Speaker 1: Oh hey, okay, quick, heads up, this is an encore
Speaker 1: episode because I went to visit my parents this weekend.
Speaker 1: I had a lovely time, and I just straight up
Speaker 1: needed to put up an encore because I'm still working
Speaker 1: hilariously on the ADHD episode. And you know what, we've
Speaker 1: done two hundred and fifty episodes in maybe like five
Speaker 1: or six encorees, so there's plenty to choose from. And ants, Oh,
Speaker 1: let's do it. I love this one. I love this ologist,
Speaker 1: and everyone has ants, but now you'll know the ants
Speaker 1: that you have. Also the most swearing done by any ologist,
Speaker 1: perhaps ever, but in an educational way. Okay, oh hey,
Speaker 1: it's your grandma's new boyfriend who just wants to show
Speaker 1: you some magic tricks. Ali Ward back with another episode. Apologies,
Speaker 1: So it's Tuesday, man, Let's learn about some ants. They're tiny,
Speaker 1: they're mighty, they're harmless, sometimes not, and they're more organized
Speaker 1: than all of the clowns on your slack thread. But
Speaker 1: you know what, maybe you don't want to see thousands
Speaker 1: of tiny ladies having an all night rave in your
Speaker 1: cereal pantry. But to quote common parlance, can a bitch live?
Speaker 1: Let's learn about these little creatures, and more importantly, let's
Speaker 1: suck some self help and organizational strategies out of them
Speaker 1: with a mirrorcologist, which is a word you only know
Speaker 1: about if you're a miracologist. But first pre usual, you
Speaker 1: know the drill. I say thank you to people who
Speaker 1: let me keep the podcast going, all the patrons at
Speaker 1: patreon dot com slash ologies who pay a buck or
Speaker 1: more a month, and is always thank you to the
Speaker 1: folks who say, you know what this pod is worth,
Speaker 1: mashing the star button on the iTunes app and maybe
Speaker 1: leaving a review for dad word to creep in the
Speaker 1: night when she feels lonesome, and then read aloud to
Speaker 1: you to prove that I read them and I picked
Speaker 1: a brand new, fresh one February first, twenty twenty two people,
Speaker 1: I went in and I put it in here. I
Speaker 1: don't slack even when I'm slacking, So thank you HBXCS
Speaker 1: for leaving this review titled the Metric. I frequently compare
Speaker 1: new podcast to ologies to determine how good they are.
Speaker 1: This podcast is simply the best. Thank you for saying that,
Speaker 1: which reminds me that we do need a metrology episode
Speaker 1: about measurements, So thank you to everyone who left review though,
Speaker 1: including you, the amazing Hufflepoff. I read all of yours.
Speaker 1: Ooh okay, mirmacology. I said that all strung out like
Speaker 1: a line of ants. Did you like it?
Speaker 2: Good?
Speaker 1: Okay? So I'm writing this before looking up the etymology.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say I wrote this before I looked
Speaker 1: it up. I took a wild guest that it was
Speaker 1: Greek for ant. Hold on, I google it, damn it.
Speaker 1: I'm right. But it wasn't coined until nineteen o six,
Speaker 1: when naturalist William Morton Wheeler was like, dang it out,
Speaker 1: love ants. I need a title that sounds like a wizard.
Speaker 1: So he took mrima and put mycologists there. You go,
Speaker 1: miriramacologists done. Now this ologist I had followed on Twitter
Speaker 1: for months and months and months and months, and our
Speaker 1: schedules never were quite aligned to do an episode. And
Speaker 1: finally he was back from the rainforest on a sunny
Speaker 1: Sunday afternoon, and I was so excited to sit down
Speaker 1: and chat. So he spends part of his time in
Speaker 1: the rainforest of Costa Rica studying tropical ants, and is
Speaker 1: also a biology professor at cal State University. Domingus Hills,
Speaker 1: which has over ten thousand students, seventy percent of whom
Speaker 1: are first generation college students. I think that is awesome.
Speaker 1: Now the result of this is a whole nest of
Speaker 1: facts about invasive species and colony communications and the bizarre
Speaker 1: genetics of queen ants, and why army ants are your
Speaker 1: new squad and what it really really really feels like
Speaker 1: like for real, to get stung by a bullet ant?
Speaker 1: Isn't that bad? And what we can learn about our
Speaker 1: own strength and work ethic from these lovely ladies and
Speaker 1: some dudes we call ants. So get ready make a beeline,
Speaker 1: make an ant line for this chat with Mrmacologist doctor
Speaker 1: Terry McGlenn.
Speaker 3: Yes, did I say it right? Mycologistsmacology? I think, well,
Speaker 3: like all these words, there's no proper way of saying it,
Speaker 3: it's just the ones that are socially acceptable among people
Speaker 3: who do.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: You can't say a word wrong, You just say a
Speaker 3: word different than other people say.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, how long have you been
Speaker 1: a murrmacologist?
Speaker 3: I started working on ants in nineteen ninety four when
Speaker 3: I started grad school. So a minute, Yeah, so that's
Speaker 3: a couple decades.
Speaker 1: Right level decades of ants, not literally under your belt,
Speaker 1: in your pants, but just in your life. Well was
Speaker 1: it about antser?
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 don'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. Actually,
Speaker 3: So before.
Speaker 1: Getting his PhD in Colorado, Terry majored in biology for
Speaker 1: undergrad at Occidental College, Obama's alma mater here in LA
Speaker 1: And when he was thinking about grad school, he was
Speaker 1: considering Europe, and he ended up interviewing with a Swiss
Speaker 1: professor who studied ants. He even flew out to interview,
Speaker 1: the first time he'd ever left the country. Now, in
Speaker 1: the end, he didn't study at that lab, but the
Speaker 1: experience of emailing back and forth with this Swiss dude
Speaker 1: unveiled the tiny, wonderful world of mere mycology and.
Speaker 3: It seemed really, really, really cool. And 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 1: Now, let's unpack this really quick. Do you think having
Speaker 1: an interest in social science and philosophy plus a little
Speaker 1: biology interest like those were married perfectly in a social insect?
Speaker 3: Maybe because I think my interest originally, 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? Wait? We are that we?
Speaker 3: 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 1: That so quick as I At first I thought he
Speaker 1: was saying mer me, as in like merely myself, But
Speaker 1: I think he's saying mere meat like that we're meat,
Speaker 1: which is so much more metal. What a metal way
Speaker 1: 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 1: So many ants right now are sipping oat milk cortados
Speaker 1: over the economist just being like wow, wow, oh 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 1: Walk me through a little bit of a colony. Because
Speaker 1: we had an episode on melotology bees and so we've
Speaker 1: covered some social insects, but what are the similarities between
Speaker 1: bees and ants? Are they all mostly women? Are they
Speaker 1: all like driven by pheromones or behavior or vision, like
Speaker 1: 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 called the temporal polyethism.
Speaker 1: So that means at different times you do different things,
Speaker 1: like your chores as a kid may have gone from
Speaker 1: feeding the cat to doing the laundry to driving your
Speaker 1: siblings to school. Now, if your kids don't think you're
Speaker 1: enough of a douche, tell them that it's imperative that
Speaker 1: they engage in temporal polytheism to acquire their weekly stipend.
Speaker 1: That way they can talk about you to a therapist
Speaker 1: 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 1: WHOA, So there's like engineer ants and like architect ants,
Speaker 1: and ones are like you know what, guys, I'm like
Speaker 1: 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 from ants in
Speaker 3: the colony, they might change their tasks. So some ants
Speaker 3: have broad variety and body sizes. So, for instance, leaf
Speaker 3: cutter ants, you have these huge, huge ones with these
Speaker 3: big heads. They're used for chopping stems and defending the colony,
Speaker 3: for like when vertebrates attack, and you have these tiny,
Speaker 3: tiny little ants that might tend the fungal garden and
Speaker 3: ride on the leaves. And so the way that the
Speaker 3: polymorphic ants divide labor and the way that monomorph ants
Speaker 3: divide labor is different.
Speaker 1: It's a little different. Yeah, Now what is your work
Speaker 1: like day to day? Do you? Here's what I picture,
Speaker 1: tell me if I'm wrong. I picture that you work
Speaker 1: in a lab and it's full of aquariums that are
Speaker 1: just big riding balls of ants, and you also have
Speaker 1: a clipboard and maybe a lab coat, and then sometimes
Speaker 1: you're in the fields with a magnifying glass. Is any
Speaker 1: 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 1: Oh my god. Okay, what are they organized into like
Speaker 1: a little tiny pins or are they just in like
Speaker 1: 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, mounting
Speaker 3: collections in pins, and so we when we mount ants
Speaker 3: in museum collections, you glue them onto the tip of
Speaker 3: a little point and put the pin through that so
Speaker 3: you can look at them, because if you put the
Speaker 3: pin through the ant, then it messes them up.
Speaker 1: So you yeah, that'd be like, that'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: we just put a missile through alley, Like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not you can't do that to an any 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 1: I mean a whole colony is like two hundred bros
Speaker 1: 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 some might have hundreds. But even for these tiny
Speaker 3: little ones that I work with on the leaf litter
Speaker 3: of the rainforest floor, the ants themselves are so tiny
Speaker 3: that a colony of a couple hundred ants will still
Speaker 3: fit into a tiny little tube.
Speaker 1: That's crazy because these.
Speaker 3: Are unspeakably tiny.
Speaker 1: How did you get involved with the tiniest ants? Were
Speaker 1: you like, I have great vision, ergo, I will work
Speaker 1: with the tiny ants now Uh.
Speaker 3: Well, no, as actually, and so now I just started worrying,
Speaker 3: like the progressive lenses. Hey, So it's like, uh so
Speaker 3: when I'm out in the field with students, like they're
Speaker 3: seeing things that I literally cannot see.
Speaker 1: Microscopic micro machine, micro machine, the micro machine pocket place
Speaker 1: that's sold simply from gloog.
Speaker 2: The smaller they are, the better they are.
Speaker 1: So for his dissertation, Terry worked with Wasmania oropunk tata.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm saying that right. So let's
Speaker 1: just call them little fire ants because that's their name
Speaker 1: unless you're from down.
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 print, and which is amazing something
Speaker 3: that talk can actually small can hurt you. I know. Oh,
Speaker 3: most ants are really tiny. A lot of them are
Speaker 3: just that small.
Speaker 1: I'm so little, like smaller than the ones that we
Speaker 1: 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 the
Speaker 3: common invasive species found in Mediterranean climates or whatnot, the
Speaker 3: one that was taking over my kitchen last week.
Speaker 1: Oh no, oh my god, what did you do because
Speaker 1: you're like a godfather to them? Did you commit mass anticide?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, actually, uh, I've wiped off the ones off
Speaker 3: the counter.
Speaker 1: No, how dare you?
Speaker 3: But but then I just blocked the entrance off, so
Speaker 3: it's not like I need to kill I wasn't trying
Speaker 3: to kill them all off. I just kept them from
Speaker 3: getting in. So like I have, like you know, the
Speaker 3: cock gun ready to go, and I keep finding a
Speaker 3: new space where they So it's like the evolutionary arms
Speaker 3: race is them finding new ways to get in me
Speaker 3: calking that spot.
Speaker 1: So now that is one thing you can do if
Speaker 1: you don't want to just like send in a poisoned
Speaker 1: cake and be like kill off your whole colony. That's
Speaker 1: a nice thing to do. So side note. As a
Speaker 1: college sophomore, I lived in my first house with friends.
Speaker 1: Everyone was pretty goth and got along, but one of
Speaker 1: my roommates was very very stony boloney like a lot,
Speaker 1: which was so endearing. And we had an ant infestation
Speaker 1: and he told me all about these things called Grant's
Speaker 1: ant sticks. They're these baits that you soak in hot
Speaker 1: water and then you set out and he explained to
Speaker 1: me like this.
Speaker 4: Like all right, okay, like if you were so hungry,
Speaker 4: right and you found like twenty pizzas and you took
Speaker 4: me to your friends and you were like shit, you guys, pizzas,
Speaker 4: this rules and everyone's like what was the best And
Speaker 4: then but the pizzas like poisoned everyone. It's like so tight.
Speaker 1: I've never forgotten this tutorial. And I'll be honest, I
Speaker 1: have used these ant baits every time I've had an infestation,
Speaker 1: and I felt so bad about it, like I'm the
Speaker 1: villain in their action movie. But it does work for
Speaker 1: a while.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, but it's also really really good. That's only
Speaker 3: going to be a short term solution anyway, because even
Speaker 3: if you get the toxic bait that they'll take and
Speaker 3: bring back, which you know, could be effective, but the
Speaker 3: thing is that's going to kill them off for a while,
Speaker 3: but eventually there's going to be some that are just
Speaker 3: moving 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 1: No, yeah, wait a minute, Okay, So these Argentinian ants
Speaker 1: which are invasive, and they're the tiny, like not tiny,
Speaker 1: but they're the small, little black ones that invade your kitchen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know that they kind of have outpaced harvester ants,
Speaker 1: which are the bigger, kind of like a amborie color
Speaker 1: ones that live in the hills.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, wh's people call red ants? Yeah, the harvest rants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there it just kind of spans one big
Speaker 1: colony under the city for.
Speaker 3: The most part, or occupying the whole city.
Speaker 1: This blew my mind. If your friend moves ten miles
Speaker 1: away in LA, you will never see each other again,
Speaker 1: like burbank to who that is a forever goodbye, just
Speaker 1: move on. But for ants, they're all essentially roommates. The
Speaker 1: Argentine ants, the little ones that are invasive species but
Speaker 1: have like pretty lax dietary tastes, the lead almost anything.
Speaker 1: They have a California colony that stretches five hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty miles, which is nothing compared to one colony in
Speaker 1: southern Europe thirty seven hundred miles. Big billions of sisters.
Speaker 1: So it's no wonder that the harvest or ants, with
Speaker 1: their kind of picky diet of locally harvested seeds are
Speaker 1: 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 1: Wow, that's so weird.
Speaker 3: And so if you're to grab ants and put them
Speaker 3: in a vial and then go one hundred miles two
Speaker 3: hundred miles, either they'll get along or they don't. And
Speaker 3: if they don't, that means that you've hit a new
Speaker 3: super colony. And you can tell where the border between
Speaker 3: the super colonies is because there's like a line of
Speaker 3: dead ants on the ground where they just go to
Speaker 3: war no cool labunnas, Yeah, are you kidding me? And
Speaker 3: they're just constantly fighting. But there's one large supercolony that
Speaker 3: has taken over most of LA.
Speaker 1: And they're all in the same family. So now even
Speaker 1: if they're the same species, they'll have a battleground. They'll
Speaker 1: 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 1: Oh it's like humans, Yeah exactly. Is that like a
Speaker 1: lot of social animals, like they operate as such one
Speaker 1: massive super organism that like their biggest predator really is
Speaker 1: their own species.
Speaker 3: Well, I would say their biggest predator, but their biggest competitor, yeah, 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 1: How many species of ants are there?
Speaker 3: I think described we might be up the 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 1: So if you want to be a meremacologist, just know
Speaker 1: that eight thousand species of ants are like notice me, please,
Speaker 1: I'm right here. They're begging you to be an ant scientist,
Speaker 1: but they probably don't know the part about putting some
Speaker 1: of their friends in jars. Even though it's to identify
Speaker 1: and save ant kind, it seems like a difficult task
Speaker 1: for ant lovers, Like I love you, I kill you.
Speaker 1: I love you, but I kill you. Do you have
Speaker 1: a favorite species of ant?
Speaker 3: Be honest, it's hard. I mean, I guess one of
Speaker 3: my favorites are the bulldog ants in Australia. The mamisi. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what I have to say, Well, so they're really big
Speaker 3: and they have these bulging eyes, but they're one of
Speaker 3: the few ants they almost act like a vertebrate like
Speaker 3: most ants if you mess with their calling, even like
Speaker 3: the big bullet ants that I work with and whatnot,
Speaker 3: that they sort of just run around and get upset
Speaker 3: and like, oh I might sting you. Oh look I'm feerce,
Speaker 3: or they'll freak out or run away. But the bulldog ants,
Speaker 3: they'll just send a few ants up out of their
Speaker 3: nest and they'll look at you and just open their
Speaker 3: mandibles and be like I see you. It's like what
Speaker 3: it's like, they're just yeah, they just stand up and
Speaker 3: it's like it's like an intimidation thing. And also they
Speaker 3: have a really painful sting. So I mean they're actually,
Speaker 3: you know, honestly advertising how badass they are.
Speaker 1: So bulldog ants actually mad dog. Now, Okay, explain to
Speaker 1: me a little bit about the social behavior, because I
Speaker 1: think that's one thing that people are just like mesmerized
Speaker 1: by ants because they have this social behavior. They have
Speaker 1: these tiny little brains. How do they do it? Is
Speaker 1: it all through pheromones? Like, is it just innate, what's like,
Speaker 1: 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 line an ant that commutes to other ants
Speaker 3: that they're dead Sti'll pick it up and drag them
Speaker 3: into the wastepile.
Speaker 1: Even if they're kicking and screaming, being like what's up, hey, assholes,
Speaker 1: I'm fully alive, and they're like, sorry, you smell like
Speaker 1: a corpse, so you're out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's totally the story. Yeah, Yo, Wilson did, Like
Speaker 3: that was the comical thing. He would paint a live
Speaker 3: ant with a chemical that says that they're a dead ant,
Speaker 3: and then the ants would be dragged living over to
Speaker 3: the dead pile.
Speaker 1: It's 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 have
Speaker 3: we're not even close to understanding the details of how
Speaker 3: one species does things differently from another species. And why so, friends,
Speaker 3: if you take ants, a colony of ants, and you
Speaker 3: put them like in an area there dirt and let's see,
Speaker 3: and you give them a chance to excavate a nest, like,
Speaker 3: so different species will have different nest architectures, and it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, and so you can look at the structure
Speaker 3: of a nest or a structure of a nest entrance,
Speaker 3: or you could do a casting of a nest and
Speaker 3: be like, oh, I think I know what species it
Speaker 3: is just on the shape of the nest that they dig.
Speaker 3: And so how is it that every that a species
Speaker 3: is socially organized to do something like that repetitively? I mean,
Speaker 3: there's still so much to learn. But in general, it's
Speaker 3: thought that the way that colonies organize complex behavior is
Speaker 3: based on interactions with one another. So if you interact
Speaker 3: with an individual, then that communicates different kinds of information
Speaker 3: depending on what chemicals you share, what body posture you have,
Speaker 3: you know, like in honeybees, for example, what orientation your
Speaker 3: body is? So from all of these small little pieces
Speaker 3: of behavior, and then we have a complex colony emerge.
Speaker 1: So a lot of small simple computers can make a
Speaker 1: big complex computer. And yes, of course this is being
Speaker 1: studied by the military. Imagine a million tiny robot soldiers.
Speaker 1: Or maybe don't do you get optimistic about solving future
Speaker 1: problems with maybe some themes or things we've learned from
Speaker 1: ant behavior? Or are you like, oh shit, we're gonna
Speaker 1: learn from ants and we're all gonna kill 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. And so
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 1: Can you give me some hot goss? Can you like
Speaker 1: spill the tea on some of ants crazy behaviors, like
Speaker 1: what kind of real housewives shit happens in those colonies?
Speaker 4: Also?
Speaker 1: Are they mostly e ladies?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Oh yeah, so yeah, So this we mentioned before.
Speaker 3: So just like in almost all social insects except for
Speaker 3: social cockroaches for really known as termites.
Speaker 1: Oh wait what yeah, yeah, termites are now called social cockroaches.
Speaker 1: 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 1: So another detail to get your head around. I'll say
Speaker 1: this fast because A it's unrelated to ants, and B
Speaker 1: it's disgusting. So termites eat wood, and cockroaches are copraphages,
Speaker 1: which means they're faces eaters, and scientists think that being
Speaker 1: friendly and eating each other's snacky waist could have set
Speaker 1: the stage for good gut biomes that are able to
Speaker 1: digest wood. So that's how cockroaches turned into termites. Thank you,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Let's get back to ants, specifically the dames,
Speaker 1: ants and bees. We're looking at a bunch 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 aunt
Speaker 3: that has no wings, then it's going to be a
Speaker 3: female worker.
Speaker 1: 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 1: So boy aunt to do list is like be born,
Speaker 1: have wings, have a nuptial flight mate, and then die.
Speaker 1: You're done and ps. The male ants, who are not
Speaker 1: called uncles but rather drones, and the queens will usually
Speaker 1: mate when it's humid out or after it rains, so
Speaker 1: that she can get laid and then rip off her
Speaker 1: own wings casually and then pump her babies into a
Speaker 1: hole in the earth, thus starting one big, happy, kind
Speaker 1: of overworked family. And now remember the family that sniffs
Speaker 1: and rubs their bodily secretions on each other together stays together.
Speaker 1: So what kind of behaviors, what kind of actions and
Speaker 1: behaviors do they have in terms of communicating with each other?
Speaker 3: They meaning the ants ants. Yeah, so there's I mean,
Speaker 3: sometimes they'll actually perform physical movements on one another to
Speaker 3: communicate things, but it's pretty much it's all chemical for
Speaker 3: the most part.
Speaker 1: Are do they say things like hey, there's a fruit
Speaker 1: loop over there, or hey, watch out, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a weird ant eater lurching about? Like what kind of
Speaker 1: 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 1: WHOA, So they know is this part in this question?
Speaker 1: Is it just coming out of their butt's where is
Speaker 1: it coming from?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 3: So they have different glands and different parts of their bodies, okay,
Speaker 3: and so some of the glands, like for instance, the
Speaker 3: alarm pheromones are in the mandibles and mandibular glands, and
Speaker 3: so once in a long while we're still discovering new glands.
Speaker 3: But who you know, But there's a few key glands
Speaker 3: you know, in the head or in the middle part
Speaker 3: of the butt that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they're like, nah, it's just a short term trail.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna hang here for too long. So they're
Speaker 1: just gonna like squirt some stuff out of their their
Speaker 1: thorax and then that evaporates. Then then wow, the alarm
Speaker 1: ones near their mandibles is really interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this means like attack what's near there? Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: But there's also just like for instance, with like we
Speaker 3: were talking about with the r g gin ants and
Speaker 3: their super colonies. So one of the things that we
Speaker 3: find is the reason the ants will accept or reject
Speaker 3: someone into the colony the pheromones. So the ants have
Speaker 3: to really physically rub up against one another to smell
Speaker 3: these like but once you touch then you would come
Speaker 3: in contact with this pheromone, which is like a long
Speaker 3: chain carbon which is not volatile, and so if that
Speaker 3: matches their own, then they recognize them as colony mates.
Speaker 3: But if those compounds are different enough, 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 1: Oh my god. So you can almost trick them into
Speaker 1: being like no, no, no, no, no, you guys are cool because
Speaker 1: you 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 feod that have different kinds
Speaker 3: of chemicals, then they'll stop getting along with one another.
Speaker 1: So side note, I had a boyfriend years ago who
Speaker 1: ate one bowl of epically pungent garlic soup one fateful day,
Speaker 1: and I thought, maybe we're going to break up. I
Speaker 1: thought that was the end I considered it. I just
Speaker 1: did not know how to cope politely. I mean, how
Speaker 1: do you approach invasive species because clearly you marvel at ants.
Speaker 1: Are you like, ah, I'm I'm pissed off at you
Speaker 1: guys because you are maybe like outpacing native species. Or
Speaker 1: 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 to one hundred years after they arrive, they really
Speaker 3: reduce the abundance of other native ants. But I mean
Speaker 3: also just pragmatically speaking, it's an economic problem because most
Speaker 3: of these invasive species cause problems that disrupt trade, 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 1: What, Yeah, they'll eat a bird like.
Speaker 3: The little baby birds. I think they have trouble getting
Speaker 3: into the eggs, but as soon as they hatch and
Speaker 3: they'll swarm over the nest. Oh my god, so like songage.
Speaker 3: So in ground nesting birds in the southeastern US are
Speaker 3: really at risk because of you know, this invasive species.
Speaker 1: Why do some ants want to eat an apple core?
Speaker 1: And others are like, well.
Speaker 3: I mean so species are different, right, And so I
Speaker 3: mean so all different kinds of bands have all different
Speaker 3: kinds of diet. But I mean some ants primarily eat
Speaker 3: other ants, like armiants.
Speaker 1: Army ants eat other ants.
Speaker 3: So most armiance species are specialists on other social insects.
Speaker 3: So other ant colonies and like wasp colonies and termites
Speaker 3: and yeah, oh.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah what are I'm okay? Because
Speaker 1: there are some there are some species of ants that
Speaker 1: have reputations fire ants, army ants, bullet ants. What is
Speaker 1: it about those species that are just like more ferocious
Speaker 1: or more threatening to people? And should we be marveling
Speaker 1: at that instead of being like hey, ants, knock it off.
Speaker 3: Oh, I think we totally should be marblized. Yeah, ants
Speaker 3: are Are they amazing? Yeah, well, army ants aren't really
Speaker 3: a threat. I guess if you were to put a
Speaker 3: baby in a bassinet and let it sit there as
Speaker 3: Armiance went through, well then that probably would not be
Speaker 3: good news because it would get stung a lot, right,
Speaker 3: But otherwise, like armiants are great. If they come through
Speaker 3: your house, you step outside for a couple hours, you
Speaker 3: come back and they've cleaned out all the insect pests?
Speaker 1: Have they really? They've just marched through and been like
Speaker 1: I ate a cockroach, I ate them off?
Speaker 3: Yeah, please seriously, And so it's normal. So I think
Speaker 3: there's this notion that they're incredibly efficient. But I've got
Speaker 3: I've looked through places where Armiance had just roam through.
Speaker 3: There's still bugs in the litters. They didn't get everybody, They.
Speaker 1: Get everything a little sloppy. And now what about bullet
Speaker 1: 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 1: 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. You know the alpha
Speaker 3: pon atoxin and beta our toxin causes a lot of pain,
Speaker 3: right right, But the real question is why is it
Speaker 3: they evolved to toxin which is so much more painful
Speaker 3: than everyone else. So my pet concept behind that is, well,
Speaker 3: bullet ants are huge, and they also have pretty big
Speaker 3: colonies considering their size, the colonies can have a few
Speaker 3: thousand individuals when they get to be big, and so
Speaker 3: the larvae and the pupy are really big and chunky.
Speaker 3: It's like a really really good meal, like I can
Speaker 3: imagine like a kowati or a peckery or someone digging
Speaker 3: up the ground and would love eating all of those.
Speaker 1: This just in a kowat is a very cute, long
Speaker 1: faced raccoon looking idiot, and a peckery appears to be
Speaker 1: a spindle legged forest piggy with frothy Texas hair, and
Speaker 1: they would probably love to eat soft, squishy bullet ant
Speaker 1: 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 sting 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 tree to eat a carpenter at colony. So
Speaker 3: bullet ant colonies are really vulnerable if they're just in
Speaker 3: soil at the base of a tree.
Speaker 1: That's a great answer. So the lesson is hide your
Speaker 1: shit or be prepared to defend it. Now, how do
Speaker 1: you feel when you see people say in like Moose
Speaker 1: science programs or YouTube that are like I put my
Speaker 1: hands in a fire ant or I let a bullet
Speaker 1: ants sting, need to see how it would feel. Are
Speaker 1: you just like shaking your damn head on the side.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean I think with a fire that's just
Speaker 3: 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 and it's painful, and so you know
Speaker 3: what's gonna 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 like
Speaker 3: and and and it really hurt.
Speaker 1: What did they do? What kind of reactions happen?
Speaker 3: Well, they just they just screamed their heads off and
Speaker 3: then use all kinds of cursing.
Speaker 1: You are dream.
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
Speaker 3: once and that was in the lab when I was
Speaker 3: being dumb. And so it's possible to work with them
Speaker 3: and not get stung. If you just treat them with
Speaker 3: respect and understand how they behave.
Speaker 1: Well, Hello, what happened? What happened? Tell me everything. You
Speaker 1: were in the lab you got stung with by a
Speaker 1: 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. They needs 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 1: Off, PS, if you haven't already, now would be a
Speaker 1: good time to cover the ears of your children or
Speaker 1: 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, fuck, And I flung
Speaker 3: the ant like somewhere in the balance room, and it
Speaker 3: 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 1: Did you ever find the flung ant?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, they're huge. How do you
Speaker 3: not find it?
Speaker 1: Okay? I looked these things up and they are meaty
Speaker 1: as hell. They're about as big as a wingless wasp,
Speaker 1: but with a sting. Some experts say is thirty times
Speaker 1: more painful than a bee's worse than childbirth and being burned. Ps.
Speaker 1: How do we know that? Well? One Cornell University study
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties was trying to measure comparative pains
Speaker 1: using something that's still called a dolorimeter. Dolar, by the way,
Speaker 1: is just straight up and noun meaning great sorrow or distress.
Speaker 1: So they use this dollar meter and during childbirth. The
Speaker 1: team of scientists James D. Hardy, Harold G. Wolf, and
Speaker 1: Helen Goodell heated, I mean, I guess burned women to
Speaker 1: ask which feels worse, and the answer must have been
Speaker 1: a consistent fuck off enough that they stopped using this method. Now,
Speaker 1: for Terry, who has a child but no experience shoving
Speaker 1: one out of an orifice, how would he describe it? Oh?
Speaker 1: 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. So
Speaker 3: it's not to say that everyone else will have this response.
Speaker 3: But for me, it was like if you put your
Speaker 3: finger on a countertop and I were to give you
Speaker 3: a hammer and ask you hit it as hard as
Speaker 3: you can. That's what it felt like. Yeah, how long
Speaker 3: does it lave? Well, the one common name that people
Speaker 3: have for them is Romigo of Antiquatro, the twenty four
Speaker 3: hour ant So mine did not last twenty four hours,
Speaker 3: but it really hurt. So I mean, so I took
Speaker 3: a photos of ibuprofen and benadreil because my hand started
Speaker 3: to get really puffy and so it was throbbing enough
Speaker 3: where I just couldn't focus on anything. So it was
Speaker 3: like my day was kind of done. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: think and then like then I had lost muscular strength
Speaker 3: in the hand, like I couldn't hold a coffee cup.
Speaker 3: In this hand, like like I just couldn't squeeze enough
Speaker 3: to hold it. It was weird. And then that evening,
Speaker 3: like the whole hand was like numb, like I would
Speaker 3: poke it and I couldn't feel it.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Here's a question. If you could do
Speaker 1: your whole life over and you had a chance to
Speaker 1: not have that happened to you, would you erase that
Speaker 1: from your experience or are you in some way glad
Speaker 1: that you.
Speaker 3: Know what it's like. I guess well enough people have
Speaker 3: asked me what it feels like?
Speaker 1: What did it feel like?
Speaker 3: That it's 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 1: I mean I have heard also, like Phil Torres, the
Speaker 1: lepidopterologist that I interviewed about butterflies. He says that entomologists
Speaker 1: have a rite of passage of like everyone kind of
Speaker 1: wants to get a bot fly larva stuck in them.
Speaker 1: Do ant research say like do ant researchers say like
Speaker 1: 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. I know they would be more into
Speaker 3: I think they a butt fly would still be a
Speaker 3: bigger rite of passage than like the nobility.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what's the craziest thing that you've seen
Speaker 1: 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 1: What the hell?
Speaker 3: So? So people used to call these slave making ants,
Speaker 3: but I don't think that really describes their behavior well.
Speaker 3: And so, so what kidnapper ants are? And those and
Speaker 3: this actually I just saw I've saw seen in Arizona.
Speaker 3: So they are colonies that go on seasonal raids where
Speaker 3: they find the colonies of other ants and steal their
Speaker 3: brood and bring them back to their own nest and
Speaker 3: raise them up, and then those ants live there. So
Speaker 3: they're like, so they're kidnapping baby ants from other colony
Speaker 3: and then those ants. So if you were to look
Speaker 3: at a kidnapper ant colony, there's two kinds of workers.
Speaker 3: There's the kidnapper ants themselves, which are like big and
Speaker 3: bright orange, and then the ants that they stole, who
Speaker 3: are working alongside them thinking they belong there, but they
Speaker 3: were actually kidnapped.
Speaker 1: Is that a matter of pheromones? Do they rub their
Speaker 1: pheromone on it where they're like, you think you're you
Speaker 1: 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 ants 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 defenses aren't quite good enough.
Speaker 1: So does that mean that the kidnapper aunt queen is
Speaker 1: kind of like a cult leader? She like a David
Speaker 1: koresh of like jonestown, Like she's like, you belong here
Speaker 1: and you love it, keep working.
Speaker 3: You totally can imagine that. Yeah, And now what are.
Speaker 1: Aunt queens like? I should have asked this earlier, but
Speaker 1: what are aunt queens like? Are they just pumping out
Speaker 1: babies all the time? Like do they get killed and
Speaker 1: eaten by someone when they're ready to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so so most folks. The popular conception is that
Speaker 3: queens run the colony for the most part, Like queens
Speaker 3: are not in charge. It's the workers that are running
Speaker 3: the colony. And so the queen, if anything, is the
Speaker 3: captive of the ants, because the ants, because the queen
Speaker 3: is doing the reproductive labor for the colony, and the
Speaker 3: answer are doing all the other labor. Oh and so,
Speaker 3: and if a queen has only made it once, then
Speaker 3: because of bizarre genetics that we could get into, the
Speaker 3: workers are more related to the queen, to their sisters,
Speaker 3: the queen's daughter, then the queen is to her own daughters. Weird,
Speaker 3: So you could argue that the queen is actually doing
Speaker 3: the reproductive work, you know, for her daughters who are
Speaker 3: in the colony.
Speaker 1: Ooh, that's some handmade, stale shit right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And what does your research right now deal with? Like,
Speaker 1: what 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 I
Speaker 3: So what I do is I find you know, there's
Speaker 3: so many curious, weird phenomena that we don't understand out there,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, you know, I think I'm gonna try
Speaker 3: to do experiments to try to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 3: And 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 of ants and how they adapt are
Speaker 3: adapting to hotter temperatures. And so the way I've been
Speaker 3: looking at this is looking at variation within a colony
Speaker 3: and how that might evolve, and how colonies use behavioral
Speaker 3: flexibility to respond to changing temperatures. So a lot of
Speaker 3: people are looking at differences among species to think how
Speaker 3: about how things will change, But I think actually ant
Speaker 3: colonies might evolve to behaviorally adapt to higher temperatures.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's crazy. Do you think that they'll store
Speaker 1: more water or seek higher ground or lower ground.
Speaker 3: Or yeah, they might nest deeper, they might vorage at
Speaker 3: 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 of 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 the colony lives. But it turns out that the
Speaker 3: majority of species move their nests on a regular basis,
Speaker 3: like every few weeks, every few months, once a year
Speaker 3: and people. And so I've been working to show people
Speaker 3: that this is actually kind of the way the ants are.
Speaker 3: They're not like miniature plants rooted in the ground, but
Speaker 3: just like our invasive arching chants move all over the city.
Speaker 3: Even if you go don't look at invasive species, if
Speaker 3: you're just looking at natural areas, ants moving their nest
Speaker 3: is a pretty common thing. And so I've been trying
Speaker 3: to figure out how and why that happens in a
Speaker 3: couple species.
Speaker 1: 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 of the
Speaker 3: forest changes, so they end up in a place that's shadier,
Speaker 3: they need to move to a place that's more sunny.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, they do this get at all?
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Now, how do you feel when you see people pouring
Speaker 1: like molten aluminum into an ant colony? So side note
Speaker 1: for a visual just imagine like a small, squat shiny
Speaker 1: metal Christmas tree that a robot might put up, or
Speaker 1: shimmering silver coral or maybe a bush doctor Seuss would
Speaker 1: dream up for the future. Now, if you google ant
Speaker 1: hill art, you can see products and some aren't displays,
Speaker 1: and also the process, and in so doing you will
Speaker 1: again realize that we are the villains in an ants
Speaker 1: action film for sure, because I know that they can
Speaker 1: then dig it up and it's this beautiful branching structure.
Speaker 1: But I'm also like, dude, ants, I just.
Speaker 3: Say it as like a gorgeous work of art. I mean,
Speaker 3: so it's like I estimated on the back of an
Speaker 3: envelope the number of ants that I killed and it
Speaker 3: was like on the low end, very low end, it's
Speaker 3: like a quarter million, a half million. So I you know,
Speaker 3: so maybe there's a little wanted posters of the inside
Speaker 3: at Colin and it's you know, unlike a lot of
Speaker 3: other people who study insects, I actually work really hard
Speaker 3: to avoid collecting. And I think biological collections are very
Speaker 3: important and we should continue to build and maintain collections,
Speaker 3: but I think we need to think hard about the
Speaker 3: ethics of how we do this. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: data to be acquired from those too. I know people
Speaker 3: are now doing that as an art piece, but also
Speaker 3: a lot of what we've learned about nest architecture has
Speaker 3: done has come from that kind of casting. And so
Speaker 3: the guy who pioneered this technique, Walter Shinkel, you know,
Speaker 3: has done all this amazing work on the architecture of
Speaker 3: nest colonies. Before doing the metal casting, people would cast
Speaker 3: colonies with dental plaster. Oh, because you need something that
Speaker 3: goes down the fine little holes to antscrawl through if
Speaker 3: you're going to cast the whole colony, And so dental
Speaker 3: plaster is fine enough that you can penetrate it the
Speaker 3: colony really well. But then digging up the colony is
Speaker 3: so difficult because it doesn't come up in one piece,
Speaker 3: so then you have to reconstruct it.
Speaker 1: So a metal casting of the colony stays intact, but
Speaker 1: the plaster cast has to be reconstructed like a jigsaw
Speaker 1: because it breaks apart. Now, however, molten metal surprise destroys
Speaker 1: all the ants. Well, the plaster can be washed away
Speaker 1: later and the scientists can figure out which ants we're
Speaker 1: 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 1: Oh wow, you can't do that with metal exactly. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine if just just a wall of molten metal
Speaker 1: came out like a flash flood.
Speaker 3: Out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're just like we Oh, oh my god, are
Speaker 1: you ready for rapid fire around?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: Okay, Patreon questions, I got like eighty questions. Okay, but
Speaker 1: we're not going to do all of them. Some people
Speaker 1: ask the same questions. We're going to run through as
Speaker 1: many as we can. Are you ready?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 1: Okay, but first we're gonna throw some money at a cause.
Speaker 1: So this episode first aired in twenty eighteen when we
Speaker 1: didn't have ads, because I didn't know that you can
Speaker 1: have ads but say no to ones that you don't like.
Speaker 1: So now we have ads, and I say no to
Speaker 1: ones I don't like. And then with the money, sometimes
Speaker 1: we buy the guest a Buffalo life man. So we
Speaker 1: are donating to one of Terry's favorite causes EESA SEEDS,
Speaker 1: which is a mentoring program for underrepresented higher education students
Speaker 1: to explore careers in ecology and it's hosted by the
Speaker 1: Ecological Society of America and the SEEDS Field Trip Endowment
Speaker 1: provides quality field experiences to undergrads, including those who didn't
Speaker 1: have an outdoorsy experience as kids. So that donation in
Speaker 1: Terry's name was made possible by these word approved sponsors.
Speaker 1: You may hear about, mom, why did I call it
Speaker 1: Scottish cheese? It's cottage cheese, honey. And I'm not sure
Speaker 1: did the dogs in other countries speak different languages? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 1: Well when we get there, well, we've got to fix
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Speaker 1: Is it the man from Geneva? Not Geneva, he's from
Speaker 1: a Viva. Oh there's a van now. For car insurance
Speaker 1: with breakdown rescue, it takes a Viva visit Aviva don
Speaker 1: a ee to say fifteen percent.
Speaker 2: Acceptance criteria, terms and conditions apply. Minimum premium of three
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Speaker 2: Aviva dot I E for details. Car insurance is underwritten
Speaker 2: by Aviva Insurance Arland dack A Viva Direct Arlund Limited
Speaker 2: is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.
Speaker 1: Okay, your questions, let's answer, Let's answer for them. Sarah
Speaker 1: Nashaw wants to know why do bullet ants scream when
Speaker 1: 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 must suit and so I jump back
Speaker 3: when I hear it, and so I imagine that other
Speaker 3: vertebrates do too, because that way it's a warning sign.
Speaker 3: My guess is yes, but it has been shown experimentally.
Speaker 1: Sure if you hear that, I mean, why do you
Speaker 1: think rattle Rattlesnakes have rattles, right, They're like, don't make
Speaker 1: me use this venom exactly, so they're like, you know
Speaker 1: what's coming. It's like the ice cream truck, but like
Speaker 1: with pain and death. Todd McLaren wants to know what's
Speaker 1: the deepest 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. So I know people have gone
Speaker 3: down many meters and not found them.
Speaker 2: Damn.
Speaker 1: That's that's some spelunking right there. For reels. Jessica Chamberlain
Speaker 1: wants to know if you're mean like my husband and
Speaker 1: squish a scout ant that you see, you know, on
Speaker 1: its own in your house, will the colonies send another
Speaker 1: scout to look for it or will they just abandon
Speaker 1: their 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 it's the very very first ant in theory, maybe
Speaker 3: but in practice probably not. Oh really okay, so probably
Speaker 3: send more.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 1: So they're just like, hey, where's Heidi, And they're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, 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: follow her and see where she goes.
Speaker 1: So if you keep following her and she's like on
Speaker 1: her way home, she's like doing her home commute, you
Speaker 1: 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 at, what
Speaker 3: you do is feeder, then see what crack she's going
Speaker 3: to go into, then killer and cover up the crack.
Speaker 1: That's that's really calculated. Yeah, that's like definitely premeditated first
Speaker 1: degree instead of just a crime of opportunity or passion.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. You're like, oh, do you want to crumb?
Speaker 1: And she's like, I mean I think.
Speaker 3: You so much.
Speaker 1: It's like this all and you're like, no, you want
Speaker 1: a bitch. Several people wanted to know how are ants
Speaker 1: so strong? How can they lift ten times their own weight.
Speaker 1: Rada Evan McKenna all wanted to know how much weight
Speaker 1: 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 two 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, and so
Speaker 3: if you shrink down then you're just that much more powerful.
Speaker 3: And so just like if you were to take an
Speaker 3: ant and to scale them up to our size, then
Speaker 3: they'd only be as strong as us.
Speaker 1: They could barely do a push up and they're like,
Speaker 1: my luggage is too heavy. Well, someone put it in
Speaker 1: the overhead for me. I had no idea. I thought
Speaker 1: they got so much props. I thought they were just
Speaker 1: like mystically strong. Yeah, totally, who knew physics scaling? Cody
Speaker 1: Woppingcamp and Dave Miller both pretty much wanted to know.
Speaker 1: Someone once told me that, based on estimates, ants outnumber humans.
Speaker 1: Am I gullible? Or is that fact true? And is
Speaker 1: it true that the weight of all the ants in
Speaker 1: the world exceeds the weight of humans. So let's debunk
Speaker 1: some flim flam numbers 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 any back of the envelope calculation,
Speaker 3: I would say every other thing that people say about
Speaker 3: ants dates back to and off the cuff thing that EO.
Speaker 3: Wilson said twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: So for some context, eighty nine year old American biologist
Speaker 1: and author EO. Wilson is said to be the world's
Speaker 1: foremost expert on ants, and he postulated in a nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four book quote, when combined, all ants in the
Speaker 1: world taken together, way about as much as all human beings.
Speaker 1: Like all mirrormacologists know this quote.
Speaker 3: And so that's the thing about the massive ants being
Speaker 3: equivalent to the mass of people. And so you know,
Speaker 3: getting more mrmacologists using more back of envelope calculations were like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that sounds fine.
Speaker 1: Okay, So ants outnumber human beings definitely numerically and also
Speaker 1: 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 woo.
Speaker 1: Okay, so then that's not even flim flam that we
Speaker 1: needed to debunk. Yeah, that's some real shit. Kendall, Thorsten,
Speaker 1: Christopher Marley, and Eva all want to ask about ant farming,
Speaker 1: like do they farm aphids? You mentioned something about a
Speaker 1: fungus farm, Like, how did they get so good at farming? Like,
Speaker 1: does that make them smarter than early humans?
Speaker 3: Well? That makes them more social? I mean so, I mean,
Speaker 3: so the question is what is smart?
Speaker 1: 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 leafcutter ants will
Speaker 3: cut leaves and they'll grow a big garden.
Speaker 1: So remember there are the leaf cutter ants that take
Speaker 1: leaf pieces and grow focus on them. Well, meanwhile, me
Speaker 1: and a live human who can drive a car and skype.
Speaker 1: France has killed three cacti in the last.
Speaker 3: Year and so they and so they carefully tend to
Speaker 3: this garden and they use the same kind of integrated
Speaker 3: pest management that we use in our crops. That's crazy,
Speaker 3: you know. And there's weeds that grow in there, and
Speaker 3: they've evolved relationships with bacteria that attack those weeds and
Speaker 3: all that, you know. And so every single day, you know,
Speaker 3: there's someone in a few labs that's discovering a new
Speaker 3: partner in this co evolved complex situation of how ants
Speaker 3: do this. So, so I would say the analogy for
Speaker 3: farming would be with fungus growing ants, whereas the analogy
Speaker 3: for ranching, I would say would be with aphids, right right,
Speaker 3: Because so ants will occasionally will grow a fids and
Speaker 3: 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 1: I mean that's this is essentially just like like nectar p.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But also analogously, in addition to milking,
Speaker 3: cows occasionally will kill them and eat them, you know,
Speaker 3: the same thing is that the ants and the aphids.
Speaker 3: They won't you know, they might eat an aphid once
Speaker 3: in a while.
Speaker 1: And are they managing the herd? Oh?
Speaker 3: They carefully. Yes, they will transport them around and adaptively
Speaker 3: manage it. They sometimes, you know, they'll kill off a
Speaker 3: plant by using too many of them, but oftentimes they
Speaker 3: use ranching management techniques.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so wild less, that's insane, so cowboy Okay.
Speaker 1: So Kristin McAdams and Lily Hill both want to know
Speaker 1: why do fire ants hate me? They both asked, in particular,
Speaker 1: why do fire ants hate me? So Lily and Kristen
Speaker 1: at least know it's not just you. And Mark wants
Speaker 1: to know how can they act as both a solid
Speaker 1: and a liquid? So fire ants, what's their beef about?
Speaker 1: And also are they a solid or liquid?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So why are fire ants are just like like
Speaker 3: so mad? So ants will defend their nests and so
Speaker 3: if you take an individual fire ant pro it can
Speaker 3: walk on you and it's not going to sting you
Speaker 3: right away. But the thing is, if you disrupt a mound,
Speaker 3: then it's going to get really mad at you. And
Speaker 3: so most other ants you can't destroy their mounds. So
Speaker 3: easily because they're underground or something, whereas fire ants have
Speaker 3: this big soil mound above the surface, and so if
Speaker 3: you kick that soil mound, then they're just gonna get
Speaker 3: really pissed because it's like you just took apart their home.
Speaker 3: And so I think they seem to be more angry
Speaker 3: because the structure of their home is a lot more
Speaker 3: likely to be disturbed, and they also have a potent
Speaker 3: sting that goes with it.
Speaker 1: Lessen 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. Well, 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 answer with prospective physics how they
Speaker 3: do that. But it's super cool.
Speaker 1: I floated this idea by Google, and it turns out
Speaker 1: that the little hairs on their tiny lady legs trap
Speaker 1: enough hair to keep them all afloat. So congratulations, there
Speaker 1: is another reason to avoid shaving your legs today. Oh,
Speaker 1: Olivia Rus's great question says, as soon as you saw
Speaker 1: this post, it reminded me of the infection that turns
Speaker 1: ants into zombies. What is it and what's the life cycle?
Speaker 1: This is cordyceps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so the common name cordyceps like ofio cordyceps. A. 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 1: It's super cool, and now it kind of turns them
Speaker 1: into these zombies though, Like we're ants will crawl up
Speaker 1: a plant stem, perch out on a leaf, and then
Speaker 1: wait until the cordyceps explodes from their head and infects
Speaker 1: all of their family members.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that usually the explosion happens after the
Speaker 3: ant's already dead and perched. But yeah, they will go
Speaker 3: to 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 in,
Speaker 3: that they're in said to help it spread more effectively.
Speaker 1: I mean, does this stuff ever just completely boggle you? Like,
Speaker 1: do you start thinking, do you get galaxy brain where
Speaker 1: you're like, what is anything? Is this all a simulation?
Speaker 1: Does dark matter teach ants what to do?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Do you ever get stonery about this stuff?
Speaker 3: Uh? 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 and it affects the behavior of every single one,
Speaker 3: and so I mean, look at them, like cordyceps seems
Speaker 3: kind of straightforward compared to some of these other crazy
Speaker 3: like host altering ones, Like you know, does the toxoplasmosis
Speaker 3: actually cause people to not have fear or so on? Like,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: This isn't even college roommate bong ripper philosophy. This is
Speaker 1: just the wild world of brain parasites. Speaking of peril,
Speaker 1: Kellen Freeman and Ray Kasha both want to know how
Speaker 1: the death spiral works. What is happening in an aunt
Speaker 1: 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 arms ants and somehow separate them
Speaker 3: from the rest of their colony, you can trick them
Speaker 3: or they might accidentally what happen, Like would march in
Speaker 3: a big circle, right, They just follow one another, and
Speaker 3: so they basically create a single pheromonal trail, and so
Speaker 3: death prob they just keep marching and marching until they're
Speaker 3: old dead. Why yeah, Well, because the thing is they
Speaker 3: all follow one another in big trail. So like individual
Speaker 3: ant colonies can solve complex problems and do big things,
Speaker 3: but ant workers are dumb and they follow simple rules.
Speaker 1: Terry explains how this is kind of like computer.
Speaker 3: Code, and so if you have an army at colony
Speaker 3: that's a quarter million ants, every ant is doing following
Speaker 3: a simple program. Yeah, and when you have all these
Speaker 3: simple bits of code together, then they function. But if
Speaker 3: you were to take some of these individual ants and
Speaker 3: separate them from the other ants, then they're just kind
Speaker 3: of screwed, and they'll just wander around. Like so, if
Speaker 3: you take an ant and bring her away from her
Speaker 3: colony to the far enough away that she'll never get back,
Speaker 3: She's not like that dog that's going to cross the
Speaker 3: whole country and find its way home.
Speaker 1: Oh, Peter, I wondered about your soul. Yeah, no, it's
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: I'm huh, because it's a bummer, man.
Speaker 1: So Tracy Benhimau wants to know, I have to know.
Speaker 1: Will ants added to a camping saute add a little
Speaker 1: flavor like lemon juice due to the acetic acid in
Speaker 1: their heads. Have you eaten ants?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: 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
Speaker 3: underground to the genus Lasias, and they actually have a
Speaker 3: citronella eat order to them. And so the weaver ants
Speaker 3: in Southeast Asia and northern in the Australian wet tropics,
Speaker 3: they have a lemony flavor to their butts. Some people
Speaker 3: call them lemon ants. I don't think they have that
Speaker 3: much acetic acid. I mean there's formic acid, but tic acid,
Speaker 3: so ceedic acid is straight up vinegar.
Speaker 1: Lemon Ants, by the way, release this citrusy smell when
Speaker 1: attacked to warn others. And they also use formic acid
Speaker 1: as an herbicide, and that creates clearings in the forest
Speaker 1: where nothing really grows. This is called a devil's garden,
Speaker 1: which is definitely a venue that my existential metal band,
Speaker 1: 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 leaf cutter ants.
Speaker 3: People once a year will collect the brood of weaver
Speaker 3: ants and collect them in large, large numbers you can
Speaker 3: get of an ethnic food stores and jars here.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I hear that there might be a little
Speaker 1: spicy too some ants.
Speaker 3: Oh some of them, Yeah, have a little bit of spice.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Crazy, I think I've eaten ants. I can't. I think
Speaker 1: I've had ants on a cookie on purpose. But yeah,
Speaker 1: let's see. Elliott Anaya wants to know do it fart?
Speaker 1: Do ants fart?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I haven't gotten to that page in
Speaker 3: the book yet.
Speaker 1: So Terry is referencing the best selling book does it Fart? Now?
Speaker 1: I don't have a copy of this book, but I
Speaker 1: do have evidence that ant man might taken from this
Speaker 1: screen Junkies interview with Paul Rudd. Paul runs suiting. He
Speaker 1: has either a very squeaky chair or problematic intestines. Ant farms,
Speaker 1: yes or no?
Speaker 3: Ant farm? The ones that you buy out of the box,
Speaker 3: Uncle Milton and Uncle Milton, no, 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 the there's
Speaker 3: these onion articles about getting an ant farm is a
Speaker 3: lesson and toiling until you die, that's what that is.
Speaker 3: But if you were to build your own ant farm
Speaker 3: and collect your own ant colony, there are many amateur
Speaker 3: like enthusiasts who really know their biology and are super cool,
Speaker 3: and there's ant chatrooms and they're willing to help. And
Speaker 3: so if you want your own ant colonies, then doing
Speaker 3: it that way. Yes.
Speaker 1: Oh so as long as you get the queen and
Speaker 1: you set it up right and you do it respectfully.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, that's cool. Yeah, super cool. There's a whole
Speaker 3: community of people who do that.
Speaker 1: You know what, I can't have a dog in this apartment,
Speaker 1: but maybe I could adopt like a couple thousand ants.
Speaker 3: You could totally have an ant colony in here yet, right, I.
Speaker 1: Just found my summer project. A few different people like
Speaker 1: Craig Minami and Sarah Sparrow want to know if there
Speaker 1: are plants or natural remedies or other insects that you
Speaker 1: could use in your house to deter ants.
Speaker 3: Probably not, okay. So there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 3: discussion about like chemicals could you use, could you spray
Speaker 3: powder or chalk or cayenne pepper or whatever. Pretty much
Speaker 3: those don't work.
Speaker 1: Okay, Cinnamon no, no, just check it. Okay. So the
Speaker 1: answer is no. The answer is goet a cock gun.
Speaker 3: The cock gun. Yeah, or I mean so a general
Speaker 3: answer would be would be to kill your lawn? What right,
Speaker 3: because I mean, I mean so, of course I've killed
Speaker 3: my lawn, and I still have trouble with ants. At
Speaker 3: least if you're in a place, a dry place like
Speaker 3: in California where you have all these argentine ants, they
Speaker 3: are fed by moisture. If it's dry, you don't have them.
Speaker 3: U It's like we're doing a clean up incompedon creek
Speaker 3: up on a dry spot and you had harvester ants
Speaker 3: like right there in the middle of urban whatever.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Harvester ants just on the lookout for that quality, organic,
Speaker 1: free range, gluten free seed to eat, whereas argentine ants
Speaker 1: are munched on pizza crust under a dead possum and
Speaker 1: 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: neighbor together and have more native landscaping than you have
Speaker 3: fewer of these invasive ants that would be taking over
Speaker 3: your house once inside. But I think the key is
Speaker 3: to keep from letting them in.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that just gently follow them home like an
Speaker 1: absolute creep. Right, Yeah, Anna Thompson wants to know, are
Speaker 1: their loner or introvert ants who are not down with
Speaker 1: the social thing.
Speaker 3: The only non social ants we have are colonies that
Speaker 3: produce 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 1: So side note, the fact that ants don't have a
Speaker 1: long running reality show franchise is and artistic failing of
Speaker 1: our culture.
Speaker 3: And then she'll just make queens and males to make
Speaker 3: new colonies. So they're so they're socially parasitic, and they
Speaker 3: evolved after ants originally evolved.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, they're kind of like sociopaths. They's been like freeloaders.
Speaker 3: They're total freeloaders. Yeah, all other ants are social.
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't know that. Danny Kay wants to know.
Speaker 1: Have you ever spilled your name out in aunt pheromones
Speaker 1: alla Eo Williams.
Speaker 3: I have not spelled my name out in aunt phaomones?
Speaker 1: Okay, chick Zach Tarbal wants to know. I heard that
Speaker 1: ants are great at predicting weather. Is there any truth
Speaker 1: 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: rains 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 1: And you said queens. Do some colonies have multiple queens
Speaker 1: or no?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So many kinds of ants will have more than
Speaker 3: one queen per colony.
Speaker 1: Okay, oh, I didn't know that. Sean and Josh Grandinetti
Speaker 1: want to know, what's the most amazing ant behavior you've seen?
Speaker 1: And do they have self awareness?
Speaker 3: Do? I don't think they have. If we say talk
Speaker 3: about self awareness as in 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 1: Okay, So I look this up, and this is a
Speaker 1: region in Turkey that's known in part for its elaborate
Speaker 1: network ready for this of underground cities, hidden tunnels that
Speaker 1: could house possibly up to twenty thousand people, the entrances
Speaker 1: of which could be conceald by boulders, like full underground
Speaker 1: cities we just discovered a few years ago. Like if
Speaker 1: you are an archaeologist working on this with any kind
Speaker 1: of hookup, please do holler. I am here by begging you. Okay,
Speaker 1: the backed hands.
Speaker 3: So, but there are these Cappadocian ants that are really tiny,
Speaker 3: but routinely are subjected to attack by army ants outside
Speaker 3: 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 1: Damn. They're like, no, let me see here. You're getting
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, that's amazing, Like in horror movies when
Speaker 1: you see someone block the door with a chair and
Speaker 1: you're like, that will keep them out. That's so smart.
Speaker 1: I love this question so much. Jade wants to know,
Speaker 1: and we asked I asked this definitely from a lot
Speaker 1: of ologists, but Jade wants to know which is more
Speaker 1: accurate scientifically, A bug's life or ants.
Speaker 3: Bugs life?
Speaker 1: Really, which do you do? You have a preference between
Speaker 1: 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 bought on it was dare I say,
Speaker 3: in some ways it was realistic.
Speaker 1: Who now, when you go to your next mermorcology conference,
Speaker 1: will you guys probably talk about that and be like, hey,
Speaker 1: who did the consulting on that? Because it was a
Speaker 1: pretty good job.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we all know the dude who's the consulting out.
Speaker 3: Oh no, last one aunt meeting I was talking to
Speaker 3: it was a yeah, the grand student who worked on it,
Speaker 3: and he did a great job. And he's like, oh,
Speaker 3: the 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. That was my next question, like, how do you
Speaker 1: feel when you watch The Bugs Life, and it's like
Speaker 1: protagonist does like a little male aunt, are you like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Said. The thing is, it's like, if you're going to
Speaker 3: explain why all answer female, that's not an easy discussion.
Speaker 3: I think old me and other more pedantic people would
Speaker 3: be like, oh my gosh, are you kidding? How can
Speaker 3: you let them get that wrong? That's like the most
Speaker 3: basic thing ever. Yeah, But you know, recent me is like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, actually, since it's not an easy thing to
Speaker 3: explain and it's rather obscure and it doesn't and the
Speaker 3: grand scheme of thing make the much difference, then maybe
Speaker 3: we should just say, well, yeah, they're you know, sure, fine, whatever,
Speaker 3: let's not talk about gender.
Speaker 1: So Terry says that there's one character named Anthony that
Speaker 1: is clearly morphologically physically a queen, but it's a male,
Speaker 1: which was noted by the consultants. But the studio was like, nah,
Speaker 1: it's fine.
Speaker 3: Because there's all these other things they had absolutely right about,
Speaker 3: all the other ants, all these oh well, Carpenter answer
Speaker 3: like this, and they do this, and you know, and
Speaker 3: Bullet answer like this, and they had all that stuff right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they looked like them and they behaved like them.
Speaker 3: It was like amazing, And so I think so they
Speaker 3: made some decision at the home office, like Okay, we
Speaker 3: know the consultant told us about this, but skirt, we're
Speaker 3: just not going to do that.
Speaker 1: I do feel like a lot of people know that
Speaker 1: that social insects tend to be primarily female. Do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: people like you don't have to be like a super
Speaker 1: super obscure like a meer mycology group. You didn't know that,
Speaker 1: But what can you describe in a nutshell why they
Speaker 1: are female? I know you said it's obscure and complex.
Speaker 3: Okay, But in ants, bees, and wasps, the males have
Speaker 3: a single copy of the genes. They are haploid, okay,
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.
Speaker 1: Oh weird.
Speaker 3: And so that results weirdness. These asymmetries in relatedness, but
Speaker 3: for the most part, like most of the social animals
Speaker 3: that are truly social that way, have that genetic thing
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 1: And then how do they know that the eggs are
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 3: female depending on what whether or not she squirts sperm
Speaker 3: on it. Because in insects, the females have an organ
Speaker 3: called a spermatinka that store a sperm. So so males
Speaker 3: die after they have sex for the most part, but
Speaker 3: worse for females, what they do is they just don't
Speaker 3: have sex again. They just store the sperm for the
Speaker 3: rest of their life.
Speaker 1: Oh man, you get one super lay and then you're like,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm celibate, yeah.
Speaker 3: Or maybe a bunch, and then you have sperm for
Speaker 3: multiple males. But then that's it, okay, yeah right, And
Speaker 3: so then so then she lays an egg, she can
Speaker 3: make it a male by not putting any sperm on it,
Speaker 3: or she can make it a female by fertilizing it. Oh,
Speaker 3: which she makes a male that's one hundred percent her genes.
Speaker 1: Right, 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 a queen essentially is being selfish, then she's
Speaker 3: making too many males. But then the workers will get
Speaker 3: pissed off. And if the you know, because the workers
Speaker 3: want them to lay sisters because the work because the
Speaker 3: workers are more closely related to the sisters.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's game of thrones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's totally Game of Thrones and so and so
Speaker 3: there's all these conflicts of interest and it's a total met.
Speaker 1: So for a long time, scientists were very firm in
Speaker 1: thinking that 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,
Speaker 3: like like we're talking as fighting words.
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, drama, So drama in the colony, drama outside
Speaker 1: of the colony, looking at the colony.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Who knew that aunt life was just like such a
Speaker 1: roiling soap opera. Yeah, okay, So last questions, what do
Speaker 1: you hate about your job other than getting stung by
Speaker 1: bullet ants?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Gosh, I guess well, I guess i'd well, 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
Speaker 3: parts of the world.
Speaker 1: Oh, we don't have quite as much like trapdoor ants
Speaker 1: and fungus ants, and we've got like, we've got a
Speaker 1: 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 1: So I guess it keeps you thirsty for field research, right, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Are you ever like at a picnic in la or
Speaker 1: like at someone's house and you get distracted by ants
Speaker 1: and you're like oh, I gotta go look at that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, once in a while, and people will chortle, will
Speaker 3: be like, oh, you know, I should have like a
Speaker 3: vile in my pocket at all times, but I don't.
Speaker 3: But some people I know, they don't go anywhere without
Speaker 3: a vial.
Speaker 1: Do you have friends who call you an ant man?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a few.
Speaker 1: And then what do you love the most about being
Speaker 1: 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 you know, have labs
Speaker 3: that are focusing on studying ants, and there's so many
Speaker 3: things that we don't know. And especially in the tropics,
Speaker 3: you know, wherever you go there are ants and they
Speaker 3: are doing things that are running the world, and so
Speaker 3: it's hard to not discover cool things if you choose
Speaker 3: to look.
Speaker 1: And if you had to glean some self help information
Speaker 1: from ants, is there anything that ants have inspired you
Speaker 1: to do differently with your life or could inspire us
Speaker 1: 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: if 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 underground.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. And so I think that's a good
Speaker 3: counter example for me. Like ants like instead of being
Speaker 3: the go to the anth house sluggard, they work really
Speaker 3: hard blah blah blah. It's like no, ants like are
Speaker 3: waiting for other ants to do their job before they
Speaker 3: they can do theirs. They're they're like the opposite of
Speaker 3: being hard working, entrepreneurial or whatever. And so they're a
Speaker 3: counter example. That's that's how I learned from ants.
Speaker 1: Does that make you work harder or chill more?
Speaker 3: No? I think I think I should learn from them
Speaker 3: that 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 when
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 happening
Speaker 3: in an ant colony where they fall the rules if
Speaker 3: they if the individual washing dishes isn't there at the moment,
Speaker 3: then it's not going to happen.
Speaker 1: Right, That's so funny to think about lazy ants like
Speaker 1: making you take initiative. Yeah, which, by the way, I
Speaker 1: have a sink full of dirty dishes and I live alone.
Speaker 1: So this is the saddest thing I was of myself.
Speaker 1: I'm my own lazy an. This was so informative. I
Speaker 1: love this. I don't think I'm ever going to look
Speaker 1: at ants the same. I mean, I already love them,
Speaker 1: but I'm definitely going to be more prone to just
Speaker 1: seeing where they're headed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just watch them. I mean, so the thing is,
Speaker 3: if your kitchen is overrun with ants, you don't have
Speaker 3: to freak out and like wipe them all away, because
Speaker 3: if you wait five more minutes, it's not going to
Speaker 3: get worse. Might as well just watch them, right, and
Speaker 3: then you knew com.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being here. This was dope.
Speaker 1: I loved it.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: So go around and go ask some smart people some
Speaker 1: not smart questions all you want, even if they seem
Speaker 1: like small inquiries, the answers might be mighty. So now
Speaker 1: go find Tear on Twitter. He's at oormiga h O
Speaker 1: R M I g A on Twitter, which is Spanish
Speaker 1: for aunt nice. He's also at leaflitter dot org. He's
Speaker 1: so great, and we are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 1: I'm Ali Ward with one L on both, so do
Speaker 1: say hello. Thank you again to Birthday Girl Aaron Talbert
Speaker 1: for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to
Speaker 1: Shannon and Bonnie for helping out too. Thank you Emily
Speaker 1: White the wordery who makes our professional transcripts. Kayla Patten
Speaker 1: bleep swears out of the episodes, and you can find
Speaker 1: both of those at aliwar dot com slash Ologies dash
Speaker 1: extras for free anyone who needs them. Thank you Susan
Speaker 1: Hale and Noel Dilworth for keeping the Ologies business running
Speaker 1: behind the scenes. Thank you Kelly Dwyer for making my website.
Speaker 1: She can make yours too. Her link is in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Thank you Stephen Ray Morris for the original
Speaker 1: edit of this episode. Thank you, and very very happy
Speaker 1: birthday to Zeke Rodriguez Thomas, who works on smologies. He's wonderful.
Speaker 1: Those are short, classroom friendly versions of classics. They come
Speaker 1: out about every two weeks, so thank you again Zeke
Speaker 1: for doing those. Thank you Nick Thorburn who made the
Speaker 1: theme music. Thank you to doctor Tikinwall for saying that
Speaker 1: male aunts are called uncles, a joke for which she
Speaker 1: gave me permission to steal. And of course, thank you
Speaker 1: to Queen of this Castle Jerry Sleeper for helping put
Speaker 1: up this encore and driving to and from my parents
Speaker 1: all weekend. Well, I very literally drooled on myself in
Speaker 1: the passenger seat. If you stick around until the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, I tell you secret. And this secret
Speaker 1: is that I have one of those pilia plants. They're
Speaker 1: called like pancake plants. They look like coins on stems,
Speaker 1: and it was given to me as a housewarming gift
Speaker 1: three years ago and I've been really weirdly superstitious about
Speaker 1: not killing it, like I'm really afraid to kill that one,
Speaker 1: and I haven't, and it's been two and a half
Speaker 1: three years, but it's starting to grow tall and it
Speaker 1: has like this naked stem that's bending over and I
Speaker 1: don't know what to do. I never thought it would
Speaker 1: live this long. I'm so anxious about it not dying,
Speaker 1: and I think I think it needs a stick to
Speaker 1: prop it up, but I don't know. It's one of
Speaker 1: the few plants I've never killed. Also, I ordered a
Speaker 1: new tooth thresholder, which will make more sense if you
Speaker 1: listened to last week's episode.
Speaker 3: Okay, bye bye, because it's so that's some