the laundry to driving your
Speaker 2: siblings to school. Now, if your kids don't think you're
Speaker 2: enough of a douche, tell them that it's imperative that
Speaker 2: they engage in temporal polytheism to acquire their weekly stipend.
Speaker 2: That way they can talk about you to a therapist
Speaker 2: later in life.
Speaker 3: However, some ants might be more inclined to perform some
Speaker 3: tasks rather than others. Some ants are more generalists, some
Speaker 3: are highly specialized.
Speaker 2: WHOA, So there's like engineer ants and like architect ants
Speaker 2: and ones that are like you know what, guys, I'm
Speaker 2: like pretty good at finding seeds, so I'm just gonna do.
Speaker 3: That sort of. But if you were to remove some
Speaker 3: ants from the colony or add some fromants in the colony,
Speaker 3: they might change their tasks. So some ants have broad
Speaker 3: variety and body sizes. So, for instance, leafcutter ants, you
Speaker 3: have these huge, huge ones with these big heads. They're
Speaker 3: used for chopping stems and defending the colony, for like
Speaker 3: when vertebrates attack, and you have these tiny, tiny little
Speaker 3: ants that might tend the fungal garden and ride on
Speaker 3: the leaves. And so the way that the polymorphic ants
Speaker 3: divide labor and the way that monomorphic ants divide labor
Speaker 3: is different.
Speaker 2: It's a little different. Yeah, Now what is your work
Speaker 2: like day to day? Do you? Here's what I picture
Speaker 2: tell me if I'm wrong. I picture that you work
Speaker 2: in a lab and it's full of aquariums that are
Speaker 2: just big riding balls of ants, and you also have
Speaker 2: a clipboard in maybe a lab coat, and then sometimes
Speaker 2: you're in the fields with a magnifying glass. Is any
Speaker 2: of that correct? No, Okay, just checking.
Speaker 3: So I think my average workday is probably not that
Speaker 3: different from yours, which is like I'm sitting in front
Speaker 3: of a laptop, okay, or I'm standing at my desk
Speaker 3: or whatever. And so in the lab, I have a
Speaker 3: bunch of ants, a ton of ants, but they're all dead.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Okay, what are they organized into like
Speaker 2: a little tiny pins or are they just in shoe boxes?
Speaker 3: So I have them in vials, and these vials would
Speaker 3: be packaged in racks, and these racks are on shelves, okay,
Speaker 3: and so so like if you know, visiting a museum,
Speaker 3: then there's all these ants that are you know, mounted
Speaker 3: in collections in pins. And so we when we mount
Speaker 3: ants in museum collections, you glue them onto the tip
Speaker 3: of a little point and put the pin through that
Speaker 3: so you can look at them. Because if you put
Speaker 3: the pin through the ant, then it messes them up.
Speaker 2: So you yeah, that'd be like, that'd be like, oh,
Speaker 2: we just put a missile through alley, Like, yeah, it's not.
Speaker 2: You can't do that to an ant taddy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, even the really really big chunky ants that you
Speaker 3: could kind of do that too, by convention, we don't, Okay,
Speaker 3: I keep most of mine just sitting in alcohol from
Speaker 3: the way I collected them, and most of the ants
Speaker 3: that I've collected our whole colonies. Oh but these whole
Speaker 3: colonies are really really tiny ones. They like the they
Speaker 3: would easily fit inside a thimble, like they would occupy
Speaker 3: like a two milli liter tube with tons of space
Speaker 3: available there.
Speaker 2: I mean, a whole colony is like two hundred bros
Speaker 2: or ladies.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, Like, well it depends. I mean, so some
Speaker 3: colonies will just have like ten or twenty or thirty ants,
Speaker 3: and then some might have hundreds. But even for these
Speaker 3: tiny little ones that I work with on the leaf
Speaker 3: litter of the rainforest floor, the ants themselves are so
Speaker 3: tiny that a colony of a couple hundred ants will
Speaker 3: still fit into a tiny little tube.
Speaker 2: That's crazy because these.
Speaker 3: Are unspeakably tiny.
Speaker 2: How did you get involved with the tiniest ants? Were
Speaker 2: you like, I have great vision, ergo, I.
Speaker 3: Will work with the tiny ants now, Uh well, no,
Speaker 3: as actually, and so now I just started worrying, like
Speaker 3: the progressive lenses. Hey, So it's like, uh so when
Speaker 3: I'm out in the field with students, like they're seeing
Speaker 3: things that I literally cannot see.
Speaker 2: Microscopic micro machine micro machines. The micro machine pocket place
Speaker 2: that sold simply from gloob.
Speaker 3: The smaller they are, the better they are.
Speaker 2: So for his dissertation, Terry worked with Wasmania oropunk Tata.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm saying that right. So let's
Speaker 2: just call them little fire ants because that's their name
Speaker 2: unless you're from down Onda.
Speaker 3: Although in Australia they call it the electric ant. And
Speaker 3: these ants are like a couple millimeters long and so
Speaker 3: really really tiny and if they sting you, it feels
Speaker 3: like a little pink prick, and which is amazing something
Speaker 3: that talk can actually small it can hurt you. I know,
Speaker 3: most ants are really tiny. A lot of them are
Speaker 3: just that small.
Speaker 2: I'm so little, like smaller than the ones that we
Speaker 2: see trying to eat like a watermelon rind on the countertop.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, so here in La the ones that you have,
Speaker 3: I don't know if you get them in your place,
Speaker 3: But the Argentine ants, people think of the that's a
Speaker 3: common invasive species found in Mediterranean climates or whatnot, the
Speaker 3: one that was taking over my kitchen last week.
Speaker 2: Oh no, oh my god, what did you do, because
Speaker 2: you're like a godfather to them? Did you commit mass anticide? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, actually I've wiped off the ones off the counter.
Speaker 2: No, how dare you?
Speaker 3: But then I just blocked the entrance off. So it's
Speaker 3: not like I need to kill I wasn't trying to
Speaker 3: kill them all off. I just kept them from getting in.
Speaker 3: So like I have, like you know, the cock gun
Speaker 3: ready to go, and I keep finding a new space
Speaker 3: where they So it's like the evolutionary arms race is
Speaker 3: them finding new ways to get in me caking that spot.
Speaker 2: So now that is one thing you can do if
Speaker 2: you don't want to just like send in a poisoned
Speaker 2: cake and be like kill off your whole colony. That's
Speaker 2: a nice thing to do. So side note. As a
Speaker 2: college sophomore, I lived in my first house with friends.
Speaker 2: Everyone was pretty goth and got along, but one of
Speaker 2: my roommates was very very stony, blooney like a lot,
Speaker 2: which was so endearing, and we had an ant infestation
Speaker 2: and he told me all about these things called grants
Speaker 2: ant sticks. They're these baits that you soak in hot
Speaker 2: water and then you set out and he explained to
Speaker 2: me like this.
Speaker 4: Well, all right, okay, like if you were so hungry, right,
Speaker 4: you found like twenty pizzas and you took them to
Speaker 4: your friends and you were like, shit, you guys, pizzas
Speaker 4: it's rules and everyone's like what was best? And then
Speaker 4: but the pizza's like poisoned everyone. It's like so tight.
Speaker 2: I've never forgotten this tutorial. And I'll be honest, I
Speaker 2: have used these ant baits every time I've had an infestation,
Speaker 2: and I felt so bad about it, like I'm the
Speaker 2: villain in their action movie. But it does work for
Speaker 2: a while.
Speaker 4: Tight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's also really really that's only going to
Speaker 3: be a short term solution anyway, because even if you
Speaker 3: get the toxic bait that they'll take and bring back,
Speaker 3: which you know, could be effective, but the thing is
Speaker 3: that's going to kill them all for a while. But
Speaker 3: eventually there's going to be some that are just moving
Speaker 3: back because you can't eliminate ants from the entire neighborhood.
Speaker 3: And the way these it's essentially, you know, for the
Speaker 3: most part, it's like one big whole colony, super colony
Speaker 3: all throughout the LA area.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, wait a minute, Okay, so these Argentinian ants
Speaker 2: which are invasive, and they're the tiny, like not tiny,
Speaker 2: but they're the small, little black ones that invade your kitchen. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I know that they kind of have outpaced harvester ants,
Speaker 2: which are the bigger, kind of like Amboerrie color ones
Speaker 2: that live in the hills, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which people call red ants, yeah, harvest r ants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there it just kind of spans one big
Speaker 2: colony under the city.
Speaker 3: For the most part, or occupying the whole city.
Speaker 2: This blew my mind. If your friend moves ten miles
Speaker 2: away in LA, you will never see each other again,
Speaker 2: like burbank to who that is a forever goodbye, just
Speaker 2: move on. But for ants, they're all essentially roommates. The
Speaker 2: Argentine ants, the little ones that are invasive species but
Speaker 2: have like pretty lax dietary tastes that lead almost anything.
Speaker 2: They have a California colony that stretches five hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty miles, which is nothing compared to one colony in
Speaker 2: southern Europe thirty seven hundred miles, big billions of sisters.
Speaker 2: So it's no wonder that the harvest or ants, with
Speaker 2: their kind of picky diet of locally harvested seeds are
Speaker 2: getting smoked by their Argentine relatives.
Speaker 3: The last I know, there's one big super colony. So
Speaker 3: if we were to get ants in one part of
Speaker 3: LA and move them to another part of LA. They'll
Speaker 3: be a hey, sister, how's it going, and accept them
Speaker 3: just like the members of the same colony.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's so weird.
Speaker 3: And so if you were to grab ants and put
Speaker 3: them in a vial and then go like one hundred
Speaker 3: miles two hundred miles, either they'll get along or they don't.
Speaker 3: And if they don't, that means that you've hit a
Speaker 3: new super colony. And you can tell where the border
Speaker 3: between the super colonies is because there's like a line
Speaker 3: of dead ants on the ground where they just.
Speaker 2: Go to war no cool labunnas, Yeah, are you kidding me?
Speaker 3: And they're just constantly fighting. But there's one large supercolony
Speaker 3: that has taken over most of LA.
Speaker 2: And they're all in the same family. So now even
Speaker 2: if they're the same species, they'll have a battleground. They'll
Speaker 2: be like a line of death.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, so in general, for ants, their biggest enemy
Speaker 3: is another colony of the same species.
Speaker 2: Oh it's like humans, Yeah exactly? Is that like a
Speaker 2: lot of social animals, like they operate as such one
Speaker 2: massive super organism that like their biggest predator really is
Speaker 2: their own species.
Speaker 3: Well, I would say their biggest predator, but their biggest competitor, right,
Speaker 3: because the thing is, I mean, so if they're you know,
Speaker 3: because if the species has a niche and they're nesting
Speaker 3: in a particular environment, and they're consuming the same kind
Speaker 3: of food and they need the same environmental requirements, then
Speaker 3: of course if there's another colony that's just like you,
Speaker 3: that has the same environmental requirements, then they're your biggest competition.
Speaker 2: How many species of ants are there?
Speaker 3: I think described we might be up to twelve thousand dish,
Speaker 3: I think the estimates and people say there's probably about
Speaker 3: twenty thousand, but maybe about half of them aren't described,
Speaker 3: Like we haven't put names to them yet.
Speaker 2: So if you want to be a meremacologist, just know
Speaker 2: that eight thousand species of ants are like notice me, please,
Speaker 2: I'm right here. They're begging you to be an ant scientist,
Speaker 2: but they probably don't know the part about putting some
Speaker 2: of their friends in jars. Even though it's to identify
Speaker 2: and save ant it seems like a difficult task for
Speaker 2: ant lovers, Like I love you, I kill you, but
Speaker 2: I love you I kill you. Do you have a
Speaker 2: favorite species of ant? Be honest, it's hard.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess one of my favorites are the
Speaker 3: bulldog ants in Australia, the marmicia. What I have to say, Well,
Speaker 3: so they're really big and they have these bulging eyes,
Speaker 3: but they're one of the few ants they almost act
Speaker 3: like a vertebrate like most ants if you mess with
Speaker 3: their calling, even like the big bullet ants that I
Speaker 3: work with and whatnot, that they sort of just run
Speaker 3: around and get upset and like, oh I might sting you,
Speaker 3: Oh look I'm fear or they'll freak out or run away.
Speaker 3: But the bulldog ants they'll just send a few ants
Speaker 3: up out of their nest and they'll look at you
Speaker 3: and just open their mandibles and be like I see you.
Speaker 3: It's like what it's like, they're just yeah, they just
Speaker 3: stand up and it's like it's like an intimidation thing.
Speaker 3: And also they have a really painful sting. So I
Speaker 3: mean they're actually, you know, honestly advertising how badass. They are.
Speaker 2: So bulldog ants actually mad dog Now, Okay, explain to
Speaker 2: me a little bit about the social behavior, because I
Speaker 2: think that's one thing that people are just like mesmerized
Speaker 2: by ants because they have this social behavior. They have
Speaker 2: these tiny little brains. How do they do it? Is
Speaker 2: it all through pheromones? Like is it just innate? What's like,
Speaker 2: what is even happening here?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean so clearly. Ants communicate with chemicals a lot.
Speaker 3: Chemicals are a huge, big part of their communication, I
Speaker 3: mean visual inputs for the most part. There are some
Speaker 3: blind ants, ones that live underground usually don't advise or
Speaker 3: don't use them or whatever. But we're still working out
Speaker 3: in detail, like which chemicals are used in what circumstances.
Speaker 3: So some will have a very discrete signal, like, for example,
Speaker 3: in a famous circumstance, it's like if you put this
Speaker 3: one chemical on an ant that commutes to other ants
Speaker 3: that they're dead, so they'll pick it up and drag
Speaker 3: them into the waste pile.
Speaker 2: Even if they're kicking and screaming, being like what's up, hey, assholes,
Speaker 2: I'm fully alive, and they're like, sorry, you smell like
Speaker 2: a corpse, so you're out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's totally the story. Yeah, that EO. Wilson did,
Speaker 3: Like that is the comical thing. He would paint a
Speaker 3: live ant with a chemical that says that they're a
Speaker 3: dead ant, and then the ants would be dragged living
Speaker 3: over to the dead pile.
Speaker 2: Yes, so rough.
Speaker 3: The concept is is that the way that colonies divide
Speaker 3: labor essentially that some ants will do some things, other
Speaker 3: ants will do other things. And it's and we we
Speaker 3: have we're not even close to understanding the details of
Speaker 3: how one species does things differently from another species. And
Speaker 3: why so, friends, if you take ants, a colony of ants,
Speaker 3: and you put them like in an area there dirt
Speaker 3: and let's see, and you give them a chance to
Speaker 3: excavate a nest like, so different species will have different
Speaker 3: nest architectures, and it's like, oh, you know, and so
Speaker 3: you can look at the structure of a nest or
Speaker 3: a structure of a nest entrance, or you could do
Speaker 3: a casting of a nest and be like, oh, I
Speaker 3: think I know what species it is, just on the
Speaker 3: shape of the nest that they dig. And so how
Speaker 3: is it that every that a species is socially organized
Speaker 3: to do something like that repetitively? I mean, there's still
Speaker 3: so much to learn. But in general, it's thought that
Speaker 3: the way that colonies organize complex behavior is based on
Speaker 3: interactions with one another. So if you interact with an individual,
Speaker 3: then that communicates different kinds of information depending on what
Speaker 3: chemicals you share, what body posture you have, you know,
Speaker 3: like in honey bees for example, what orientation your body is.
Speaker 3: So from all of these small little pieces of behavior,
Speaker 3: and then we have a complex colony emerge.
Speaker 2: So a lot of small simple computers can make a
Speaker 2: big complex computer. And yes, of course this is being
Speaker 2: studied by the military. Imagine a million tiny robot soldiers.
Speaker 2: Or maybe don't do you get optimistic about solving future
Speaker 2: problems with maybe some themes or things we've learned from
Speaker 2: ant behavior? Or are you like, oh shit, we're going
Speaker 2: to learn from ants and we're all going to kill
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 3: I'm terrified at the concept that we could use you know, learning,
Speaker 3: education and technology to do bad things regardless, I think
Speaker 3: I think there's if we study how social insects work,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of power and understanding how the world works.
Speaker 3: And so I think by studying insects then we can
Speaker 3: tap into lots of new knowledge and then it's up
Speaker 3: to us to use that wisely.
Speaker 2: Now, can you give me some hot goss? Can you
Speaker 2: like spill the tea on some of ants crazy behaviors,
Speaker 2: like what kind of Real Housewives shit happens in those colonies. Also,
Speaker 2: are they mostly ladies?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Oh yeah, so yeah, so we mentioned before, So
Speaker 3: just like in almost all social insects except for social
Speaker 3: cockroaches before really known as termites.
Speaker 2: Oh wait what Yeah yeah, termites are now called social cockroaches.
Speaker 2: When did that happen?
Speaker 3: Well, it happened like ten years ago, but now people
Speaker 3: are getting their heads around this.
Speaker 2: So another detail to get your head around. I'll say
Speaker 2: this fast because A it's unrelated to ants, and B
Speaker 2: it's disgusting. So termites eat wood, and cockroaches are coprophages,
Speaker 2: which means they're faces eaters, and scientists think that being
Speaker 2: friendly and eating each other's snacky waist could have set
Speaker 2: the stage for good gut biomes that are able to
Speaker 2: digest wood. So that's how cockroach has turned to determine.
Speaker 2: Thank you, I'm sorry. Let's get back to ants, specifically
Speaker 2: the dames, ants and bees. We're looking at a bunch
Speaker 2: of ladies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So all workers are female, and so in
Speaker 3: pretty much almost all colonies, if you're seeing an ant
Speaker 3: that has no wings, then it's going to be a
Speaker 3: female worker.
Speaker 2: Do boy ants have wings?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so almost almost all the time, the boy ants
Speaker 3: will have wings, and their job is to have sex
Speaker 3: and then die, I mean, and that's it.
Speaker 2: So boy aunt to do list is like, be born,
Speaker 2: have wings, have a nuptial flight, mate, and then die.
Speaker 2: You're done and ps. The male ants, who are not
Speaker 2: called uncles but rather and the queens, will usually mate
Speaker 2: when it's humid out or after it rains, so that
Speaker 2: she can get laid and then rip off her own
Speaker 2: wings casually and then pump her babies into a hole
Speaker 2: in the earth, thus starting one big, happy, kind of
Speaker 2: overworked family. And now remember the family that sniffs and
Speaker 2: rubs their bodily secretions on each other together stays together.
Speaker 2: So what kind of behaviors? What kind of actions and
Speaker 2: behaviors do they have in terms of communicating with each other?
Speaker 3: They meaning the ants the ants. Yeah, so there's I
Speaker 3: mean some sometimes they'll actually perform physical movements on one
Speaker 3: another communicate things, but it's pretty much it's all chemical
Speaker 3: for the most part.
Speaker 2: Or do they say things like hey, there's a fruit
Speaker 2: loop over there, or hey, watch out, there's a there's
Speaker 2: a weird ant eater lurching about, Like what kind of it?
Speaker 2: What are they chatting about?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, so there's big categories that you can
Speaker 3: put pheromones into. And so then there's recruitment pheromones, which
Speaker 3: is like, hey, the food's over there, and then there's
Speaker 3: trail pheromones saying, well, this is the trail. And so
Speaker 3: there are different kinds of trail pheromones, Like some are
Speaker 3: long term trail pheromones that will last for a long time,
Speaker 3: saying this is our big long term trail, or a couple.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you'll have trail pheromones that evaporate really quickly that
Speaker 3: are short term trail pheromones.
Speaker 2: WHOA, So they know is this part in this question?
Speaker 2: Is it just coming out of their butts? Where is
Speaker 2: it coming from?
Speaker 3: Uh? So they have different glands and different parts of
Speaker 3: their bodies, okay, and so some of the glands, like
Speaker 3: for instance, the alarm pheromones are in the mandibles and
Speaker 3: mandibular glands, and so once in a long while we're
Speaker 3: still discovering new glands. But who you know, But there's
Speaker 3: a few key glands you know, in the head or
Speaker 3: in the middle part of the butt that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they're like, nah, it's just a short term trail.
Speaker 2: We're not gonna hang here for too long. So they're
Speaker 2: just gonna like squirt some stuff out of their their
Speaker 2: thorax and then that evaporates. Then then wow, the alarm
Speaker 2: ones near their mandibles is really interesting, yeah.
Speaker 3: Which means like attack what's near there, you know. But
Speaker 3: there's also just like for instance, with like we were
Speaker 3: talking about with the r G gin ants and their
Speaker 3: super colonies. So one of the things that we find
Speaker 3: is the reason the ants will accept or reject someone
Speaker 3: into the colony the pheromones. So the ants have to
Speaker 3: really physically rub up against one another to smell these
Speaker 3: like but once you touch then you would come in
Speaker 3: contact with this pheromone, which is like a long chain
Speaker 3: carbon which is not volatile, and so if that matches
Speaker 3: their own, then they recognize them as colony mates. But
Speaker 3: if those compounds are different enough, then they recognize them
Speaker 3: as different. So if you were to give ants the
Speaker 3: same coat them with these chemicals, then they'll recognize one
Speaker 3: another's colony mates.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. So you can almost trick them into
Speaker 2: being like no, no, no, no, you guys are cool because you
Speaker 2: just coated them with the same kind of perfume.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to some extent. Yeah, But also if you were
Speaker 3: to take a colony and then split it apart and
Speaker 3: give them different kinds of food that have different kinds
Speaker 3: of chemicals. Then they'll stop getting along with one another.
Speaker 2: So side note, I had a boyfriend years ago who
Speaker 2: ate onel epically pungent garlic soup one fateful day, and
Speaker 2: I thought, maybe we're going to break up. I thought
Speaker 2: that was the end I considered it. I just did
Speaker 2: not know how to cope politely. I mean, how do
Speaker 2: you approach invasive species because clearly you marvel at ants.
Speaker 2: Are you like, ah, I'm I'm pissed off at you
Speaker 2: guys because you are maybe like outpacing native species. Or
Speaker 2: do you just say, like, let nature be nature.
Speaker 3: So I studied invasive species for my dissertation. I'm gotten
Speaker 3: past that. I'm doing other things now. But I mean,
Speaker 3: and so, I mean, it's a problem. It's a problem
Speaker 3: because especially in ants, it seems for at least you know,
Speaker 3: fifty two hundred years after they arrive, they really reduce
Speaker 3: the abundance of other native ants. But I mean also
Speaker 3: just pragmatically speaking, it's an economic problem because most of
Speaker 3: these invasive species cause problems that disrupt trade or could
Speaker 3: be human health problems, or cause problems for endangered species
Speaker 3: with red imported fire ants. They'll like eat ground nesting birds.
Speaker 2: What Yeah, they'll eat a bird.
Speaker 3: Like the little baby birds. Think they have trouble getting
Speaker 3: it to the eggs, but as soon as they hatch
Speaker 3: and they'll swarm over the nest. Oh my god, so
Speaker 3: like so engage. So in ground nesting birds in the
Speaker 3: southeastern US are really at risk because of you know,
Speaker 3: this invasive species.
Speaker 2: Why do some ants want to eat an apple core?
Speaker 2: And others are like.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean so species are different, right, and so
Speaker 3: I mean so all different kinds of bands have all
Speaker 3: different kinds of diet. But I mean some ants primarily
Speaker 3: eat other ants, like army ants.
Speaker 2: Army ants eat other ants.
Speaker 3: So most army ant species are specialists on other social insects,
Speaker 3: so other ant colonies and like wasp colonies and termites
Speaker 3: and yeah, oh I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah what are I'm okay? Because there are some there
Speaker 2: are some species of ants that have reputations fire ants,
Speaker 2: army ants, bullet ants. What is it about those species
Speaker 2: that are just like more ferocious or more threatening to people?
Speaker 2: And should we be marveling at that instead of being like, hey, ants,
Speaker 2: knock it off.
Speaker 3: Oh, I think we totally should be marblized. Yeah, ants
Speaker 3: are they amazing? Yeah? Well, armiants aren't really a threat.
Speaker 3: I guess if you were to put a baby in
Speaker 3: a bassinet and let it sit there as Armiance went through,
Speaker 3: well then that probably would not be good news because
Speaker 3: it would get stung a lot, right, But otherwise, like,
Speaker 3: armiants are great. If they come through your house, you
Speaker 3: step outside for a couple hours, you come back and
Speaker 3: they've cleaned out all the insect pests?
Speaker 2: Have they really? They've just marched through and been like
Speaker 2: I ate a cockroach, I ate them off?
Speaker 3: Yeah, seriously, And so it's normal. So I think there's
Speaker 3: this notion that they're incredibly efficient. But got I've looked
Speaker 3: through places where Armiance had just roam through. There's still
Speaker 3: bugs in the litter. They didn't get everybody, They.
Speaker 2: Get everything a little sloppy. And now what about bullet
Speaker 2: ants and fire ants? Why are they called those things?
Speaker 3: Well, bullet ants just to call bullet ants because it
Speaker 3: really really hurts when they sting you.
Speaker 2: Does it hurt so bad?
Speaker 3: Why does it hurt so bad? Like it could be
Speaker 3: like approximate answer, which is like, well, it's because the
Speaker 3: structure of this pona a toxin, and you know, the
Speaker 3: alpha ponter atoxin and beta ponter a toxin causes a
Speaker 3: lot of pain, right right, But the real question is
Speaker 3: why is it they evolved a toxin which is so
Speaker 3: much more painful than everyone else. So my pet concept
Speaker 3: behind that is, well, bullet ants are huge, and they
Speaker 3: also have pretty big colonies. Considering their size, the colonies
Speaker 3: can have a few thousand individuals when they get to
Speaker 3: be big, and so the larvae and the pupy are
Speaker 3: really big and chunky. It's like a really really good meal,
Speaker 3: like I can imagine like a kowati or a peckery
Speaker 3: or someone digging up the ground and would love eating
Speaker 3: all of those.
Speaker 2: This just in a kowati is a very cute, long
Speaker 2: faced raccoon looking idiot, and a peckery appears to be
Speaker 2: a spindle legged forest piggy with frothy Texas hair, and
Speaker 2: they would probably love to eat soft, squishy bullet ant
Speaker 2: babies like Swedish fish, you know.
Speaker 3: And so because they offer such a massive nutritional reward
Speaker 3: to someone who attacks the colony, they probably have to
Speaker 3: deter vertebrates really well. And so no vertebrate in its
Speaker 3: right mind is going to mess with with a bullet
Speaker 3: ant colony. And so their colonies you could probably like
Speaker 3: dig and access them within several seconds if you had
Speaker 3: like a shovel or good digging claws, But you just
Speaker 3: be crazy too because they stink so badly, whereas so
Speaker 3: many other ants. If they have a lot of nutritious
Speaker 3: prey available to them, then they're probably deep in a
Speaker 3: piece of wood. Like carpenter ants get to be almost
Speaker 3: as big as bullet ants, but they don't even have
Speaker 3: a sting and they bite you. But it's not the
Speaker 3: worst thing in the world. It's just that. But they're
Speaker 3: nesting in wood. You're not going to rip open like
Speaker 3: a whole, you know, tree to eat a carpenter at colony.
Speaker 3: So bullet ant colonies are really vulnerable if they're just
Speaker 3: in soil at the base of a tree.
Speaker 2: That's a great answer. So the lesson is hide your
Speaker 2: shit or be prepared to defend it. Now, how do
Speaker 2: you feel when you see people say in like science
Speaker 2: programs or YouTube that are like I put my hands
Speaker 2: in a fire ant colony or I let a bullet
Speaker 2: ants sting me to see how it would feel are
Speaker 2: you just like shaking your damn head on the side.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think with a fire ans, that's
Speaker 3: just I don't know, that's just kind of dumb, I think.
Speaker 3: I mean, gosh, it's gonna hurt. I mean, you've seen
Speaker 3: I mean people with fire ants, the fire and seeing
Speaker 3: you get all these welts and you have the blisters
Speaker 3: and it's horrible, it's painful, and so you know what's
Speaker 3: going to happen. But I think with bullet ants, what
Speaker 3: happens is you get stung and it looks like nothing. Initially,
Speaker 3: you might swell up or whatever, but then you see
Speaker 3: people reacting in extraordinary pain, and it's a matter of curiosity, right.
Speaker 3: I've had several students intentionally get themselves stung by bullet
Speaker 3: ants because they wanted to know what it felt.
Speaker 2: Like and and and it really hurts. What did they
Speaker 2: do of reactions happened.
Speaker 3: Well, they just they just screamed their heads off and
Speaker 3: then use all kinds of cursing you no more damn rift.
Speaker 3: So I've worked with bullet ants, I published a few
Speaker 3: papers on them, and I've only been stung by them once,
Speaker 3: and that was in the lab when I was being dumb,
Speaker 3: and so it's possible to work with them and not
Speaker 3: get stung if you just treat them with respect and
Speaker 3: understand how they behave.
Speaker 2: Well, Hello, what happened? What happened? Tell me everything? You
Speaker 2: were in the lab you got stung with by a
Speaker 2: bullet ant? Where? How How?
Speaker 3: So I was in the lab and I needed to
Speaker 3: weigh this ant because I was putting we're doing experiments
Speaker 3: with microbes in their guts, and so to weigh the ant,
Speaker 3: I needed to put it in a container and weigh
Speaker 3: the ant in the container then used to track the
Speaker 3: weight of the container. But I realized that when I
Speaker 3: weighed the cup, it didn't have a lid on it,
Speaker 3: and I was like, oh, I need to weigh a
Speaker 3: cup with the lid. But I wasn't thinking that that
Speaker 3: cup that had the lid on it was the one
Speaker 3: that had the ant that I was weighing in it.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I just wasn't thinking. And so the moment
Speaker 3: I got the lid.
Speaker 2: Off, PS, if you haven't already, now would be a
Speaker 2: good time to cover the ears of your children or
Speaker 2: my mom. You know.
Speaker 3: It just got me right on the tip of my finger,
Speaker 3: and I was like, fuck, fuck fu fuck, And I
Speaker 3: flung the ant like somewhere in the balance room and
Speaker 3: it was roaming around. Meanwhile, so I have like like this,
Speaker 3: you know, sophomore in college. I'm showing her how to
Speaker 3: do this experiment for the rest of the summer that
Speaker 3: she sees this. It was like, oh my god, it
Speaker 3: was so bad. It was really really bad.
Speaker 2: Did you ever find the flung ant? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, they're huge. How do you
Speaker 3: not find it?
Speaker 2: Okay? I looked these things up and they are meaty
Speaker 2: as hell. They're about as big as a wingless wasp,
Speaker 2: but with a sting some experts say is thirty times
Speaker 2: more painful than a bee's worse than chi birth and
Speaker 2: being burned. Ps. How do we know that? Well? One
Speaker 2: Cornell University study in the nineteen forties was trying to
Speaker 2: measure comparative pains using something that's still called a Dolora meter. Dolar,
Speaker 2: by the way, is just straight up and noun meaning
Speaker 2: great sorrow or distress. So they use this dolar meter
Speaker 2: and during childbirth. The team of scientists James D. Hardy,
Speaker 2: Harold G. Wolf, and Helen Goodill, he did, I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess burned women to ask which feels worse, and
Speaker 2: the answer must have been a consistent fuck off enough
Speaker 2: that they stopped using this method. Now, for Terry, who
Speaker 2: has a child but no experience shoving one out of
Speaker 2: an orifice, how would he describe it?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: My god, what did it feel like?
Speaker 3: So, the way I explain it, I've seen multiple people
Speaker 3: get stung, right, and so or at least see the
Speaker 3: after effects, and so it affects different people differently. Not
Speaker 3: to say that everyone else will have this response, but
Speaker 3: for me, it was like if you put your finger
Speaker 3: on a countertop and I were to give you a
Speaker 3: hammer and ask you hit it as hard as you can.
Speaker 3: That's what it felt like. Yeah, how long does it last? Well?
Speaker 3: The one common name that people have for them is
Speaker 3: where Migo of Antiquatro, the twenty four hour ant So
Speaker 3: mine did not last twenty four hours, but it really hurt. So,
Speaker 3: I mean, so I took a full dose of ibuprofen
Speaker 3: and benadreuil because my hand started to get really puffy,
Speaker 3: and so it was throbbing enough where I just couldn't
Speaker 3: focus on anything. So it was like my day was
Speaker 3: kind of done. Yeah yeah, and then like then I
Speaker 3: had lost muscular strength in the hand, like I couldn't
Speaker 3: hold a coffee cup in this hand, like like I
Speaker 3: just couldn't squeeze enough to hold it. It was weird.
Speaker 3: And then that evening, like the whole hand was like numb,
Speaker 3: like I would poke it and I couldn't feel it.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Here's a question. If you could do
Speaker 2: your whole life over and you had a chance to
Speaker 2: not have that happened to you, would you erase that
Speaker 2: from your experience or are you in some way glad
Speaker 2: that you know what it's like.
Speaker 3: I guess well enough people have asked me what it
Speaker 3: feels like?
Speaker 2: What do you feel like?
Speaker 3: That is better to have that experience than to be
Speaker 3: like that smug dude who's like, well, I'm so careful
Speaker 3: I never get stuck, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, I have heard also, like Phil Torres, the
Speaker 2: lepidopterologist that I interviewed about butterflies. He says that entomologists
Speaker 2: have a rite of passage of like everyone kind of
Speaker 2: wants to get a bot fly larva stuck in them.
Speaker 2: Do ant research say like do ant researchers say, like,
Speaker 2: I kind of want to see what this is like?
Speaker 3: You know, I don't think it's like no, I think
Speaker 3: among the ant people I know, it's the more at
Speaker 3: least ant men.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: They would be more into I think they a butot
Speaker 3: fly would still be a bigger rite of passage than like.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, what's the craziest thing that you've seen
Speaker 2: in the field or the craziest behavior you've ever witnessed?
Speaker 3: Wow, I would say probably the coolest, coolest thing I've
Speaker 3: seen are kidnapper ants.
Speaker 2: What the hell?
Speaker 3: So people used to call the slave making ants, but
Speaker 3: I don't think that really describes their behavior well. And
Speaker 3: so what kidnapper ants are and those and this actually
Speaker 3: I just I've seen in Arizona. So they are colonies
Speaker 3: that go on seasonal raids where they find the colonies
Speaker 3: of other ants and steal their brood and bring them
Speaker 3: back to their own nest and raise them up. And
Speaker 3: then those ants live there. So they're like, so they're
Speaker 3: kidnapping baby ants from other colony and then those ants.
Speaker 3: So if you were to look at a kidnapper ant colony,
Speaker 3: there's two kinds of workers. There's the kidnapper ants themselves,
Speaker 3: which are like big and bright orange, and then the
Speaker 3: ants that they stole who are working alongside them thinking
Speaker 3: they belong there, but they were actually kidnapped.
Speaker 2: Is that a matter of pheromones? Do they rub their
Speaker 2: pheromone on it where they're like, you think you're you
Speaker 2: can't tell that we are not your real family?
Speaker 3: Uh? Yeah, so, I mean, so the thing is if
Speaker 3: you're raised in that environment, then you'll basically be having
Speaker 3: the odors that come from that environment. And so we
Speaker 3: know that kidnapper ants will use pheromones to disrupt the
Speaker 3: communication of the colonies. So these aunts that get raided
Speaker 3: by kidnapper ants, they kind of know it's coming. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's evolved over like you know, probably millions of years
Speaker 3: and so and so and so they've evolved some kind
Speaker 3: of defense, but obviously the defences aren't quite good enough.
Speaker 2: So does that mean that the kidnapper aunt queen is
Speaker 2: kind of like a cult leader? She like a David
Speaker 2: koresh of like Jonestown, Like she's like, you belong here
Speaker 2: and you love it, keep working.
Speaker 3: You totally can imagine that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And now what are aunt queens like? I should
Speaker 2: have asked this earlier, but what are aunt queens like?
Speaker 2: Are they just pumping out babies? All the time, Like
Speaker 2: do they get killed and eaten by someone when they're
Speaker 2: ready to go? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So so most folks, the popular conception is that queen's
Speaker 3: run the colony for the most part, Like queens are
Speaker 3: not in charge. It's the workers that are running the colony.
Speaker 3: And so the queen, if anything, is the captive of
Speaker 3: the ants, because the ants, because the queen is doing
Speaker 3: the reproductive labor for the colony and the ants are
Speaker 3: doing all the other labor. Oh and so and if
Speaker 3: a queen has only made it once, then because of
Speaker 3: bizarre genetics that we could get into, the workers are
Speaker 3: more related to the queen, to their sisters, the queen's daughter,
Speaker 3: then the queen is to her own daughters.
Speaker 2: Weird, So you.
Speaker 3: Could argue that the queen is actually doing the reproductive work,
Speaker 3: you know, for her daughters who are in the colony.
Speaker 2: Ooh, that's some handmade stale yeah right there, Yeah totally.
Speaker 2: And what does your research right now deal with? Like
Speaker 2: what's your bread and butter research?
Speaker 3: So the way a friend of mine described what I
Speaker 3: what I do. He's like, I really like when you
Speaker 3: do that experimental natural history, And I'm like, oh, that's
Speaker 3: a good word for it. Oh, I know. So what
Speaker 3: I do is I find, you know, there's so many curious,
Speaker 3: weird phenomena that we don't understand out there, and I'm like,
Speaker 3: you know, I think I'm going to try to do
Speaker 3: experiments to try to figure out what's going on. And
Speaker 3: so I have a few different things I'm working on.
Speaker 3: So one thing is I'm understanding and this is what
Speaker 3: a lot of people are working on this for good reason.
Speaker 3: The thermal biology evans and how they adapt are adapting
Speaker 3: to hotter temperatures. And so the way I've been looking
Speaker 3: at this is looking at variation within a colony and
Speaker 3: how that might evolve, and how colonies use behavioral flexibility
Speaker 3: to respond to changing temperatures. So a lot of people
Speaker 3: are looking at differences among species to think how about
Speaker 3: how things will change, But I think actually ant colonies
Speaker 3: might evolve to behaviorally adapt to higher temperatures.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, that's crazy. Do you think that they'll store
Speaker 2: more water or seek higher ground or lower ground.
Speaker 3: Or yeah, others they might nest deeper, they might vorge
Speaker 3: at different times of day, or nest in deeper leaf litter.
Speaker 3: But it looks like that they're more adaptable than people thought,
Speaker 3: I mean, so that's one thing I'm working on. There's
Speaker 3: this other group at vants that I'm working on that
Speaker 3: move their nests all the time. Well many ants. People
Speaker 3: think of ants as like, here's a hole in the
Speaker 3: ground where they add colony lives. But it turns out
Speaker 3: that the majority of species move their nests on a
Speaker 3: regular basis, like every few weeks, every few months, once
Speaker 3: a year and people and so I've been working to
Speaker 3: show people that this is actually kind of the way
Speaker 3: the ants are. They're not like miniature plants rooted in
Speaker 3: the ground, but just like our invasive argent plants move
Speaker 3: all over the city. Even if you go don't look
Speaker 3: at invasive species, if you're just looking at natural areas,
Speaker 3: ants moving their nests is a pretty common thing. And
Speaker 3: so I've been trying to figure out how and why
Speaker 3: that happens in a couple species.
Speaker 2: Why does it happen? Do you think?
Speaker 3: Well, in different it's very different for depending upon the
Speaker 3: species are looking at about what the advantage is. Like,
Speaker 3: there's some that do it because they're trying to find
Speaker 3: a sunnier patch, and so if the structure the forest changes,
Speaker 3: so they end up in a place that's shadier. They
Speaker 3: need to move to a place that's more sonny, Oh
Speaker 3: my god, they do this get at all? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Now, how do you feel when you see people pouring
Speaker 2: like molten aluminum into an ant colony? So side note
Speaker 2: for a visual just imagine like a small, squat shiny
Speaker 2: metal Christmas tree that a robot might put up, or
Speaker 2: shimmering silver coral, or maybe a bush doctor Seuss would
Speaker 2: dream up for the future. Now, if you google Ant
Speaker 2: Hill art, you can see the products and some art
Speaker 2: displays and also the process, and in so doing you
Speaker 2: will again realize that we are the villains in an
Speaker 2: ant's action film for sure, because I know that they
Speaker 2: can then dig it up and it's this beautiful branching structure.
Speaker 3: But I'm also like, dude, ants, I just say it
Speaker 3: as like a gorgeous work of art. I mean, so
Speaker 3: it's like I estimated on the back of an envelope
Speaker 3: the number of ants that I killed, and it was
Speaker 3: like on the low end, very low end, it's like
Speaker 3: a quarter million and a half million. So I you know,
Speaker 3: so maybe there's a little wanted posters of me inside
Speaker 3: the ant colonies, you know, unlike a lot of other
Speaker 3: people who study insects. I actually work really hard to
Speaker 3: avoid collecting, and I think biological collections are very important
Speaker 3: and we should continue to build and maintain collections, but
Speaker 3: I think we need to think hard about the ethics
Speaker 3: of how we do this. There's a lot of data
Speaker 3: to be acquired from those too. I know people are
Speaker 3: now doing that as an art piece, but also a
Speaker 3: lot of what we've learned about nest architecture has done
Speaker 3: has come from that kind of casting. And so the
Speaker 3: guy who pioneered this technique, Walter Shinkel, you know, has
Speaker 3: done all this amazing work on the architecture of nest colonies.
Speaker 3: Before doing the metal casting, people would cast colonies with
Speaker 3: dental plaster. Oh, because you need something that goes down
Speaker 3: the fine little holes to ant scrawl through if you're
Speaker 3: going to cast the whole colony, and so dental plaster
Speaker 3: is fine enough that you can penetrate it the colony
Speaker 3: really well. But then digging up the colony is it's
Speaker 3: so difficult because it doesn't come up in one piece,
Speaker 3: so then you have to reconstruct it.
Speaker 2: So a metal casting of the colony stays intact, but
Speaker 2: the plaster cast has to be reconstructed like a jigsack
Speaker 2: as it breaks apart. Now, however, molten metal surprise destroys
Speaker 2: all the ants, while the plaster can be washed away
Speaker 2: later and the scientists can figure out which ants we're
Speaker 2: kicking it in which part of their house.
Speaker 3: And so you can be like, oh, these ants were
Speaker 3: in this chamber, these ants were in this chamber.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, you can't do that with metal exactly. Can
Speaker 2: you imagine if just just a wall of molten metal
Speaker 2: came out like a flash flood out of nowhere. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're just like we oh, oh my god, are you
Speaker 2: ready for rapid fire around?
Speaker 3: Uh? Sure.
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Speaker 2: Okay, your questions okay, Patreon question. I got like eighty questions. Okay,
Speaker 2: but we're not going to do all of them because
Speaker 2: some people ask the same questions. We're going to run
Speaker 2: through as many as we can. Are you ready, okay?
Speaker 2: Sarah nasheall wants to know why do bullet ants scream
Speaker 2: when they attack? Is it an intimidation tactic?
Speaker 3: I some people think so. I think it could be. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So bullets make this when you disturb a nest and
Speaker 3: the odor is a little garlicky when they do that,
Speaker 3: and so I'm assume and so I jump back when
Speaker 3: I hear it, and so I imagine that other vertebrates
Speaker 3: do too, because that way it's a warning sign. My
Speaker 3: guess is yes, but has been shown experimentally.
Speaker 2: Sure if you hear that, I mean, why do you
Speaker 2: think Rattlesnakes have rattles? Right, They're like, don't make me
Speaker 2: use this venom exactly, so they're like, you know what's coming.
Speaker 2: It's like the ice cream truck, but like with pain
Speaker 2: and death. Todd McLaren wants to know what's the deepest
Speaker 2: ant hole recorded any idea?
Speaker 3: So I know there are if you look at leafcutter
Speaker 3: ant colonies, they can go like maybe ten twenty meters deep.
Speaker 3: I think there are probably some that go deeper that
Speaker 3: we haven't collected, Like I know people that have tried
Speaker 3: to excavate colonies where like there are these there's these
Speaker 3: volcano ants in Australia where they make these tiny little
Speaker 3: mounds of soil that look like volcanoes and you try
Speaker 3: to dig them up and the hole just goes deep
Speaker 3: and deep and deep deep. So I know people have
Speaker 3: gone down many meters and not found them.
Speaker 2: Damn. That's that's some spelunking right there. For reels. Jessica
Speaker 2: Chamberlain wants to know if you're mean like my husband
Speaker 2: and squish a scout ant that you see, you know,
Speaker 2: on its own in your house, will the colony send
Speaker 2: another scout to look for it or will they just
Speaker 2: abandon the fallen comrade.
Speaker 3: My ex So, I'm just speaking from experience. If it's
Speaker 3: in your house and you have one ant roaming around,
Speaker 3: if you if it's the very very first ant. In theory,
Speaker 3: maybe but in practice probably not. Oh really, okay, so
Speaker 3: probably send more. All right, So they're just.
Speaker 2: Like, hey, where's Heidi, And they're like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: go find her. Maybe she found good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think they probably forget that. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: better to do that than not if you don't want
Speaker 3: them to come back. But I think it's probably futile.
Speaker 3: I think i'd look for the gun instead, okay, or
Speaker 3: follower and see where she goes.
Speaker 2: So if you keep following her and she's like on
Speaker 2: her way home, she's like doing her home commute, you
Speaker 2: can find where the entrance is.
Speaker 3: Totally, which is about like what how I spend most
Speaker 3: of my time in the forest. If I'm like, if
Speaker 3: you want to find an ant colony, give them food,
Speaker 3: then they'll walk back to their home. So actually, if
Speaker 3: you're trying to get rid of that scouting aunt, what
Speaker 3: you do is feeder, then see what crack she's going
Speaker 3: to go into, then kill her and cover up the crack.
Speaker 2: That's that's really calculated. Yeah, that's not that's like definitely
Speaker 2: premeditated first degree instead of just a crime of opportunity
Speaker 2: or passion. That's amazing. You're like, oh, do you want
Speaker 2: to crumb? And she's like, I mean I think you
Speaker 2: was a much like this home, and you're like, no,
Speaker 2: you want a bitch. Several people wanted to know how
Speaker 2: are ants so strong? How can they lift ten times
Speaker 2: their own weight? Rada Evan McKenna all wanted to know
Speaker 2: how much weight can ants carry? Why are they so strong?
Speaker 3: So I think the answer is they can carry like
Speaker 3: maybe one hundred tw hundred times their masks or something
Speaker 3: like that. And so the answer is is that ants
Speaker 3: are not particularly strong. It's just a matter of scaling
Speaker 3: for body size. So in other words, if you were
Speaker 3: to shrink your own body down to the size of
Speaker 3: an ant, then you would be as strong as an
Speaker 3: ant that size, Okay, And so it's scaling. The way
Speaker 3: that muscles work is their power. It's a function of
Speaker 3: like the cross sectional area of the muscle essentially, and
Speaker 3: so if you shrink down then you're just that much
Speaker 3: more powerful. And so just like if you were to
Speaker 3: take an ant and to scale them up to our size,
Speaker 3: then they'd only be as strong as us.
Speaker 2: They could barely do a push up and they're like,
Speaker 2: my luggage is too well, someone put it in the
Speaker 2: overhead for me. I had no idea. I thought they
Speaker 2: got so much props. I thought they were just like
Speaker 2: mystically strong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Who knew physics scaling? Cody Woppingcamp and Dave Miller both
Speaker 2: pretty much wanted to know. Someone once told me that,
Speaker 2: based on estimates, ants outnumber humans. Am I gullible? Or
Speaker 2: is that fact true? And is it true that the
Speaker 2: weight of all the ants in the world exceeds the
Speaker 2: weight of humans. So let's debunk some flim flam numbers
Speaker 2: and weights of ants versus human.
Speaker 3: Oh, there's way way way more ants than people. There
Speaker 3: has to be. Oh, like for any back of the
Speaker 3: envelope calculation, I would say every other thing that people
Speaker 3: say about ants dates back to and off the cuff
Speaker 3: thing that EO. Wilson said twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: So for some context, eighty nine year old American biologist
Speaker 2: and author EO. Wilson is said to be the world's
Speaker 2: foremost expert on ants, and he postulated in a nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four book quote, when combined, all ants in the
Speaker 2: world taken together, way about as much as all human beings.
Speaker 2: Like all mirrormacologists know this quote.
Speaker 3: And so that's the thing about the massive ants being
Speaker 3: equivalent to the massive people, and so you know, getting
Speaker 3: more murrmacologists using more back of envelope calculations were like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that sounds fine.
Speaker 2: Okay, So ants outnumber human beings definitely numerically and also
Speaker 2: by weight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or maybe about the same, but ballpark, it could
Speaker 3: be within an order of magnitude, you know, the same
Speaker 3: as more or less.
Speaker 2: Okay, So then that's not even flim flam that we
Speaker 2: needed to debunk. Yeah, that's some real shit. Kendall Thorsten,
Speaker 2: Christopher Marley, and Eva all want to ask about ant farming,
Speaker 2: like do they farm aphids? You mentioned something about a
Speaker 2: fungus farm, Like, how did they get so good at farming? Like,
Speaker 2: does that make them smarter than early humans?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: That makes them more social, I mean, so, I mean,
Speaker 3: so the question is what is smart?
Speaker 2: Right, this is your philosophy background.
Speaker 3: So the party line is that ants evolved agriculture sixty
Speaker 3: million years ago with fungus growing ants, Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And so they you know, collected bits of like animal
Speaker 3: poop or whatnot. And so famously, now leaf cutter ants
Speaker 3: will cut leaves and they'll grow a big garden.
Speaker 2: So remember there are the leaf cutter ants that take
Speaker 2: leaf pieces and grow focus on them. Well, meanwhile, me
Speaker 2: and a live human who can drive a car and
Speaker 2: skype France has killed three cacti in the last year.
Speaker 3: And so they and so they carefully tend to this
Speaker 3: garden and they use the same kind of integrated past
Speaker 3: management that we use in our crops. Oh my god,
Speaker 3: that's crazy, you know. And there's weeds that grow in there,
Speaker 3: and they've evolved relationships with bacteria that attack those weeds
Speaker 3: and all that, you know. And so every single day,
Speaker 3: you know, there's someone in a few labs that's discovering
Speaker 3: a new partner in this coevolved complex situation of how
Speaker 3: ants do this. So, so I would say the analogy
Speaker 3: for farming would be with fungus growing ants, whereas the
Speaker 3: analogy for ranching, I would say would be with aphids. Right,
Speaker 3: oh right, Because so ants will occasionally will grow aphids,
Speaker 3: and they will milk the aphids to get their honey due,
Speaker 3: which is basically the leftover sugary stuff that the aphids
Speaker 3: don't consume when they're feeding on plants. And so, and
Speaker 3: there's also caterpillars that will do this with ants too.
Speaker 2: I mean that's this is essentially just like like nectar.
Speaker 3: P right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But also analogously, in addition
Speaker 3: to milking, cows occasionally will kill them and eat them.
Speaker 3: You know, the same thing is that the ants and
Speaker 3: the aphids they won't you know, they might eat an
Speaker 3: aphid once in a while.
Speaker 2: And are they managing the herd.
Speaker 3: Oh, they carefully. Yes, They will transport them around and
Speaker 3: adaptively manage it. They sometimes, you know, they'll kill off
Speaker 3: a plant by using too many of them, but oftentimes
Speaker 3: they use ranching management techniques.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so wild less, that's insane, so cowboy, Okay, So,
Speaker 2: Kristin McAdams and Lily Hill both want to know why
Speaker 2: do fire ants hate me? They both asked in particular,
Speaker 2: why do fire ants hate me? So Lily and Kristen
Speaker 2: at least know it's not just you, and Mark wants
Speaker 2: to know how can they act as both a solid
Speaker 2: and a liquid? So fire ants, what's their beef about?
Speaker 2: And also are they solid or liquid?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So why fire ants are just like so mad?
Speaker 3: So ants will defend their nests, and so if you
Speaker 3: take an individual fire ant, it can walk on you
Speaker 3: and it's not going to sting you right away. But
Speaker 3: the thing is, if you disrupt a mound, then it's
Speaker 3: gonna get really mad at you. And so most other ants,
Speaker 3: you can't destroy their mounds so easily because they're underground
Speaker 3: or something, Whereas fire ants have this big soil mound
Speaker 3: above the surface, and so if you kick that soil mound,
Speaker 3: then they're just gonna get really pissed because it's like
Speaker 3: you just took apart their home. And so I think
Speaker 3: they seem to be more angry because the structure of
Speaker 3: their home is a lot more likely to be disturbed,
Speaker 3: and they also have a potent sting that goes with it.
Speaker 2: Lesson insecurity makes us bitches.
Speaker 3: And so the whole solid liquid thing is like and
Speaker 3: so in how they can they can float and raft
Speaker 3: when it floods, So it's cool. So fire ants evolved
Speaker 3: in these seasonal floodplains in South America, and so when
Speaker 3: it floods, the colonies can just pick up and then
Speaker 3: raft along and then land when the waters recede. And
Speaker 3: so the ants bodies will cling together. And then if
Speaker 3: you have a whole bunch of ants clinging together, then
Speaker 3: they will like pour with these physical properties will actually
Speaker 3: they act as a liquid. But the ants themselves also
Speaker 3: can be a solid. And so I don't think I
Speaker 3: can offer a solid antswer with prospective physics how they
Speaker 3: do that, But it's super cool.
Speaker 2: I floated this idea by Google, and it turns out
Speaker 2: that the little hairs on their tiny lady legs trap
Speaker 2: enough hair to keep them all afloat. So congratulations, there
Speaker 2: is another reason to avoid shaving your legs today. Oh
Speaker 2: Olivia Rus's great question says, as soon as she saw
Speaker 2: this post, it reminded me of the infection that turns
Speaker 2: ants into zombies. What is it and what's the life cycle?
Speaker 2: This is cordyceps.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, so the common name cordyceps like opio cordyceps. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the zombie ant fungus is super cool. So and
Speaker 3: there's a number of people working to figure this critter out.
Speaker 3: It takes over the brain of the animal and it
Speaker 3: tells them to perch somewhere and then then that results
Speaker 3: in that kills the animal. Then the spore gets spread
Speaker 3: that will infect another animal.
Speaker 2: It's super cool, and now it kind of turns them
Speaker 2: into these zombies though, like where some ants will crawl
Speaker 2: up a plant stem, perch out on the leaf, and
Speaker 2: then wait until the cordyceps explodes from their head and
Speaker 2: infects all of their family members.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that usually the explosion happens after the
Speaker 3: already dead and perched, But yeah, they will go to
Speaker 3: a location that helps the dispersal of the fungal spores.
Speaker 3: And so it turns out that and there's a recent
Speaker 3: paper that came out showing that the way that ants
Speaker 3: bite onto the tissue corresponds to the environment that you're
Speaker 3: in that they're in so to help it spread more effectively.
Speaker 2: I mean, does this stuff ever just completely boggle you, Like,
Speaker 2: do you start thinking, do you get galaxy brain where
Speaker 2: you're like, what is anything? Is this all a simulation?
Speaker 2: It does dark matter teach ants what to do? Like
Speaker 2: do you ever get stonery about this stuff? Uh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I kind of used to. But the thing is,
Speaker 3: for every single thing that I read about that's weird,
Speaker 3: I know, like people have already figured out like even
Speaker 3: weirder things, and so I think it's like, wow, that's
Speaker 3: super cool. I mean, yeah, that's amazing, you know. But
Speaker 3: then there are these flukes, you know, that will have
Speaker 3: like three or four different hosts for example, so they'll
Speaker 3: infect a bird, and they'll infect a snail and like
Speaker 3: an alien and you know, and then this complex life
Speaker 3: cycle it affects the behavior of every single one. And
Speaker 3: so I mean, look at them, like Cordyceps seems kind
Speaker 3: of straightforward compared to some of these other crazy like
Speaker 3: host altering ones, Like you know, does the toxoplasmosis actually
Speaker 3: cause people to not have fear or so on? Like
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: This isn't even college roommate bong ripper philosophy. This is
Speaker 2: just the wild world of brain parasites. Speaking of peril,
Speaker 2: Kellen Freeman and Ray Kasha both want to know how
Speaker 2: the death spiral works. What is happening in an ant
Speaker 2: death spiral?
Speaker 3: Okay, So, so for the uninitiated, the death spiral is
Speaker 3: this thing where so armiance forage in these big raids,
Speaker 3: and so they all follow one another. If you're to
Speaker 3: take a bunch of armiants and somehow separate them from
Speaker 3: the rest of their colony, you can trick them or
Speaker 3: they might accidentally what happen, Like would march in a
Speaker 3: big circle, right, They just follow one another, and so
Speaker 3: they basically create a single pheromonal trail. And so death
Speaker 3: probably just keep marching and marching until they're old dead.
Speaker 3: Why Yeah, Well, because the thing is, they all follow
Speaker 3: one another in big trail. So like individual ant colonies
Speaker 3: can solve complex problems and do big things, but ant
Speaker 3: workers are dumb and they follow simple rules.
Speaker 2: Terry explains how this is kind of like computer code.
Speaker 3: And so if you have an army at colony that's
Speaker 3: a quarter million ants, every ant is doing following a
Speaker 3: simple program. Yeah, and when you have all these simple
Speaker 3: bits of code together, then they function. But if you
Speaker 3: were to take some of these individual ants and separate
Speaker 3: them from the other ants, then they're just kind of screwed,
Speaker 3: and they'll just wander around. Like so, if you take
Speaker 3: an ant and bring her away from her colony to
Speaker 3: the far enough away that she'll never get back. She's
Speaker 3: not like that dog that's going to cross the whole
Speaker 3: country and find its way home.
Speaker 2: Oh, Peter, I wondered about your soul. Yeah, no, it's
Speaker 2: not like nineteen ninety three's homework Bound.
Speaker 3: You know, it's going to be like, oh, I don't
Speaker 3: know where to go, and then wander around aimlessly until
Speaker 3: it tries to find some signal about where its home
Speaker 3: might be, and then it won't and they'll just die. Huh,
Speaker 3: because it's a bummer man.
Speaker 2: So Tracy Benhimau wants to know. I have to know.
Speaker 2: Will ants added to a camping saute add a little
Speaker 2: flavor like lemon juice due to the acetic acid in
Speaker 2: their heads? Have you eaten ants?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Some ants? Yeah? Yeah, I try not to. I'm vegetarian,
Speaker 3: so I extend that to insects. But I've tried some
Speaker 3: and inadvertently. I mean, we all eat insects when we
Speaker 3: don't try. So there are some ants that tastes absolutely horrible.
Speaker 3: But for instance, in this part of the world we
Speaker 3: have what we call citronella ants, and so they live underground,
Speaker 3: the genus Lazias, and they actually have a citronella eat
Speaker 3: order to them. And so the weaver ants in Southeast
Speaker 3: Asia and northern Theustralian wet tropics, they have a lemony
Speaker 3: flavor to their butts. Some people call them lemon ants.
Speaker 3: I don't think they have that much acetic acid. I
Speaker 3: mean there's formic acid, buteric acid, So ceedic acid is
Speaker 3: straight up vinegar.
Speaker 2: Lemon Ants, by the way, release this citrusy smell when
Speaker 2: attacked to warn others. And they also use formic acid
Speaker 2: as an herbicide, and that creates clearings in the forest
Speaker 2: where nothing really grows. This is called a devil's garden,
Speaker 2: which is definitely a venue that my existential metal band,
Speaker 2: Mirror Meat, would love to play.
Speaker 3: But ants, what might add other flavors? I mean, people
Speaker 3: will eat, will roast like queens of leafcutter ants. People
Speaker 3: once a year will collect the brood of weaver ants
Speaker 3: and collect them in large, large numbers. You can get
Speaker 3: them in ethnic food stores and jars here.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I hear that there might be a little
Speaker 2: spicy too.
Speaker 3: Some ants oh some of them. Yeah, they have a
Speaker 3: little bit of spice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, crazy, I think I've eaten ants. I can't. I
Speaker 2: think I've had ants on a cookie on purpose. But yeah,
Speaker 2: let's see Elliott and Ayah wants to know, do it fart?
Speaker 2: Do ants fart?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: My god, I haven't gotten to that page in the
Speaker 3: book yet.
Speaker 2: So Terry is referencing the best selling book does it Fart? Now?
Speaker 2: I don't have a copy of this book, but I
Speaker 2: do have evidence that ant man might taken from this
Speaker 2: screen Junkies interview with Paul Rodd Paul run shooting. He
Speaker 2: has either a very squeaky chair or problematic intestines. Ant farms,
Speaker 2: yes or no?
Speaker 3: Ant farm the ones that you buy out of the
Speaker 3: box until and Uncle Milton know because they're all going
Speaker 3: to die because they don't send you a queen. They
Speaker 3: just die. And it's like so it's like, there's these
Speaker 3: onion articles about getting an ant farm is a lesson
Speaker 3: and toiling until you die, that's what that is. But
Speaker 3: if you were to build your own ant farm and
Speaker 3: collect your own ant colony, there are many amateur like
Speaker 3: enthusiasts who really know that biology and are super cool
Speaker 3: and there's ant chat rooms and they're willing to help.
Speaker 3: And so if you want your own ant colonies, then
Speaker 3: doing it that way. Yes.
Speaker 2: Oh so as long as you get the queen and
Speaker 2: you set it upright and you do it respectfully.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, super cool. There's a whole community of people who
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 2: You know what, I can't have a dog in this apartment,
Speaker 2: but maybe I could adopt like a couple thousand ants.
Speaker 3: You could totally have an ant colony in here yet, right,
Speaker 3: I just.
Speaker 2: Found my summer project. A few different people like Craig
Speaker 2: Minami and Sarah Sparrow want to know if there are
Speaker 2: plants or natural remedies or other insects that you could
Speaker 2: use in your house to deter ants.
Speaker 3: Probably not, okay. So there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 3: discussion about well, like chemicals could you use? Could you
Speaker 3: spray powder or chalk or cayenne pepper or whatever? Pretty
Speaker 3: much those don't work?
Speaker 2: Okay, cinnamon no, no, just check it. Okay. So the
Speaker 2: answer is no.
Speaker 3: The answer is got to the cock gun. Yeah, or
Speaker 3: I mean so a general answer would be would be
Speaker 3: to kill your lawn? What right? Because I mean, I
Speaker 3: mean so of course, I've killed my lawn and I
Speaker 3: still have trouble with ants. At least if you're in
Speaker 3: a place, a dry place like in California where you
Speaker 3: have all these argentine ants, they are fed by moisture.
Speaker 3: If it's dry, you don't have them. It's like we're
Speaker 3: doing a clean up in Compton Creek up on a
Speaker 3: dry spot and you had harvester ants like right there
Speaker 3: in the middle of urban whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, harvester ants just on the lookout for that quality, organic,
Speaker 2: free range, gluten free seed to eat, whereas argentine ants
Speaker 2: are munched on pizza crust under a dead possum and
Speaker 2: loving it.
Speaker 3: Often the invasive species will be following water or following
Speaker 3: human disturbance. And so so if you get all your
Speaker 3: neighbors together and have more native landscaping, then you have
Speaker 3: fewer of these invasive ants that would be taking over
Speaker 3: your house. But once inside. But I think the key
Speaker 3: is to keep.
Speaker 2: From letting them in, Okay, so that just gently follow
Speaker 2: them home like an absolute creep, right, Yeah. Anna Thompson
Speaker 2: wants to know, are their loner or introvert ants who
Speaker 2: are not down with the social thing.
Speaker 3: The only non social ants. We have colonies that produce
Speaker 3: what we call social parasites, whereas actually they're not colonies.
Speaker 3: They are non social ants, and so they only produce
Speaker 3: queens and males. And what they do is the queens
Speaker 3: will then fly off and live inside the colony of
Speaker 3: other ants and take their food and lay their own
Speaker 3: eggs and sneak them in with the rest of the colony.
Speaker 2: So side note, the fact that ants don't have a
Speaker 2: long running reality show franchise is an artistic failing of
Speaker 2: our culture.
Speaker 3: And then she'll just make queens and males to make
Speaker 3: new colonies. So they're socially parasitic, and they evolved after
Speaker 3: ants originally evolved.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, they're kind of like sociopaths, like freeloaders.
Speaker 3: They're total freeloaders. Yes, all other ants are social.
Speaker 2: Oh, I didn't know that. Danny Kay wants to know.
Speaker 2: Have you ever spelled your name out in aunt pheromones?
Speaker 2: All at EO Williams.
Speaker 3: I have not spelled my name out in aunt pharamones?
Speaker 2: Okay, Chick Zach Tarbal wants to know. I heard that
Speaker 2: ants are great at predicting weather. Is there any truth
Speaker 2: to this?
Speaker 3: They are the one example I can think of, is
Speaker 3: they are great in predicting weather, is if they know
Speaker 3: if it's really going to rain. So in the for instance,
Speaker 3: in dry areas like in the southwestern US, like they
Speaker 3: reproduce after a rain storm, and so you'll often if
Speaker 3: you're going to have a lot of rain, like there's
Speaker 3: mating flights and so sometimes they'll start flying before the
Speaker 3: rain's hit. And so often people studying them, who are
Speaker 3: trying to collect them can look at the weather reports
Speaker 3: and be like, oh, I bet they're going to fly tonight.
Speaker 2: And you said queens, do some colonies have multiple queens
Speaker 2: or no?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so many kinds of ants will have more than
Speaker 3: one queen per colony.
Speaker 2: Okay, Oh I didn't know that. Sean and Josh Grand
Speaker 2: and EDDI want to know what's the most amazing ant
Speaker 2: behavior you've seen? And do they have self awareness?
Speaker 3: I don't think they have. If we say talk about
Speaker 3: self awareness as in like cognition where they recognize themselves
Speaker 3: in the mirror, I don't think so. Okay, okay, So
Speaker 3: the most amazing behavior I've seen deals with the army
Speaker 3: ants that roam across the ground and eat all the
Speaker 3: other ants that they find. There's this colony of ants,
Speaker 3: which we now call Cappadocian ants.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I look this up, and this is a
Speaker 2: region in Turkey that's known in part for its elaborate
Speaker 2: network ready for this of underground cities, hidden tunnels that
Speaker 2: could house possibly up to twenty thousand people, the entrances
Speaker 2: of which could be concealed by boulders, like full underground
Speaker 2: cities we just discovered a few years ago. Like, if
Speaker 2: you are an archaeologist working on this with any kind
Speaker 2: of hook up, please do holler. I am here by
Speaker 2: begging you. Okay, the backed hands.
Speaker 3: So, but there are these Cappadocian ants that are really
Speaker 3: tiny but routinely are subjected to attack my army ants.
Speaker 3: Outside their nest entrance. They have a little pebble sitting outside,
Speaker 3: and when in an aggressive ant comes to that ant
Speaker 3: colony and they smell them, an ant will come out
Speaker 3: and drag that pebble and plug the nest shut. And
Speaker 3: so you can stimulate this behavior by getting any kind
Speaker 3: of really aggressive smelly ant, like an army ant, and
Speaker 3: wave it in front of the ant entrance and they'll
Speaker 3: come out and they'll grab that little pebble and close
Speaker 3: it shut.
Speaker 2: Damn, They're like nothing to see here, You're not getting
Speaker 2: in there. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, like in horror movies
Speaker 2: when you see someone block the door with a chair
Speaker 2: and you're like, that'll keep them out. That's so smart.
Speaker 2: I love this question so much. Jade wants to know,
Speaker 2: and we ask I asked this definitely from a lot
Speaker 2: of ologists. But Jade wants to know which is more
Speaker 2: accurate scientifically, A bug's life or ants.
Speaker 3: Bugs life?
Speaker 2: Really, which do you have a Do you have a
Speaker 2: preference between both ant movies?
Speaker 3: Gosh, well, I've only seen each of them once, okay,
Speaker 3: and I generally I just found the Ants one annoying,
Speaker 3: Like when Woody Allen has a good movie is good.
Speaker 3: But otherwise it's like, you know, and then there's all
Speaker 3: these other issues of Woody Allen and so. But I
Speaker 3: think bugs life in general, the whole concept about the colony,
Speaker 3: you know, having a seasonal nature and working together and
Speaker 3: storing food. But no, I think I mean, but in general,
Speaker 3: in terms of the life history of the ants, I
Speaker 3: think it's far better than the Ants movie. Ant Man,
Speaker 3: I thought was wonderful. With ant biology, I thought a
Speaker 3: lot of stuff was spot on. It was Dare I say,
Speaker 3: in some ways it was realistic?
Speaker 2: Right now, when you go to your next mermorcology conference,
Speaker 2: will you guys probably talk about that and be like, hey,
Speaker 2: who did the consulting on that? Because it was like
Speaker 2: a pretty good job.
Speaker 3: We all know the dude who's the consulting out No.
Speaker 3: Last one ant meeting I was talking to it was
Speaker 3: a yeah, the grass student who worked on it, and
Speaker 3: he did a great job. And he's like, oh, the
Speaker 3: one thing I'm really annoyed about. He was telling me
Speaker 3: was that that they didn't do the all ants being female?
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That was my next question, like, how do you feel
Speaker 2: when you watch the bugs life and it's like protagonist
Speaker 2: does like a little male aunt. Are you like, well,
Speaker 2: I don't know. Said.
Speaker 3: The thing is, it's like, if you're going to explain
Speaker 3: why all answer female, that's not an easy discussion. I
Speaker 3: think old me and other more pedantic people would be like,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, are you kidding? How can you let
Speaker 3: them get that wrong? That's like the most basic thing ever. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but you know, recent me is like, well, you know, actually,
Speaker 3: since it's not an easy thing to explain and it's
Speaker 3: rather obscure, and it doesn't and the grand scheme of
Speaker 3: thing make that much difference, then maybe we should just say, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: they're you know, sure, fine whatever, let's not talk about gender.
Speaker 2: So Terry says that there's one character named Anthony that
Speaker 2: is clearly morpholog physically a queen, but it's a male,
Speaker 2: which was noted by the consultants. But the studio was like, nah,
Speaker 2: it's fine.
Speaker 3: Because there's all these other things they had absolutely right
Speaker 3: about all the other ants, all these oh well Carpenter
Speaker 3: answer like this, and they do this, and you know,
Speaker 3: and Bullet answer like this, and they had all that
Speaker 3: stuff right. Yeah, and they looked like them and they
Speaker 3: behaved like them. It was like amazing, And so I
Speaker 3: think so they made some decision at the home office
Speaker 3: like Okay, we know the consultant told us about this,
Speaker 3: but screwt, We're just not going to do that.
Speaker 2: I do feel like a lot of people know that
Speaker 2: that social insects tend to be primarily female, do you
Speaker 2: know what I mean? I feel like a lot of
Speaker 2: people like you don't have to be like a super
Speaker 2: super obscure like a meer mycology group. You didn't know that,
Speaker 2: but what can you describe in a nutshell why they
Speaker 2: are female? I know you said it's obscure and complex.
Speaker 3: Okay, But in in ants, bees, and wasps, the males
Speaker 3: have a single copy of the genes. They are haploid,
Speaker 3: and females have two copies of the genes, meaning they're diploid.
Speaker 3: And so that's a thing in this group. That's just
Speaker 3: the way they are. And so that means that when
Speaker 3: males are making sperm, there's no miosis, there's no sorting
Speaker 3: of genes. So in other words, all male sperm is identical.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, And so their sperm is an exact copy
Speaker 3: of them. Oh weird, And so that results weirdness these
Speaker 3: asymmetries in relatedness. But for the most part, like most
Speaker 3: of the social animals that are truly social that way,
Speaker 3: have that genetic thing going on.
Speaker 2: And then how do they know that the eggs are
Speaker 2: just going to be female?
Speaker 3: Essentially, there's like a competition or a war or whatever
Speaker 3: in the colony where a queen will lay an egg
Speaker 3: and she can choose to make it a male or female,
Speaker 3: depending on whether or not she squirts sperm on it.
Speaker 3: Because in insects, the females have an organ called a sperma.
Speaker 3: Thinka that store is sperm. So so males die after
Speaker 3: they have sex for the most part, but worse for females,
Speaker 3: what they do is they just don't have sex again.
Speaker 3: They just store the sperm for the rest of their life.
Speaker 2: Right. Oh, man, you get one super lay and then
Speaker 2: you're like, I guess I'm.
Speaker 3: Celibate, yeah, or maybe a bunch, and then you have
Speaker 3: sperm for multiple males. But then that's it.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah right.
Speaker 3: And so then so then she lays an egg, she
Speaker 3: can make it a male by not putting any sperm
Speaker 3: on it, or she can make it a female by
Speaker 3: fertilizing it. Oh, when she makes a male, that's one
Speaker 3: hundred percent her genes, right.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Okay, that's kind of crazy.
Speaker 3: So genetically, it's in the female's interest actually to make
Speaker 3: males because the males are more closely related to her
Speaker 3: than her daughters, who are only fifty percent related to her.
Speaker 3: So if if a queen essentially is being selfish, then
Speaker 3: she's making too many males. But then the workers will
Speaker 3: get pissed off. And if the you know, because the
Speaker 3: workers want them to lay sisters, because the work because
Speaker 3: the workers are more closely related to the sisters.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. And thrones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's totally Game of Thrones and so there's all
Speaker 3: these conflicts of interest and it's a total met So for.
Speaker 2: A long time, scientists were very firm in thinking that
Speaker 2: the relatedness caused the evolution of social behavior.
Speaker 3: But there's a new generation of scientists that didn't live
Speaker 3: through these wars. But anyone who's my generation or older, like, like,
Speaker 3: we're talking as fighting words.
Speaker 2: Really, yeah, drama, So drama in the colony, drama outside
Speaker 2: of the colony looking at the colony. Yeah. Total Who
Speaker 2: knew that ant life was just like such a roiling
Speaker 2: soap opera?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Okay, So last questions, what do you hate about your
Speaker 2: job other than getting stung by bullet ants?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Gosh, I guess well, I guess I don't. Oh, this
Speaker 3: is a hard thing to say because it's so awesome.
Speaker 3: But as a mermacologist, what do I hate about being
Speaker 3: a mermacologist? I guess it's because being in southern California,
Speaker 3: the ants are relatively boring compared to so many other parts.
Speaker 4: Of the world.
Speaker 2: Oh, we don't have quite as much like trapdoor ants
Speaker 2: and fungus ants, and we've got like, we've got a
Speaker 2: couple of big species battling it out, right, So.
Speaker 3: You have argentine ants, which is like, oh, snevasis species
Speaker 3: and blah blah blah blah. And then some of the
Speaker 3: native ants. Oh, they're kind of cool. But it's like,
Speaker 3: once you get tropical, then you see all these amazing things,
Speaker 3: and so I see them when I go elsewhere, but
Speaker 3: not when I'm here.
Speaker 2: So I guess it keeps you thirsty for field research, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Are you ever like at a picnic in La You're
Speaker 2: like at someone's house and you get distracted by ants
Speaker 2: and you're like, well, I gotta go look at that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, once in a while, and people chortal will be like, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, I should have like a vile in my
Speaker 3: pocket at all times, but I don't. But some people,
Speaker 3: I know, they don't go anywhere without a vial.
Speaker 2: Do you have friends who call you hand man?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a few.
Speaker 2: And then what do you love the most about being
Speaker 2: a mirmacologist.
Speaker 3: There's still so much mystery, Like it's a whole frontier.
Speaker 3: As Korime Moro recently pointed out, there's like a few
Speaker 3: hundred people in the world that are that you know,
Speaker 3: have labs that are focusing on studying ants, and there's
Speaker 3: so many things that we don't know. And especially in
Speaker 3: the tropics. You know, wherever you go, there are ants
Speaker 3: and they are doing things that are running the world.
Speaker 3: And so it's hard to not discover cool things if
Speaker 3: you choose to look.
Speaker 2: And if you had to glean some self help information
Speaker 2: from ants, is there anything that ants have inspired you
Speaker 2: to do differently with your life or could inspire us
Speaker 2: to do.
Speaker 3: Within ant colonies, there's a lot of conflict and despite
Speaker 3: the reputation for having their act together and working really hard,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of lazy ants that are waiting for
Speaker 3: other ants to do their job. And so I mean,
Speaker 3: I I think so I would think of ant call
Speaker 3: if you were to look at an ant colony, most
Speaker 3: ants aren't doing anything.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 3: For every ant that you see above ground doing something,
Speaker 3: there's ten ants like sitting on their ass doing nothing under.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And so I think that's a good counter example for me.
Speaker 3: Like ants like instead of being the go to the
Speaker 3: antthouse sluggard, they work really hard blah blah blah. It's
Speaker 3: like no ants like are waiting for other ants to
Speaker 3: do their job before they they can do theirs. They're
Speaker 3: they're like the opposite of being hard working, entrepreneurial, whatever,
Speaker 3: and so they're a counter example. That's that's how I
Speaker 3: learned from ants.
Speaker 2: Does that make you work harder or chill more? No?
Speaker 3: I think I think I should learn from them that
Speaker 3: I probably should do my own choose my own path,
Speaker 3: and do my own thing rather than just try to
Speaker 3: perform the role that I think I'm supposed to be doing. Like,
Speaker 3: for instance, if my house is messy, it's because, well,
Speaker 3: my wife's waiting for me to do the dishes, and
Speaker 3: I'm waiting for her to do the dishes, so they
Speaker 3: don't get done. That's the kind of thing that may
Speaker 3: or may not that I could kind of see happy
Speaker 3: in an ant colony where they follow the rules they
Speaker 3: if the individual washing dishes isn't there at the moment,
Speaker 3: then it's not going to happen, right.
Speaker 2: That's so funny to think about lazy ants like making
Speaker 2: you take initiative. Yeah, which, by the way, I have
Speaker 2: a sink full of dirty dishes and I live alone.
Speaker 2: So this is the saddest thing of myself. I'm my
Speaker 2: own lady, and this was so informative. I love this.
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm ever gonna look at ants the same.
Speaker 2: I mean, I already love them, but I'm definitely going
Speaker 2: to be more prone to just seeing where they're headed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just watch them.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 3: So the thing is, if your kitchen is overrun with ants,
Speaker 3: you don't have to freak out and like wipe them
Speaker 3: all away, because if you wait five more minutes, it's
Speaker 3: not going to get worse. Might as well just watch them, right,
Speaker 3: and then you knew com.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being here. This was dope.
Speaker 2: I loved it.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: So ask smart people, stupid questions all you want, even
Speaker 2: if they seem like small inquiries. The answers can be mighty.
Speaker 2: Now to find Terry McGlynn on Twitter, he's at hormiga
Speaker 2: h O R M I g A almost positive I'm
Speaker 2: saying that wrong. Or he's at leaflitter dot org. He
Speaker 2: is great now. Ologies is at ologies on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 2: I'm Ali Ward with one L on both Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 2: Do say hello, come and follow. For Ologies Merch, go
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Speaker 2: If you post yourself in merch tagget ologies merch so
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Speaker 2: slash Ologies twenty five cents an episode. The Ologies Facebook
Speaker 2: group is a party full of fine human beings. Thanks
Speaker 2: to admin's Hannahlippo and Aaron Talbot. Thank you to Stephen
Speaker 2: Ray Morris, host of the per cast, and see Jurassic
Speaker 2: Right for all the edits you do to put the
Speaker 2: show together. Special thanks to doctor Teagan Wall for saying
Speaker 2: that male ants are called Uncle's, a joke for which
Speaker 2: she gave me permission to include. Theme song is by
Speaker 2: Nick Thorburn. And if you stick around to the very end,
Speaker 2: you know that I tell you secret, and I will
Speaker 2: tell you right now. I'm recording this from an Airbnb
Speaker 2: in Seattle. My friend is getting married Ology's lepidopterologist Phil Taurus,
Speaker 2: and everyone in the house is asleep, so I'm like
Speaker 2: whisper asiding downstairs, hoping I'm not going to wake anyone up.
Speaker 2: Ps phils fiance Celia bought him the Gucci loafers with
Speaker 2: the bugs on them we talked about at the end
Speaker 2: of his episode. I'm so happy, happily ever after it
Speaker 2: does exist. I will also tell you that there's a
Speaker 2: bonus episode coming out soon that's an anniversary episode. Stephen
Speaker 2: Ray Morris asked me your questions that you submitted, and
Speaker 2: I guess my secret this week is I hope you
Speaker 2: like it. That sounds it's so desperate. I don't think
Speaker 2: it's a laugh riot. I think I was so sentimental
Speaker 2: talking about the anniversary of ologies and it's like how
Speaker 2: much it means to me? So, just so you know,
Speaker 2: is it heartfelt? Very very yes. So that bonus episode
Speaker 2: will be out soon. Thank you as always for listening.
Speaker 2: High five an ant if you see one gently though. Okay,
Speaker 2: all right, bye bye, pacodermatologyology or do zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, pology, nanthology, zeriologyology.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmm, because it's so awesome.