June 1, 2021 • 42 mins
The war has raged for at least 100 million years. Armored warriors boil up out of the ground and surge across the battlefield. Mandibles clash. Bodies are torn asunder. As the will of one colony clashes with another, forces advance, withdrawal and sometimes whole populations perish in the Earth. Such are the wars of the ants, compared to which the wars of humanity are but a blip. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the history and tactics of ant warfare, and what humans can learn from it all. (originally published 6/12/2020)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
bringing you an episode from the Vault. This is aunt
War's Part one, originally aired on June twelve. Should we
go right in, Let's do it. For years, the Trailhead
(00:31):
nest had been protected by a ten thousand member force
of its adult members or soldiers. A soldier's exoskeleton, twice
the size of that of an ordinary worker is literally
heavy armor, thick, tough, and hitted in places for resilience
and strength. A pair of spines project backward from the
(00:52):
mid section of the body to protect the waist. Spikes
protect the neck, and the rear margin of the head
is curved forward, forming a helmet. When attacked, the soldier
can pull in her legs and antenna and tighten up
the segments of her body, turning her entire surface into
a shield. The ordinary Trailhead workers, while built for labor,
(01:13):
were also available for combat. They served as the light infantry,
using the swiftness and the agility of their supple bodies
to dart in and out of enemy lines, seizing any
leg or antenna available, and holding onto it until their
nest mates could close in and grab another body part.
When the adversary was finally pinned and spread eagled, others
piled on to bite, sting or spray her with poison.
(01:48):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Off to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
today It's Ants, folks. That's right, this is going to
be Ant Wars Episode one. Uh, the Ampire strikes Back.
(02:11):
Perhaps I'm not sure. I haven't worked out that the
full title yet, but yeah, we're gonna be taking a
couple of episodes to look at the wars of the Ants,
and it seemed ideal that we kick off with a
cold reading from the novel ant Hill, a novel by E. O.
Wilson which came out in so we were talking about
(02:31):
this novel before we got started. It actually got some
surprisingly good reviews. I was thinking about picking up a
copy and reading it until I discovered that a significant
portion of this novel is about human characters. And I
was hoping with EO. Wilson, you know, especially in the past,
we've talked about that video where he like plunges his
hand into a nest of fire ants and beams with
(02:54):
the most the most radiant joy as the ants all
biden sting him. At the same time, I was hoping
it would be all about ants, because if anybody could
do ants as compelling central characters, I would think it
would be E. O. Wilson. Yeah, I think I was
looking at one review of it. There was glowing that
said that they're about seventy pages in the novel that
(03:14):
only E. O. Wilson could have written. Um and uh,
and I think this gives everyone a little taste of that.
And when we say, you know, surprisingly, you know great reviews,
you know it's obviously EO. Wilson is a is a
tremendous author. But generally he was he was associated with
with nonfiction, uh, conveying oftentimes conveying science very effectively, um
(03:35):
to a general audience. But of course fiction is a
slightly different scenario. So you might expect even a very
talented nonfiction writer, uh, you know, to to to perhaps
stumble a bit in trying to create a work of
fiction like this. Oh totally, that's what I mean. I
didn't mean, like EO. Wilson's a dummy. I just meant
that usually when somebody who's not primarily a fiction writer
(03:55):
is like, yeah, I'll do a novel, it's it's not
always great. Well, you know, the main in the main
example that always comes to my mind is would be
the the Tech Wars novels that were attributed to William
Shatner that although I understand it was more of a
ghostwriting scenario, it was in place and there was some
some spiritual composition in there. But but I have to
say it was not the tech Wars that inspired inspired
(04:18):
me to to seek this topic out this week, but
rather the Clone Wars um and and also the miniature
board gaming in general. So my son and I recently
ordered a copy of Fantasy Flight Star Wars Legion miniature Game,
which is a miniature um war game in the tradition
of things like say Warhammer, Warhammer forty thousand, and then
(04:41):
the older um the the older like napoleonic Um war
games of old, the kind of thing that has been
the past time of people such as H. G. Wells,
who wrote a essentially a rule book for such miniature
gaming and then was also a favorite pastime of Peter Cushing. Right,
you recently shared this deo with me where Cushing is
(05:01):
painting his little figurines. I guess it's Napoleonic Wars or
some similar temporal event where all these little uniformed figures
he's like posing them around barns and stuff that he's
gotten on his floor. I think it was a video
from the from the nineteen fifties that was done. Yeah,
it was. It was nineteen fifties, and yeah, he's really
getting into it, has a whole whole hobby set up,
and yeah, then he's laying them out on the floor
(05:23):
getting them into into position. Um, you know, a very
very historical based for sure. But yeah, just thinking about
this sort of thing, thinking about miniature gaming in general,
and thinking about the clone Wars where you have on
one side a bunch of uh, you know, genetically identical
warriors going up against you know, armored robotic hords. I
(05:47):
couldn't help but think of the ants, the wars of
the ants. You know, it's amazing how much hymen opteran
conflict we can miss because you're just going about your business.
Maybe you're doing something in your yard, you're hanging out
out in the sun or in the hammock or something,
and you don't even realize that there is literally a
battle raging just a couple of feet from you around
(06:09):
the blades of grass. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. They the ants
are are waging their wars, they're defending their territories, um,
and and we're talking about against other ants and not
even talking about their their various struggles against other species.
And it's everywhere. We did not even think about our
aunts unless they actually invade our homes, and then then
(06:31):
we get hot and bothered about it. But I imagine
the most crucial question we have to consider before we
proceed is can we really consider the conflict we see
between ant species between different ant colonies as warfare more
or less in the human sense of the word. Well,
I mean, in one sense you could say maybe pedantically
(06:52):
and obviously no, because it would necessarily fail to capture
like the full range of human value and culture and
and passion that the company's conflict between humans. But on
the other hand, I think you could absolutely probably like
see some parallels in terms of like pure resource dynamics. Yeah,
I was thinking about this a little bit. Uh. Sometimes
(07:13):
you see war defined as a declared armed hostile conflict,
and of course the idea of ants actually declaring war
on another group of ants is ridiculous because you're getting
into declarations of war. That's a human political reality and
is doctor Brundle would probably remind us insects are rather
short on politics. I mean, I think that that that
(07:35):
fails to capture even a lot of actual war in
the human context, where a lot of wars are not
cold wars by the people carrying them out right. Another
issue too, is if we're talking about an armed hostile conflict, well,
ants don't actually take up arms in the human sense,
and of course they don't have to, because aunts have
a number of biological weapons and chemical weapons at their
(07:57):
disposal that make make such tool will use unnecessary. And
of course we'll be running through some examples of of
these bio weapons as we proceed through these episodes. However,
we do tend to discuss these conflicts between ant colonies
between ant species as being a form of war something
(08:17):
that we can think of as for as zoologist and
entomologist Sean O'Donnell pointed out on Serious Science, ants engage
in quote direct aggressive interaction between ants of different colonies.
They also engage in such conflict over resources, and as
a noted ant expert author of the Human Swarm tropical biologists,
(08:38):
Mark W. Moffatt has put it, or is quote the
concentrated engagement of group against group in which both sides
risk wholesale destruction. So it's easy to look at other
animals perhaps and say, well, cats don't wage war, dogs
don't wage war. It would be, for instance, kind of
ridiculous to say that um lions are way ing war
(09:00):
against say an antelope. Right, yeah, I I think that
the the analogy would really fall short there. But for
the ant however, it gets a little, a little, a
little different. So Mofat contends that the case for ant
warfare is fairly convincing. It's not simply a matter of
applying the lens of human civilization to the behavior of animals.
What what they are doing and we humans have done
(09:23):
for thousands of years are both endeavors that entail quote
an astonishing array of tactical choices about methods of attack
and strategic decisions about when and where to wage war. Now,
the parallel there gets especially interesting because while humans would
have to make tactical and strategic choices in in organized
conflict consciously, you know, they have to like use their
(09:46):
brains look at what's going on and try to judge.
I think, uh, I think we would have to say
that the ant carries out its campaigns almost entirely on instinct.
Like it the ant doesn't have strategic theories except it
naturally does by instinctive behavior. That's right. Yeah, they more
or less simply do. And we'll get into some of
(10:07):
the details of that here in a second. I want
to throw in that Douglas j Emlin, who wrote an
excellent book several years ago titled Animal Weapons uh he
he uh, weighs in on this and says that, Okay,
for the most part, animals do not fight battles or
wars um and you know it, basically, he says, most
of the animal conflict that we see in the wild,
(10:28):
it's ultimately more of a duel, you know, especially as
far as interest species contests go, you know, like male
fighting a male over a potential mate. But ants and
termites are are certainly examples of something that could be
a standout, you know, in which we do see this
kind of large scale war with high stakes for both sides. Um.
(10:49):
You know, I was thinking a bit about this too,
that you know, even these other scenarios lions versus antelopes
and all like, at best, we could maybe think of
that as a skirmish, right, but certainly not a war.
Not certainly not a war or of of eradication. Yeah.
I would say that the conflicts between most animals you
see in nature are much more individual. They're less group oriented,
(11:09):
that they're less organized. Though at the same time that
brings up an interesting question about what what really counts
as an individual when you're talking about something like a
colony of ants, because unlike say mammals or birds or something,
answer a situation where within the colony, it gets harder
to make the case that the individual ant's body is
(11:32):
a is a like independent, autonomous agent, and it might
be better thought of as like one organ of the
the actual individual, which is the overall colony. Yeah. I
think a lot of it comes down to the fact
that they are so I mean, they're use social insects,
and they're so connected that there there is this sense
of civilization to them. You know, they are you know,
(11:54):
they're managing resources. In some cases, such with the leaf
counter ant, they're engaging in agriculture. You know, they there's
this this whole system that is there that that makes
the argument for ant warfare a lot more convincing than saying, well,
this invasive species is waging a war on the native species. Yeah,
I mean it is out competing it for some resource.
(12:16):
But it is not like this tight knit unit. It
is not a like a full blown colony. Now, obviously
nothing humans do is going to be comparable to something
in the ant world, but the similarities are pretty startling.
I want to read a quote from a wonderful two
thousand and eleven Scientific American article titled Ants and the
(12:37):
Art of War, and this is also by Mark W. Moffatt. Quote.
Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants and
termites form tight knit societies with members numbering in the millions,
and that these insects engage in complex behaviors. Such practices
include traffic control, public health efforts, crop domestication, and, perhaps
most intriguingly, warfare, the concentrated engagement of group against group
(13:01):
in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these
respects and others, we modern humans more closely resemble ants
than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in
far smaller societies. So the main similarity between us and
the ants is that we organize ourselves more so than
almost any other non insect animal right now. Biologically, of course,
(13:25):
we're much larger vertebrates. We have impressive brains that have
enabled us to achieve unequal technological accomplishments, including but not
limited to, the production of nineteen fifty four Is Them
and Birdeye Gordon's nineteen seventy seven film Empire of the Ants.
You don't see the ants themselves making films this good.
That's true. Ant cinema is rather lacking, though I don't
(13:48):
know if I've seen this Birdeye Gordon movie or not.
Of course, Birt Eye Gordon has come up on the
show several times. He's sort of h MR a K
A Mr Big. He's the king of the force perspective effect,
where you know, you take like a lizard and then
you shoot it up close against the background and make
it say that it's a dinosaur. Yeah. I have to
say I haven't seen Empire of the Ants either. I
(14:08):
mainly know it because it's referenced in a Warren Zevon song,
but it's a n seven release. That's that's pretty late
into in the bird Eye Gordon and Giant Animal rampaging world.
I would think last time I checked bird Eye Gordon
was still alive. I think he is, oh well, still
going at Yes, he's ninety seven years old. Alright, So
obviously ants can't actually top that. You know, they don't
(14:31):
have language, they don't have civilization in the sense that
we do. Ants. However, they have a different way of
going about things. So for instance, they produce While we're
like a fifty fifty male female species, ants only produce
males to serve as short lived reproductive drones, to fertile queens.
That's right, I mean ants are females basically. Yeah, the
(14:53):
vast majority of the colony consists of sterile females. And
while the queen terminology, you know, if we talk about
the queen ant and it brings with it the legacy
of human centralized power structures. Ultimately, ants function without a
power hierarchy or a permanent leader. They are entirely decentralized. So,
(15:13):
like you said earlier, combat decisions, they're not made by commanders.
You know, if if this was a miniature war game,
you wouldn't have like the commander piece that's essential for
all of this to take place. No, it's rather a
case of form intelligence. That is one of the hardest
things to keep in mind because there there's this natural
tendency we have to assume that something called the queen
(15:34):
is in charge. But yeah, when you're thinking about aunts,
you have to remember that basically ants are always at
war and the queen is never in command. The queen
doesn't tell the ants what to do. They are highly
motivated to protect the queen. But that's kind of in
the same way that like you are highly motivated to
protect the most vulnerable parts of your body from injury, right,
(15:55):
like you'd protect your face and stuff. Like the queen
is there reproductive chances and that's why she is protected, right,
and she's she is very important. There's some passages in EO.
Wilson's novel where where the tragedy of the fall of
their their queen is discussed and how this is a
you know, part of the peril that this key group
(16:17):
of ants finds themselves in. But ultimately, the wars of
ants and the wars of humans they're often fought for
the same reasons. Territory, food, ideal dwelling spaces, and even labor.
So some ant species do in fact employ something that
we might think of as slave labor, and we'll come
back to that as we go. But also ants deploy
various tactics depending on what is at stake. So, like
(16:40):
you know, not every war is equal to the ant colony.
There is um, there's a fluctuation in, you know, the
amount of effort that is put into it, how much
ant power is is put on the line, et cetera. However,
in his book The Human Swarm, Moffatt speaks a little
bit more about this, about the basic comparison in between
human and ant warfare, and he does he does write
(17:03):
the quote, if nothing else, remember this, comparing identical things
is deadly boring. Making comparisons is most fruitful when parallels
are noticed between ideas or things or actions ordinarily treated
as distinct. Uh. And he discusses this at length in
that book, if if, if anyone wants to pick that
up and explore more. But I think this is also
something that's important to keep in mind. Yeah, it's it's
(17:24):
not a one to one, but if it were a
one to one, we probably wouldn't be doing a podcast
about it, right, all right, we need to take a
quick break, but when we come back, we will talk
about aunt warriors in classic literature. Than all right, we're back.
So we spent the whole first portion of this episode
talking about the idea of comparing ant warfare to human
(17:48):
warfare and uh, and to what, to what extent it's fair,
what extent it makes sense? And ultimately it's irrelevant because
we still do it, and we've been doing it for
a very long time. We've been making that connection between
human warfare in ant warfare, perhaps for as long as
warriors have had a chance, uh, you know, to pause
on the battlefield and look down between their human feet
(18:10):
and see a smaller version of their campaigns playing out
in the dirt beneath them. For instance, if we look
back to the Iliad, the specialized warriors who serve the
mighty Akellyes are known as the Myrmidons. The aunt people
is the the literal translation of that. Now I know.
According to some mythological sources, the Mermandons who fight with
(18:33):
Achilles actually were ants at some point. Isn't that right?
They were like transformed into human warriors from their aunt origins. Yeah,
The tradition that we see in Ovid's metamorphosis, for example,
is that is that the gods transformed the ants into humans. Uh,
and that's why they have these these ant like uh
(18:55):
uh tendencies. They have this ant like tenacity because they
are essentially ants that were made human. But of course
that was not the actual reality. These were these were
human troops, and we have to make some sort of
sense of it. Uh. I was reading a two thousand
tin paper published in the Classical World by Matthew Sears
titled Warrior Ants Elite Troops in the Iliad, and he
(19:18):
points out that massed fighting was probably the norm in
the days of Homer, but that in this we get
into scholarly conflict over the idea of the hop light
revolution and the prin pre hop light and hop light warfare.
Now this refers to the Greek use of spears and
shields and the phalanx formation. So this is kind of
like an ant level um of of of cooperation that
(19:41):
stands in contrast to mass fighting and the dramatic single
combat episodes of the Iliad. So the basic idea here
is that the Myrmidons as well as you know, opposing
soldiers under AJAX might be understood as specialized warriors, professional
soldiers who use this type of tight formation with the
(20:02):
shields providing you know, absolute support for the unit and
uh and the offensive spears used in a very deliberate
manner as opposed to just a bunch of warriors running
out and going at it. So definitely keep the phalanx
in mind, because we'll come back to it and discuss
it more when we get into ant tactics a bit.
But basically, on both sides of the conflict described in
(20:22):
the Iliad, the ideas that you would have had a
mix of such professional, highly trained fighters alongside more general
generalized troops, and of course this would remain a reality
in warfare for a long time, the professional soldiers fighting
alongside the h you know, basically common commoners, common men
who have just been given arms or have taken up
(20:43):
arms in the conquest. Now in this series goes and
of course into a great deal more detail because it
is primarily concerned with the ancient world, but he actually
poses the question of whether ancient people's without special lenses
would have been able to mark the similarities between human
and ant organize conflict and based on the work of others.
He says, yeah, you know, we look at the traditions
(21:06):
in Africa, Australia and New Guinea. Uh, in cases where
you have people who know who have not used specialized
gear to analyze ants, and they have long made these comparisons. Quote,
the warlike characteristics of ants would have been just as
apparent to the eyes of the ancient Greeks as they
were to throw and McCook. In short, the description of
achilles men as aunt people maybe due to their resemblance
(21:30):
in terms of ferocity, uh, tactical ingenuity, unit cohesion, and
general belicocity to these insects, as as as observed by
the ancients. Okay, so what makes them like ants? It's
that they are fierce, that they execute tactics effectively, that
they stick together and don't break up into individuals, and
that they're very aggressive. Yeah they're not. Just yeah, I
(21:53):
think the sticking together and like working as a as
a unit is keyty Here. It's not the warfare of
sort of you know, random battle. It's not the warfare
of like the one hero fighting the other hero at
the at the at the walls of Troy. No, it
is about tactics and in uniform performance exactly, and that
is the advantage of the phalanx. Alright, So the next
(22:15):
question folks might wonder is how long have Aunt's waged
these wars? Or maybe you haven't, maybe you're not asking
that question, but let me go and tell you. It's
an interesting question with an interesting answer. Tell us the answer, Robert,
All right, well, well, first of all, let's let's consider
the big picture. First, we have to really stop and
realize that we live in the world of the ant.
(22:36):
Because today the world is home to an estimated twenty
two thousand species of a hant, and of those, only
I've seen two different numbers for this, uh, twelve five
hundred or perhaps thirteen thousand have been classified or described.
So we're still talking thousands of ant species out there
that we just you know, don't have a good hand line,
(22:57):
maybe don't even have names for um. According to ted
Are Shooltz in a paper on ant ancestors, ants probably
account for fifteen of the terrestrial animal biomass today. So
that means if you take all of the animals that
live on land, and of course this doesn't include plants
(23:18):
and stuff like that, but all the animals that live
on land, you weigh them all together, this estimate would
say fifteen of that is just ants. Yeah, And apparently
in areas where they're especially prominent, you could maybe be
looking at they because they and they thrive everywhere. Like
certainly they're they're you know, around the you know, the
the Equatorial belt, they're going to be especially active. But
(23:40):
they thrive everywhere except Antarctica and as well as the
occasional far flung and inhospitable island. Otherwise the ants just
have it all locked down. Now, that's an amazing estimate,
and I do want to be fair. I've been reading
around and I think there are some disputes about exactly
how much biomass ants account for the Different people have
different estimates. Um. But one other estimate I came across
(24:03):
that was very interesting. It was quoted in a in
a BBC article I was reading about aunt biomass It
quotes Francis Ratniqus, who is a professor of apriculture at
the University of Sussex, and Ratnius was trying to address
the question of what ways more all the ants or
all the humans. Uh, And there have been different answers
(24:24):
to this question. Ratnix thinks that, well, now, probably if
you weighed up all the humans, the humans way more
than the ants um But that hasn't always been the case. Definitely,
Ratnique says, if you went back a few thousand years,
ants would have far outweighed the humans. But as human
populations have grown exponentially, especially in recent centuries, that changed.
(24:46):
Ratnique thinks it was probably right around the late seventeen
hundreds or maybe a little bit before that, that the
total weight of humans on Earth suddenly became larger than
the total weight of ants. So around the time of
American into it's the humans overtook the ants. Wow. Uh,
here's another figure. And again these are all estimates, so
(25:07):
you know, don't you know, have any particular factor like
tattoo in your body regarding this. But the Field Museum
has a wonderful ant page uh ants section of their website,
and they they point they make the claim that in
the tropics, ant biomass outweighs all vertebrate life two to one. Yeah,
(25:27):
and that that emphasizes that like the percentage of ants,
as biomass is going to be heavily dependent on environment. Right,
So around the equatorial regions where they're even more abundant,
they might they might massively outweigh humans. I mean the
take home is that that basically, no matter how often
we fail to notice ants in our environment, they are
(25:48):
an extremely successful species. By you know, by some accounts,
they are the most successful insect on the planet, which
really puts them, uh, you know, in consideration for the
most sessiful animal on the planet. Oh yeah, I mean,
insects dominate the animal world, and especially especially the terrestrial
animal world, and if ants dominate the insects, I mean,
(26:11):
I think you could absolutely make a good case there.
But the funny thing is you have to imagine, like
all other organisms or families of organisms on Earth, there
was a time when ants were newcomers on the evolutionary scene.
And they can't always have had this this uh you know,
occupied this elevated station. That's right. They were not an
(26:31):
overnight success. Uh. Ants evolved and estimated one forty two,
one hundred and sixty eight million years ago, so they
are ultimately a product of the Jurassic But but yeah,
they were not an instant hit uh. I was reading that.
You know, scientists consider that they're probably like a modest
success at first. You know, um ants were doing their thing,
(26:53):
but they weren't just blowing up. But then something changed.
Flowering and fruiting plants evolved an estimated one million years ago.
And what this did is it transformed the energy economy.
Insects suddenly had in it were not suddenly, but insects
progressively had an entirely new food source to adapt to,
um a whole slew of new food sources. And so
(27:16):
they did. And ants, which were again probably just a
modestly successful life form at best earlier, suddenly exploded, filling
out these these various niches in the in the ecosystem.
They adapted to a host of evolutionary niches and then
spread across the two supercontinents of Eurasia and Gondwana. I'm
(27:38):
trying to imagine the scene of the first time some
ants discovered it fallen fruit. What a small moment that
would have been. Almost it's almost like an ant Garden
of Eden story. Yeah, And and it's like it's just
basically like all levels of this new fruit flower economy,
like the ants are there to figure out how to
make it work, and you know, and and of course
steadily evolve into these various species. Is that um to
(28:02):
take advantage of it in various ways. Now, as Schiltz
points out, we don't have much evidence of ants from
the first half of their existence. Not until the mid
Cretaceous do we see their fossil remains. But the evidence
we have is pretty incredible. In nineteen sixty six, E. O.
Wilson and others identified the fossil remains of a Cretaceous
ant species that was trapped in amber from ninety two
(28:24):
million years ago. But then there there there have been
some more recent exciting findings. Ancient Burmese amber from Myanmar
gives us even older evidence. I was reading about a
two thousand sixteen study from Rutgers that was at the
time of that study dated to ninety nine million years ago.
And according to Philip Bardon of the Insect and Evolution
(28:45):
Lab and Jessica l Where of the Department of Biological
Sciences at Rutgers University Newark, what what the contents of
this chunk of amber show us is a frozen act
of ant warfare. Oh, I see it. They're in a tangle. Yeah,
it's it's two ants battling it out, duking it out,
trapped forever in this uh, this droplet of amber. Well,
(29:06):
I'm imagining a scene where the scientists from Jurassic Park
drill into this amber and they use it to clone
dangerous Jurassic fruit right as they get the stomach content.
I don't know if that joke connected. Okay whatever, Um no, no,
I give it to your your cooking there. So the researchers,
though they do not go in that direction. What the
(29:26):
What they say is that the ants trapped here belonged
to early Aunt lineages. They're ultimately distinct from modern ants,
so they're not really direct ancestors of modern ants. But
in their study they present evidence that that these ancient
ants were social and and they were you know, engaging
in this kind of uh you know, collective conflict. Another
bit of amber, they point out, contains some twenty one
(29:49):
worker ants, and this is from a time period in which,
again ant fossil evidence is super rare, So they say,
to get twenty one in one blow suggested they were
already you know, very social, working together. So we're looking
at a good one million years of ant warfare based
on this, you know, at least memo or less, lining
up with the advent of flowering and fruiting plants, with
(30:11):
true dominance of the ants being reached some sixty million
years ago. Now, other things, of course evolved as well, uh,
including some of their various features. Uh. Interestingly enough, some
of the ancient ants were rather brutal looking, even more
brutal looking than they look today. For instance, there were
the hell ants uh so named because they feature many
(30:34):
characteristics that some might you know, consider unusual or hellish. Um. Yeah,
I found out because because you linked it to this
one called Lingua Mermix, vladdie, And I was looking at
that name for a second, thinking, wait, Vladdie, that that
can be? Is it? Is it? Vlad is it Vladim Paler?
It is named for Vladim Paler because it has this
(30:55):
U unique head structure where it has um Uh. It's
kind of difficult to describe because it's it has like
this paddle like projection on it and uh and X
ray uh imaging reveals that it was most probably filled
with sequestered metals to make it like you know, fortified uh,
(31:15):
and that it would have worked in tandem with scithelike
mandibles to pin and potentially puncture soft bodied prey. So
it was you know, there's this real you know, bear
trap of a head on this thing. I'm looking at
images of it now. It is a brutal spike coming
out of the head. Yeah. Now, this isn't to say
there aren't some really gnarly ant heads around today. We'll
(31:38):
get back to some of those later on. But one
of the important tacoms from all of this, and this
is something that Sean O'Donnell points out in that that
serious science article on ant wars. He points out that
there's an important shift in the weaponry of ants across time.
So long ago, vertebrates were probably the biggest threat to ants,
(31:59):
so they were more equipped to deal with them via
things like a powerful sting. But as time passed and
they spread her across the world, they become more and
more successful. Pressure on each other becomes more prevalent. In
other words, the endless aunt wars become more important for
shaping their evolution than the dinosaurs, the birds, and the
(32:20):
various mammals that preyed on them. So they used to
be they used to have to be more worried about
and eaters and armadillos getting in there and vacuum them
up with the snout but over time their real adversaries
become the rival. I'm an opter in colonies exactly. So
ultimately some AUNT lineages end up keeping their sting. For example,
(32:40):
the bullet ant whose bite ranks as a four. That's
the maximum score on Schmidt's sting pain index um. There
I was reading a description. This is by Justin Oschmidt,
the entomologist who came up with this system of measuring
UH the stings. He described it as quote pure intense,
brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoil with a three
(33:03):
inch nail and embedded in your heel. Yeah. I've read
descriptions of this one as well. The only other thing
that I recall being compared to this level of pain
with the sting was the tarantula hawk, which is a
type of stinging wasp, but apparently it is just like
unimaginable in terms of an insect thing. So that's an
example of of ants that have kept their impressive bioweapon um,
(33:27):
but others lost it entirely, and in some cases, UH
these systems adapted into chemical weapons systems to be used
against other ants, and we'll discuss those later on in
this UH this look at ant warfare because the end
of it is up taking a different form because ultimately
you're trying to solve different problems at different scales with
different enemies. Okay, it looks like it's time for us
(33:50):
to take a break, but we'll be right back with
more than all Right, we're back. So we've now come
to the poor of our our episodes here where we're
going to really get into the endless wars of ant
kind and the sorts of tactics they employ on the battlefield.
And we're probably not going to be able to to
(34:11):
make it all the way through the this next section
without having to stop the episode and come back in
part two. But if everything goes according to plan, you're
only gonna have to wait like a day for the
ant wars to continue. Now, the most important fact to
drive home first is that naturally there are so many
species of ants to consider, and that you know a
specific species. Tactics are then also going to change depending
(34:34):
on circumstances, and this is just going to be the
nature of war. Moffett rights that some ants succeed in
battle by being on constant offensive, and he draws an
interest in comparison here to a sixth century BC Chinese
military general Son Zoo, who also noted that quote, rapidity
is the essence of war, right, I mean, so much
(34:55):
depends on your ability to not give your opponent time
to react act effectively. Right, and so like the key
A variety of aunt to draw a comparison here to uh,
he says, would be the army ants that inhabit a
warm regions around the world, as well as ages marauder
ants as prime examples here. Uh. For these aunt legions,
hundreds or even millions of these warriors will advance in
(35:19):
a tight phalanx against their AUNT adversaries. Now, I guess
we should try to examine what that would mean for
ants as opposed to human warriors. So, if you're like
an ancient Greek phalanx, this would involve, say, staying together
in a tight formation with a wall of shields out
in front that's sort of like prevents the enemy from
(35:39):
reaching you, and that you would have trained to be
able to move forward and thrust with spears in an
organized fashion, all altogether minimizing the chances for the enemy
to to break into you while you're pushing into them. Yeah, Like, basically,
the difference between like just two hordes, like just slamming
into each other. And how thing something more and more
(36:01):
in keeping with really what we've seen in the tradition
of tabletop war gaming. Uh, for anyone out here there
is actually played any of these games, you can certainly relate.
But even if you've looked at one, you get the
sense of order, and I think that's what draws players
into it. Right. You have all these these units, these
little individual soldiers that are part of different units, and
(36:22):
these units are working together. You're having to employ a
strategy to deploy them and then move them around and
counter the movements of your adversary. And again, for a
human this is done by you know, either the godlike
figure that looms over the gaming table or it it
is the domain of a commander. But for the ants
it is it is just that pure swarm intelligence that
(36:44):
allows it to take place. Now, Momft points out for
that for for human forces just advancing in a phalanx,
part of the issue here is you need to know
where you're going, right, which is obvious, your your your
your your phalonx needs to have a target or goal
or purpose like cutting its way through the defenses in
order to get to the gates of Troy, that sort
(37:06):
of thing. But some hands ants, however, just kind of
stick to this roving phalanx tactic, just a roving decimating
horde that that brings to mind. Oh, I'd say like
the Tyra the Tyrant Army from forty Warhammer forty thousand
MND made an example of this, you know, or various
sort of alien bio adversaries in science fiction where it's
(37:28):
just it's just this massive horde that's working in unity
and uh, it's difficult to stop. Right. However, human forces,
you know, tend not to go this route. They tend
to depend on scouts as well to determine where to
apply that offensive pressure, where to send your phalanx, and
some ants do this as well. Some species will send
(37:48):
out a small team of workers to serve as scouts.
But this too is risky. Is this risky strategy for
ants because a team of scouts they have to report
back to the colony in order for a larger force
too then return to obtain that food source that they
just scouted. And this is true of human scouts as well.
In a military scenario, we might well consider the case
(38:09):
of imperial probe droids for example, right, and Empire strikes back,
you send out these droids and yet one may discover
a rebel base on Hoth, but it actually needs to
survive and then it's and then get word back to
the Empire so they can deploy their their A T eighties,
you know, their their massive army. Likewise, the Empire would
(38:30):
find this to be a better method send out the
probe droids, because we can't send the A T eighties
to every world just in case there's a rebel base there.
So basically for the for the Empire, for the ants
as well, it basically means that you can depend on
you can send out fewer ants and cover a larger
area in order to scout out potential targets in the
(38:52):
case of the ants, potential food. Now I can imagine though,
there are a lot of considerations that must be built
into ant behavior based on not wasting resources on like
you know, on you know, going somewhere where there's no
longer anything useful to be done, right, Yeah, because there's
always the risk that the enemy will move before a
larger force can arrive, or that that food source that
(39:13):
was scouted out it's just not going to be there
when you're true your aunt troops roll in and uh
in all of this for the for the ants, pheromones
are key for their communication. Here, the Scouts use this
to tag the food source for the larger force to find.
So so the pheromones of the ants here would be
the imperial probe droids dab day about kind of message
(39:36):
that it sends out. Yeah, basically like the pheromones end
up serving as communication lines. Some of it rights that
uh quote the workers of the army ants or marauder
ants can immediately summon any help they require because a
slew of assistance are marching directly behind them. The result
is maximal shock and awe. So much like in more
large scale conflicts, you would have to you'd have to
(39:58):
in some way ensure that communication in lines are able
to remain open for forces to be effective exactly. And
again here you know, the for the ants it is
is largely this realm of of touch and smell. It's
the pheromonal information that's so key. So really I feel
like this at this point in the podcast, I think
we do have a pretty broad view of like what's
(40:20):
going on with on with the ant war effort about
how how troops are distributed, how communication is taking place,
and then how offensive pressure can be applied to different
areas depending on the need. Oh, but there is so
much more ant battle to talk about. Yes, indeed there is. Uh. Yeah,
we we were only able to get through like the
(40:41):
first half of our material here because there's a lot
more about well just about like the at the individual level,
there's a lot more about like the how like aunt
jaws work, the power of ant bioweapons, it's etcetera. But
then also when you get into the Marauder ant specifically,
there's been a lot of wonderful work, uh regarding just
(41:02):
how they carry out their campaigns and to what extent
we can compare uh, these these acts of ant conquest
to actual human battles. Well, I can't wait to come
back next time and fight on with the Myrmadons. Yeah,
more ants, more allusions to UH star Wars and various
UH tabletop gaming scenarios. It's gonna be gonna be a
(41:23):
lot of fun. In the meantime. If you would like
to check out other episodes of stuff to blow your mind,
you know where to find us, and that is wherever
you get your podcast, wherever that happens to be. What
strange service you depend on for your podcast delivery, Just
make sure you rate, review, and subscribe because that really
helps us out in the long run. Huge thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
(41:46):
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(42:08):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
bringing you an episode from the Vault. This is aunt
War's Part one, originally aired on June twelve. Should we
go right in, Let's do it. For years, the Trailhead
(00:31):
nest had been protected by a ten thousand member force
of its adult members or soldiers. A soldier's exoskeleton, twice
the size of that of an ordinary worker is literally
heavy armor, thick, tough, and hitted in places for resilience
and strength. A pair of spines project backward from the
(00:52):
mid section of the body to protect the waist. Spikes
protect the neck, and the rear margin of the head
is curved forward, forming a helmet. When attacked, the soldier
can pull in her legs and antenna and tighten up
the segments of her body, turning her entire surface into
a shield. The ordinary Trailhead workers, while built for labor,
(01:13):
were also available for combat. They served as the light infantry,
using the swiftness and the agility of their supple bodies
to dart in and out of enemy lines, seizing any
leg or antenna available, and holding onto it until their
nest mates could close in and grab another body part.
When the adversary was finally pinned and spread eagled, others
piled on to bite, sting or spray her with poison.
(01:48):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Off to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
today It's Ants, folks. That's right, this is going to
be Ant Wars Episode one. Uh, the Ampire strikes Back.
(02:11):
Perhaps I'm not sure. I haven't worked out that the
full title yet, but yeah, we're gonna be taking a
couple of episodes to look at the wars of the Ants,
and it seemed ideal that we kick off with a
cold reading from the novel ant Hill, a novel by E. O.
Wilson which came out in so we were talking about
(02:31):
this novel before we got started. It actually got some
surprisingly good reviews. I was thinking about picking up a
copy and reading it until I discovered that a significant
portion of this novel is about human characters. And I
was hoping with EO. Wilson, you know, especially in the past,
we've talked about that video where he like plunges his
hand into a nest of fire ants and beams with
(02:54):
the most the most radiant joy as the ants all
biden sting him. At the same time, I was hoping
it would be all about ants, because if anybody could
do ants as compelling central characters, I would think it
would be E. O. Wilson. Yeah, I think I was
looking at one review of it. There was glowing that
said that they're about seventy pages in the novel that
(03:14):
only E. O. Wilson could have written. Um and uh,
and I think this gives everyone a little taste of that.
And when we say, you know, surprisingly, you know great reviews,
you know it's obviously EO. Wilson is a is a
tremendous author. But generally he was he was associated with
with nonfiction, uh, conveying oftentimes conveying science very effectively, um
(03:35):
to a general audience. But of course fiction is a
slightly different scenario. So you might expect even a very
talented nonfiction writer, uh, you know, to to to perhaps
stumble a bit in trying to create a work of
fiction like this. Oh totally, that's what I mean. I
didn't mean, like EO. Wilson's a dummy. I just meant
that usually when somebody who's not primarily a fiction writer
(03:55):
is like, yeah, I'll do a novel, it's it's not
always great. Well, you know, the main in the main
example that always comes to my mind is would be
the the Tech Wars novels that were attributed to William
Shatner that although I understand it was more of a
ghostwriting scenario, it was in place and there was some
some spiritual composition in there. But but I have to
say it was not the tech Wars that inspired inspired
(04:18):
me to to seek this topic out this week, but
rather the Clone Wars um and and also the miniature
board gaming in general. So my son and I recently
ordered a copy of Fantasy Flight Star Wars Legion miniature Game,
which is a miniature um war game in the tradition
of things like say Warhammer, Warhammer forty thousand, and then
(04:41):
the older um the the older like napoleonic Um war
games of old, the kind of thing that has been
the past time of people such as H. G. Wells,
who wrote a essentially a rule book for such miniature
gaming and then was also a favorite pastime of Peter Cushing. Right,
you recently shared this deo with me where Cushing is
(05:01):
painting his little figurines. I guess it's Napoleonic Wars or
some similar temporal event where all these little uniformed figures
he's like posing them around barns and stuff that he's
gotten on his floor. I think it was a video
from the from the nineteen fifties that was done. Yeah,
it was. It was nineteen fifties, and yeah, he's really
getting into it, has a whole whole hobby set up,
and yeah, then he's laying them out on the floor
(05:23):
getting them into into position. Um, you know, a very
very historical based for sure. But yeah, just thinking about
this sort of thing, thinking about miniature gaming in general,
and thinking about the clone Wars where you have on
one side a bunch of uh, you know, genetically identical
warriors going up against you know, armored robotic hords. I
(05:47):
couldn't help but think of the ants, the wars of
the ants. You know, it's amazing how much hymen opteran
conflict we can miss because you're just going about your business.
Maybe you're doing something in your yard, you're hanging out
out in the sun or in the hammock or something,
and you don't even realize that there is literally a
battle raging just a couple of feet from you around
(06:09):
the blades of grass. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. They the ants
are are waging their wars, they're defending their territories, um,
and and we're talking about against other ants and not
even talking about their their various struggles against other species.
And it's everywhere. We did not even think about our
aunts unless they actually invade our homes, and then then
(06:31):
we get hot and bothered about it. But I imagine
the most crucial question we have to consider before we
proceed is can we really consider the conflict we see
between ant species between different ant colonies as warfare more
or less in the human sense of the word. Well,
I mean, in one sense you could say maybe pedantically
(06:52):
and obviously no, because it would necessarily fail to capture
like the full range of human value and culture and
and passion that the company's conflict between humans. But on
the other hand, I think you could absolutely probably like
see some parallels in terms of like pure resource dynamics. Yeah,
I was thinking about this a little bit. Uh. Sometimes
(07:13):
you see war defined as a declared armed hostile conflict,
and of course the idea of ants actually declaring war
on another group of ants is ridiculous because you're getting
into declarations of war. That's a human political reality and
is doctor Brundle would probably remind us insects are rather
short on politics. I mean, I think that that that
(07:35):
fails to capture even a lot of actual war in
the human context, where a lot of wars are not
cold wars by the people carrying them out right. Another
issue too, is if we're talking about an armed hostile conflict, well,
ants don't actually take up arms in the human sense,
and of course they don't have to, because aunts have
a number of biological weapons and chemical weapons at their
(07:57):
disposal that make make such tool will use unnecessary. And
of course we'll be running through some examples of of
these bio weapons as we proceed through these episodes. However,
we do tend to discuss these conflicts between ant colonies
between ant species as being a form of war something
(08:17):
that we can think of as for as zoologist and
entomologist Sean O'Donnell pointed out on Serious Science, ants engage
in quote direct aggressive interaction between ants of different colonies.
They also engage in such conflict over resources, and as
a noted ant expert author of the Human Swarm tropical biologists,
(08:38):
Mark W. Moffatt has put it, or is quote the
concentrated engagement of group against group in which both sides
risk wholesale destruction. So it's easy to look at other
animals perhaps and say, well, cats don't wage war, dogs
don't wage war. It would be, for instance, kind of
ridiculous to say that um lions are way ing war
(09:00):
against say an antelope. Right, yeah, I I think that
the the analogy would really fall short there. But for
the ant however, it gets a little, a little, a
little different. So Mofat contends that the case for ant
warfare is fairly convincing. It's not simply a matter of
applying the lens of human civilization to the behavior of animals.
What what they are doing and we humans have done
(09:23):
for thousands of years are both endeavors that entail quote
an astonishing array of tactical choices about methods of attack
and strategic decisions about when and where to wage war. Now,
the parallel there gets especially interesting because while humans would
have to make tactical and strategic choices in in organized
conflict consciously, you know, they have to like use their
(09:46):
brains look at what's going on and try to judge.
I think, uh, I think we would have to say
that the ant carries out its campaigns almost entirely on instinct.
Like it the ant doesn't have strategic theories except it
naturally does by instinctive behavior. That's right. Yeah, they more
or less simply do. And we'll get into some of
(10:07):
the details of that here in a second. I want
to throw in that Douglas j Emlin, who wrote an
excellent book several years ago titled Animal Weapons uh he
he uh, weighs in on this and says that, Okay,
for the most part, animals do not fight battles or
wars um and you know it, basically, he says, most
of the animal conflict that we see in the wild,
(10:28):
it's ultimately more of a duel, you know, especially as
far as interest species contests go, you know, like male
fighting a male over a potential mate. But ants and
termites are are certainly examples of something that could be
a standout, you know, in which we do see this
kind of large scale war with high stakes for both sides. Um.
(10:49):
You know, I was thinking a bit about this too,
that you know, even these other scenarios lions versus antelopes
and all like, at best, we could maybe think of
that as a skirmish, right, but certainly not a war.
Not certainly not a war or of of eradication. Yeah.
I would say that the conflicts between most animals you
see in nature are much more individual. They're less group oriented,
(11:09):
that they're less organized. Though at the same time that
brings up an interesting question about what what really counts
as an individual when you're talking about something like a
colony of ants, because unlike say mammals or birds or something,
answer a situation where within the colony, it gets harder
to make the case that the individual ant's body is
(11:32):
a is a like independent, autonomous agent, and it might
be better thought of as like one organ of the
the actual individual, which is the overall colony. Yeah. I
think a lot of it comes down to the fact
that they are so I mean, they're use social insects,
and they're so connected that there there is this sense
of civilization to them. You know, they are you know,
(11:54):
they're managing resources. In some cases, such with the leaf
counter ant, they're engaging in agriculture. You know, they there's
this this whole system that is there that that makes
the argument for ant warfare a lot more convincing than saying, well,
this invasive species is waging a war on the native species. Yeah,
I mean it is out competing it for some resource.
(12:16):
But it is not like this tight knit unit. It
is not a like a full blown colony. Now, obviously
nothing humans do is going to be comparable to something
in the ant world, but the similarities are pretty startling.
I want to read a quote from a wonderful two
thousand and eleven Scientific American article titled Ants and the
(12:37):
Art of War, and this is also by Mark W. Moffatt. Quote.
Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants and
termites form tight knit societies with members numbering in the millions,
and that these insects engage in complex behaviors. Such practices
include traffic control, public health efforts, crop domestication, and, perhaps
most intriguingly, warfare, the concentrated engagement of group against group
(13:01):
in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these
respects and others, we modern humans more closely resemble ants
than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in
far smaller societies. So the main similarity between us and
the ants is that we organize ourselves more so than
almost any other non insect animal right now. Biologically, of course,
(13:25):
we're much larger vertebrates. We have impressive brains that have
enabled us to achieve unequal technological accomplishments, including but not
limited to, the production of nineteen fifty four Is Them
and Birdeye Gordon's nineteen seventy seven film Empire of the Ants.
You don't see the ants themselves making films this good.
That's true. Ant cinema is rather lacking, though I don't
(13:48):
know if I've seen this Birdeye Gordon movie or not.
Of course, Birt Eye Gordon has come up on the
show several times. He's sort of h MR a K
A Mr Big. He's the king of the force perspective effect,
where you know, you take like a lizard and then
you shoot it up close against the background and make
it say that it's a dinosaur. Yeah. I have to
say I haven't seen Empire of the Ants either. I
(14:08):
mainly know it because it's referenced in a Warren Zevon song,
but it's a n seven release. That's that's pretty late
into in the bird Eye Gordon and Giant Animal rampaging world.
I would think last time I checked bird Eye Gordon
was still alive. I think he is, oh well, still
going at Yes, he's ninety seven years old. Alright, So
obviously ants can't actually top that. You know, they don't
(14:31):
have language, they don't have civilization in the sense that
we do. Ants. However, they have a different way of
going about things. So for instance, they produce While we're
like a fifty fifty male female species, ants only produce
males to serve as short lived reproductive drones, to fertile queens.
That's right, I mean ants are females basically. Yeah, the
(14:53):
vast majority of the colony consists of sterile females. And
while the queen terminology, you know, if we talk about
the queen ant and it brings with it the legacy
of human centralized power structures. Ultimately, ants function without a
power hierarchy or a permanent leader. They are entirely decentralized. So,
(15:13):
like you said earlier, combat decisions, they're not made by commanders.
You know, if if this was a miniature war game,
you wouldn't have like the commander piece that's essential for
all of this to take place. No, it's rather a
case of form intelligence. That is one of the hardest
things to keep in mind because there there's this natural
tendency we have to assume that something called the queen
(15:34):
is in charge. But yeah, when you're thinking about aunts,
you have to remember that basically ants are always at
war and the queen is never in command. The queen
doesn't tell the ants what to do. They are highly
motivated to protect the queen. But that's kind of in
the same way that like you are highly motivated to
protect the most vulnerable parts of your body from injury, right,
(15:55):
like you'd protect your face and stuff. Like the queen
is there reproductive chances and that's why she is protected, right,
and she's she is very important. There's some passages in EO.
Wilson's novel where where the tragedy of the fall of
their their queen is discussed and how this is a
you know, part of the peril that this key group
(16:17):
of ants finds themselves in. But ultimately, the wars of
ants and the wars of humans they're often fought for
the same reasons. Territory, food, ideal dwelling spaces, and even labor.
So some ant species do in fact employ something that
we might think of as slave labor, and we'll come
back to that as we go. But also ants deploy
various tactics depending on what is at stake. So, like
(16:40):
you know, not every war is equal to the ant colony.
There is um, there's a fluctuation in, you know, the
amount of effort that is put into it, how much
ant power is is put on the line, et cetera. However,
in his book The Human Swarm, Moffatt speaks a little
bit more about this, about the basic comparison in between
human and ant warfare, and he does he does write
(17:03):
the quote, if nothing else, remember this, comparing identical things
is deadly boring. Making comparisons is most fruitful when parallels
are noticed between ideas or things or actions ordinarily treated
as distinct. Uh. And he discusses this at length in
that book, if if, if anyone wants to pick that
up and explore more. But I think this is also
something that's important to keep in mind. Yeah, it's it's
(17:24):
not a one to one, but if it were a
one to one, we probably wouldn't be doing a podcast
about it, right, all right, we need to take a
quick break, but when we come back, we will talk
about aunt warriors in classic literature. Than all right, we're back.
So we spent the whole first portion of this episode
talking about the idea of comparing ant warfare to human
(17:48):
warfare and uh, and to what, to what extent it's fair,
what extent it makes sense? And ultimately it's irrelevant because
we still do it, and we've been doing it for
a very long time. We've been making that connection between
human warfare in ant warfare, perhaps for as long as
warriors have had a chance, uh, you know, to pause
on the battlefield and look down between their human feet
(18:10):
and see a smaller version of their campaigns playing out
in the dirt beneath them. For instance, if we look
back to the Iliad, the specialized warriors who serve the
mighty Akellyes are known as the Myrmidons. The aunt people
is the the literal translation of that. Now I know.
According to some mythological sources, the Mermandons who fight with
(18:33):
Achilles actually were ants at some point. Isn't that right?
They were like transformed into human warriors from their aunt origins. Yeah,
The tradition that we see in Ovid's metamorphosis, for example,
is that is that the gods transformed the ants into humans. Uh,
and that's why they have these these ant like uh
(18:55):
uh tendencies. They have this ant like tenacity because they
are essentially ants that were made human. But of course
that was not the actual reality. These were these were
human troops, and we have to make some sort of
sense of it. Uh. I was reading a two thousand
tin paper published in the Classical World by Matthew Sears
titled Warrior Ants Elite Troops in the Iliad, and he
(19:18):
points out that massed fighting was probably the norm in
the days of Homer, but that in this we get
into scholarly conflict over the idea of the hop light
revolution and the prin pre hop light and hop light warfare.
Now this refers to the Greek use of spears and
shields and the phalanx formation. So this is kind of
like an ant level um of of of cooperation that
(19:41):
stands in contrast to mass fighting and the dramatic single
combat episodes of the Iliad. So the basic idea here
is that the Myrmidons as well as you know, opposing
soldiers under AJAX might be understood as specialized warriors, professional
soldiers who use this type of tight formation with the
(20:02):
shields providing you know, absolute support for the unit and
uh and the offensive spears used in a very deliberate
manner as opposed to just a bunch of warriors running
out and going at it. So definitely keep the phalanx
in mind, because we'll come back to it and discuss
it more when we get into ant tactics a bit.
But basically, on both sides of the conflict described in
(20:22):
the Iliad, the ideas that you would have had a
mix of such professional, highly trained fighters alongside more general
generalized troops, and of course this would remain a reality
in warfare for a long time, the professional soldiers fighting
alongside the h you know, basically common commoners, common men
who have just been given arms or have taken up
(20:43):
arms in the conquest. Now in this series goes and
of course into a great deal more detail because it
is primarily concerned with the ancient world, but he actually
poses the question of whether ancient people's without special lenses
would have been able to mark the similarities between human
and ant organize conflict and based on the work of others.
He says, yeah, you know, we look at the traditions
(21:06):
in Africa, Australia and New Guinea. Uh, in cases where
you have people who know who have not used specialized
gear to analyze ants, and they have long made these comparisons. Quote,
the warlike characteristics of ants would have been just as
apparent to the eyes of the ancient Greeks as they
were to throw and McCook. In short, the description of
achilles men as aunt people maybe due to their resemblance
(21:30):
in terms of ferocity, uh, tactical ingenuity, unit cohesion, and
general belicocity to these insects, as as as observed by
the ancients. Okay, so what makes them like ants? It's
that they are fierce, that they execute tactics effectively, that
they stick together and don't break up into individuals, and
that they're very aggressive. Yeah they're not. Just yeah, I
(21:53):
think the sticking together and like working as a as
a unit is keyty Here. It's not the warfare of
sort of you know, random battle. It's not the warfare
of like the one hero fighting the other hero at
the at the at the walls of Troy. No, it
is about tactics and in uniform performance exactly, and that
is the advantage of the phalanx. Alright, So the next
(22:15):
question folks might wonder is how long have Aunt's waged
these wars? Or maybe you haven't, maybe you're not asking
that question, but let me go and tell you. It's
an interesting question with an interesting answer. Tell us the answer, Robert,
All right, well, well, first of all, let's let's consider
the big picture. First, we have to really stop and
realize that we live in the world of the ant.
(22:36):
Because today the world is home to an estimated twenty
two thousand species of a hant, and of those, only
I've seen two different numbers for this, uh, twelve five
hundred or perhaps thirteen thousand have been classified or described.
So we're still talking thousands of ant species out there
that we just you know, don't have a good hand line,
(22:57):
maybe don't even have names for um. According to ted
Are Shooltz in a paper on ant ancestors, ants probably
account for fifteen of the terrestrial animal biomass today. So
that means if you take all of the animals that
live on land, and of course this doesn't include plants
(23:18):
and stuff like that, but all the animals that live
on land, you weigh them all together, this estimate would
say fifteen of that is just ants. Yeah, And apparently
in areas where they're especially prominent, you could maybe be
looking at they because they and they thrive everywhere. Like
certainly they're they're you know, around the you know, the
the Equatorial belt, they're going to be especially active. But
(23:40):
they thrive everywhere except Antarctica and as well as the
occasional far flung and inhospitable island. Otherwise the ants just
have it all locked down. Now, that's an amazing estimate,
and I do want to be fair. I've been reading
around and I think there are some disputes about exactly
how much biomass ants account for the Different people have
different estimates. Um. But one other estimate I came across
(24:03):
that was very interesting. It was quoted in a in
a BBC article I was reading about aunt biomass It
quotes Francis Ratniqus, who is a professor of apriculture at
the University of Sussex, and Ratnius was trying to address
the question of what ways more all the ants or
all the humans. Uh, And there have been different answers
(24:24):
to this question. Ratnix thinks that, well, now, probably if
you weighed up all the humans, the humans way more
than the ants um But that hasn't always been the case. Definitely,
Ratnique says, if you went back a few thousand years,
ants would have far outweighed the humans. But as human
populations have grown exponentially, especially in recent centuries, that changed.
(24:46):
Ratnique thinks it was probably right around the late seventeen
hundreds or maybe a little bit before that, that the
total weight of humans on Earth suddenly became larger than
the total weight of ants. So around the time of
American into it's the humans overtook the ants. Wow. Uh,
here's another figure. And again these are all estimates, so
(25:07):
you know, don't you know, have any particular factor like
tattoo in your body regarding this. But the Field Museum
has a wonderful ant page uh ants section of their website,
and they they point they make the claim that in
the tropics, ant biomass outweighs all vertebrate life two to one. Yeah,
(25:27):
and that that emphasizes that like the percentage of ants,
as biomass is going to be heavily dependent on environment. Right,
So around the equatorial regions where they're even more abundant,
they might they might massively outweigh humans. I mean the
take home is that that basically, no matter how often
we fail to notice ants in our environment, they are
(25:48):
an extremely successful species. By you know, by some accounts,
they are the most successful insect on the planet, which
really puts them, uh, you know, in consideration for the
most sessiful animal on the planet. Oh yeah, I mean,
insects dominate the animal world, and especially especially the terrestrial
animal world, and if ants dominate the insects, I mean,
(26:11):
I think you could absolutely make a good case there.
But the funny thing is you have to imagine, like
all other organisms or families of organisms on Earth, there
was a time when ants were newcomers on the evolutionary scene.
And they can't always have had this this uh you know,
occupied this elevated station. That's right. They were not an
(26:31):
overnight success. Uh. Ants evolved and estimated one forty two,
one hundred and sixty eight million years ago, so they
are ultimately a product of the Jurassic But but yeah,
they were not an instant hit uh. I was reading that.
You know, scientists consider that they're probably like a modest
success at first. You know, um ants were doing their thing,
(26:53):
but they weren't just blowing up. But then something changed.
Flowering and fruiting plants evolved an estimated one million years ago.
And what this did is it transformed the energy economy.
Insects suddenly had in it were not suddenly, but insects
progressively had an entirely new food source to adapt to,
um a whole slew of new food sources. And so
(27:16):
they did. And ants, which were again probably just a
modestly successful life form at best earlier, suddenly exploded, filling
out these these various niches in the in the ecosystem.
They adapted to a host of evolutionary niches and then
spread across the two supercontinents of Eurasia and Gondwana. I'm
(27:38):
trying to imagine the scene of the first time some
ants discovered it fallen fruit. What a small moment that
would have been. Almost it's almost like an ant Garden
of Eden story. Yeah, And and it's like it's just
basically like all levels of this new fruit flower economy,
like the ants are there to figure out how to
make it work, and you know, and and of course
steadily evolve into these various species. Is that um to
(28:02):
take advantage of it in various ways. Now, as Schiltz
points out, we don't have much evidence of ants from
the first half of their existence. Not until the mid
Cretaceous do we see their fossil remains. But the evidence
we have is pretty incredible. In nineteen sixty six, E. O.
Wilson and others identified the fossil remains of a Cretaceous
ant species that was trapped in amber from ninety two
(28:24):
million years ago. But then there there there have been
some more recent exciting findings. Ancient Burmese amber from Myanmar
gives us even older evidence. I was reading about a
two thousand sixteen study from Rutgers that was at the
time of that study dated to ninety nine million years ago.
And according to Philip Bardon of the Insect and Evolution
(28:45):
Lab and Jessica l Where of the Department of Biological
Sciences at Rutgers University Newark, what what the contents of
this chunk of amber show us is a frozen act
of ant warfare. Oh, I see it. They're in a tangle. Yeah,
it's it's two ants battling it out, duking it out,
trapped forever in this uh, this droplet of amber. Well,
(29:06):
I'm imagining a scene where the scientists from Jurassic Park
drill into this amber and they use it to clone
dangerous Jurassic fruit right as they get the stomach content.
I don't know if that joke connected. Okay whatever, Um no, no,
I give it to your your cooking there. So the researchers,
though they do not go in that direction. What the
(29:26):
What they say is that the ants trapped here belonged
to early Aunt lineages. They're ultimately distinct from modern ants,
so they're not really direct ancestors of modern ants. But
in their study they present evidence that that these ancient
ants were social and and they were you know, engaging
in this kind of uh you know, collective conflict. Another
bit of amber, they point out, contains some twenty one
(29:49):
worker ants, and this is from a time period in which,
again ant fossil evidence is super rare, So they say,
to get twenty one in one blow suggested they were
already you know, very social, working together. So we're looking
at a good one million years of ant warfare based
on this, you know, at least memo or less, lining
up with the advent of flowering and fruiting plants, with
(30:11):
true dominance of the ants being reached some sixty million
years ago. Now, other things, of course evolved as well, uh,
including some of their various features. Uh. Interestingly enough, some
of the ancient ants were rather brutal looking, even more
brutal looking than they look today. For instance, there were
the hell ants uh so named because they feature many
(30:34):
characteristics that some might you know, consider unusual or hellish. Um. Yeah,
I found out because because you linked it to this
one called Lingua Mermix, vladdie, And I was looking at
that name for a second, thinking, wait, Vladdie, that that
can be? Is it? Is it? Vlad is it Vladim Paler?
It is named for Vladim Paler because it has this
(30:55):
U unique head structure where it has um Uh. It's
kind of difficult to describe because it's it has like
this paddle like projection on it and uh and X
ray uh imaging reveals that it was most probably filled
with sequestered metals to make it like you know, fortified uh,
(31:15):
and that it would have worked in tandem with scithelike
mandibles to pin and potentially puncture soft bodied prey. So
it was you know, there's this real you know, bear
trap of a head on this thing. I'm looking at
images of it now. It is a brutal spike coming
out of the head. Yeah. Now, this isn't to say
there aren't some really gnarly ant heads around today. We'll
(31:38):
get back to some of those later on. But one
of the important tacoms from all of this, and this
is something that Sean O'Donnell points out in that that
serious science article on ant wars. He points out that
there's an important shift in the weaponry of ants across time.
So long ago, vertebrates were probably the biggest threat to ants,
(31:59):
so they were more equipped to deal with them via
things like a powerful sting. But as time passed and
they spread her across the world, they become more and
more successful. Pressure on each other becomes more prevalent. In
other words, the endless aunt wars become more important for
shaping their evolution than the dinosaurs, the birds, and the
(32:20):
various mammals that preyed on them. So they used to
be they used to have to be more worried about
and eaters and armadillos getting in there and vacuum them
up with the snout but over time their real adversaries
become the rival. I'm an opter in colonies exactly. So
ultimately some AUNT lineages end up keeping their sting. For example,
(32:40):
the bullet ant whose bite ranks as a four. That's
the maximum score on Schmidt's sting pain index um. There
I was reading a description. This is by Justin Oschmidt,
the entomologist who came up with this system of measuring
UH the stings. He described it as quote pure intense,
brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoil with a three
(33:03):
inch nail and embedded in your heel. Yeah. I've read
descriptions of this one as well. The only other thing
that I recall being compared to this level of pain
with the sting was the tarantula hawk, which is a
type of stinging wasp, but apparently it is just like
unimaginable in terms of an insect thing. So that's an
example of of ants that have kept their impressive bioweapon um,
(33:27):
but others lost it entirely, and in some cases, UH
these systems adapted into chemical weapons systems to be used
against other ants, and we'll discuss those later on in
this UH this look at ant warfare because the end
of it is up taking a different form because ultimately
you're trying to solve different problems at different scales with
different enemies. Okay, it looks like it's time for us
(33:50):
to take a break, but we'll be right back with
more than all Right, we're back. So we've now come
to the poor of our our episodes here where we're
going to really get into the endless wars of ant
kind and the sorts of tactics they employ on the battlefield.
And we're probably not going to be able to to
(34:11):
make it all the way through the this next section
without having to stop the episode and come back in
part two. But if everything goes according to plan, you're
only gonna have to wait like a day for the
ant wars to continue. Now, the most important fact to
drive home first is that naturally there are so many
species of ants to consider, and that you know a
specific species. Tactics are then also going to change depending
(34:34):
on circumstances, and this is just going to be the
nature of war. Moffett rights that some ants succeed in
battle by being on constant offensive, and he draws an
interest in comparison here to a sixth century BC Chinese
military general Son Zoo, who also noted that quote, rapidity
is the essence of war, right, I mean, so much
(34:55):
depends on your ability to not give your opponent time
to react act effectively. Right, and so like the key
A variety of aunt to draw a comparison here to uh,
he says, would be the army ants that inhabit a
warm regions around the world, as well as ages marauder
ants as prime examples here. Uh. For these aunt legions,
hundreds or even millions of these warriors will advance in
(35:19):
a tight phalanx against their AUNT adversaries. Now, I guess
we should try to examine what that would mean for
ants as opposed to human warriors. So, if you're like
an ancient Greek phalanx, this would involve, say, staying together
in a tight formation with a wall of shields out
in front that's sort of like prevents the enemy from
(35:39):
reaching you, and that you would have trained to be
able to move forward and thrust with spears in an
organized fashion, all altogether minimizing the chances for the enemy
to to break into you while you're pushing into them. Yeah, Like, basically,
the difference between like just two hordes, like just slamming
into each other. And how thing something more and more
(36:01):
in keeping with really what we've seen in the tradition
of tabletop war gaming. Uh, for anyone out here there
is actually played any of these games, you can certainly relate.
But even if you've looked at one, you get the
sense of order, and I think that's what draws players
into it. Right. You have all these these units, these
little individual soldiers that are part of different units, and
(36:22):
these units are working together. You're having to employ a
strategy to deploy them and then move them around and
counter the movements of your adversary. And again, for a
human this is done by you know, either the godlike
figure that looms over the gaming table or it it
is the domain of a commander. But for the ants
it is it is just that pure swarm intelligence that
(36:44):
allows it to take place. Now, Momft points out for
that for for human forces just advancing in a phalanx,
part of the issue here is you need to know
where you're going, right, which is obvious, your your your
your your phalonx needs to have a target or goal
or purpose like cutting its way through the defenses in
order to get to the gates of Troy, that sort
(37:06):
of thing. But some hands ants, however, just kind of
stick to this roving phalanx tactic, just a roving decimating
horde that that brings to mind. Oh, I'd say like
the Tyra the Tyrant Army from forty Warhammer forty thousand
MND made an example of this, you know, or various
sort of alien bio adversaries in science fiction where it's
(37:28):
just it's just this massive horde that's working in unity
and uh, it's difficult to stop. Right. However, human forces,
you know, tend not to go this route. They tend
to depend on scouts as well to determine where to
apply that offensive pressure, where to send your phalanx, and
some ants do this as well. Some species will send
(37:48):
out a small team of workers to serve as scouts.
But this too is risky. Is this risky strategy for
ants because a team of scouts they have to report
back to the colony in order for a larger force
too then return to obtain that food source that they
just scouted. And this is true of human scouts as well.
In a military scenario, we might well consider the case
(38:09):
of imperial probe droids for example, right, and Empire strikes back,
you send out these droids and yet one may discover
a rebel base on Hoth, but it actually needs to
survive and then it's and then get word back to
the Empire so they can deploy their their A T eighties,
you know, their their massive army. Likewise, the Empire would
(38:30):
find this to be a better method send out the
probe droids, because we can't send the A T eighties
to every world just in case there's a rebel base there.
So basically for the for the Empire, for the ants
as well, it basically means that you can depend on
you can send out fewer ants and cover a larger
area in order to scout out potential targets in the
(38:52):
case of the ants, potential food. Now I can imagine though,
there are a lot of considerations that must be built
into ant behavior based on not wasting resources on like
you know, on you know, going somewhere where there's no
longer anything useful to be done, right, Yeah, because there's
always the risk that the enemy will move before a
larger force can arrive, or that that food source that
(39:13):
was scouted out it's just not going to be there
when you're true your aunt troops roll in and uh
in all of this for the for the ants, pheromones
are key for their communication. Here, the Scouts use this
to tag the food source for the larger force to find.
So so the pheromones of the ants here would be
the imperial probe droids dab day about kind of message
(39:36):
that it sends out. Yeah, basically like the pheromones end
up serving as communication lines. Some of it rights that
uh quote the workers of the army ants or marauder
ants can immediately summon any help they require because a
slew of assistance are marching directly behind them. The result
is maximal shock and awe. So much like in more
large scale conflicts, you would have to you'd have to
(39:58):
in some way ensure that communication in lines are able
to remain open for forces to be effective exactly. And
again here you know, the for the ants it is
is largely this realm of of touch and smell. It's
the pheromonal information that's so key. So really I feel
like this at this point in the podcast, I think
we do have a pretty broad view of like what's
(40:20):
going on with on with the ant war effort about
how how troops are distributed, how communication is taking place,
and then how offensive pressure can be applied to different
areas depending on the need. Oh, but there is so
much more ant battle to talk about. Yes, indeed there is. Uh. Yeah,
we we were only able to get through like the
(40:41):
first half of our material here because there's a lot
more about well just about like the at the individual level,
there's a lot more about like the how like aunt
jaws work, the power of ant bioweapons, it's etcetera. But
then also when you get into the Marauder ant specifically,
there's been a lot of wonderful work, uh regarding just
(41:02):
how they carry out their campaigns and to what extent
we can compare uh, these these acts of ant conquest
to actual human battles. Well, I can't wait to come
back next time and fight on with the Myrmadons. Yeah,
more ants, more allusions to UH star Wars and various
UH tabletop gaming scenarios. It's gonna be gonna be a
(41:23):
lot of fun. In the meantime. If you would like
to check out other episodes of stuff to blow your mind,
you know where to find us, and that is wherever
you get your podcast, wherever that happens to be. What
strange service you depend on for your podcast delivery, Just
make sure you rate, review, and subscribe because that really
helps us out in the long run. Huge thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
(41:46):
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(42:08):
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