June 3, 2021 • 48 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 6/14/2020)
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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 two, originally aired June. Let's let the aunt
Wars continue. Deliver thyself as a row from the hand
of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand
(00:27):
of the fowler. Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider
her ways and be wise, which, having no guide, overseer,
or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth
her food in the harvest. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your mind. Production of My Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome
(00:56):
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe mccorre mick. And that was a
reading from the King James translation of the Bible. It's
from the Book of Proverbs, chapter six. Uh. And I
was looking right before we started. I was like, oh,
let me check my Scholarly Oxford annotated addition to the
Bible to see if it's got any insights on how
(01:16):
the author of this passage knew that all of the
worker ants in the colony were female and no it
just says this passage appeals to the natural world. I
love that. Yeah, because I had questions about this one.
I was not familiar with this passage. We just kind
of we're looking for for fun things to read at
the at the top of our our second Ant War episode,
(01:40):
and I was like, Oh, I wonder what the what
what the old King James version had to say about ants?
And here we are a verse that at once seems
to to get the gender of the vast majority of
an Ant colony correct and also doesn't get hung up
on the idea of a central ruler like in In
(02:00):
a couple of ways, this is a very um accurate
reading of Ant civilization. You know, I didn't even think
about it, but I'm sure that means this is one
of those verses that's been employed by a Christian apologists
to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because it
But but I gotta say this versus is pretty dead
on right. Uh. There is no guide overseer or ruler.
(02:23):
It's just the swarm intelligence that emerges from the ants
evolved instinct. And uh. And it's true the Ants are
not lazy, like I think that's the point of the passage.
It's like, look, the ant doesn't wait around try, you know,
wait around to be told what to do. It just
knows what to do and does it right. And of
course then there's this bit about the gathering of food
(02:43):
and the storing of food, which, depending on which species
you're looking at, is also really accurate. Of course, as
we continue to look at examples of of ant civilization
and ant warfare, we're gonna get into some examples that
they are a bit more barbaric and uh ravageing. I
guess yeah, for a biblical parallels, some of these aunt
(03:03):
stories are going to be closer to the conquest of
Canaan than the Wisdom of Proverbs. But this is funny
because it also brings up the idea of you know,
in the last episode we were talking about obviously ancient
people had been looking at ants and trying to understand
their behavior long before there was a unified scientific study.
You know, a field known as entomology and the comparison
(03:25):
to military forces and armies has been there since ancient times.
But I think this is definitely not the only case
where people read spiritual significance into ant behavior. No, yeah,
I was I was reading about this, and ants have
a sacred role in a number of different religions. In
some African traditions, they are considered messengers of the gods.
And throughout India you'll find various customs that involve protecting
(03:50):
antlines and ant hills, even uh, leaving out food for
the ant hills or decorating them in some slight fashion,
like you know, the sprinkling of of you know, some
sort of colored or that sort of thing, and and
likewise it's considered heinous to disturb an ant hill. Especially.
I was reading about all this in a book titled
(04:12):
The Sacred Animals of India by Nandita Krishna, which is
an excellent little book from Penguin Press. You can pick
it up like most most places. I think I picked
it up at a yoga studio once while I was
waiting and waiting for my wife to get her shoes on,
and I'm like, oh, what's this a book about animals.
I started leaving through it, and it's just animal by animal, uh,
you know, some some some fascinating facts about how it
(04:35):
ties into Hindu traditions. But then also sometimes there's a
little science as well, so like there's a bit about
the ant and they also touch on some of the
basic facts about ants and their role in ecology that
we've been discussing here. But in this book the author
describes a couple of cool details. First of all, a
tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace. So
(04:57):
Vishnu comes to him and points out a line of
ants in the dirt and tells him that each and
every one of them is an Indra that rose to
the highest level of existence and then fell down again
via pride. So there's a you know, this recurring idea
that ants, like all these other animals, are part of
the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that Valmiki,
(05:20):
the author of the Ramayana, emerged from an ant hill
or a Valmika after ten years of meditation. So in
this case, the the author um of the Hindu epic
ends up taking on the name of the ant hill
as part of their new emerged identity. That's interesting and
counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as a place
(05:42):
that would be appropriate for meditation, solitude, you know, like
quiet contemplation, Whereas when I think of an ant hill,
I would think of the exact opposite something that is
certainly organized from from the ant's own genetic point of view,
but us looking down at it, it's so chaotic and frenzied,
it seemed like it would be impossible to focus. Yeah,
(06:02):
but then I guess you could also look at it
as a place of just pure order or to really
get into I guess some more of a you know,
a topic that's important in Hindu epics, a place of
pure duty, Like there's just there's you know, absolute duty
uh youth, social duty to the colony, and there's no
there's no room for aunt despair or aunt ambition. You know,
(06:26):
you're not going to be pulled in either of those directions.
It's just pure absolute duty. So really it's it's an
ideal place to fall um if you you know, you
achieve some demigotic state of pride and UH and then
have to you know, fall back down to a lower
life form and then work your way back up. And
it's a good place to start. Kind of a form
of contrapostito, right, like the idea that the divine punishment
(06:49):
or not necessarily punishment either, but the the divine justice
somehow fits the UH fits the original offense that brought
it on. Yeah, So if you're joining us in this
so do you've probably figured out that we're talking about
ants and uh. And this is indeed the second in
our aunt wars Um series. So if you didn't listen
(07:10):
to the last episode, we would recommend you go back
and give it a listen. We discussed the empire, the ants,
and and very broadly the endless wars that formed the
boundaries of their individual kingdoms. I want to go back
again to the writings of Mark W. Moffatt Uh and
this is from that Scientific American article that I previously
(07:31):
mentioned that's also hosted on his website at dr bugs
dot com. He writes, quote, in Ghana, I witness deceiving
carpet of workers of the army ants species Dori lists
Nigricans searching together across an area hundred feet wide. These
African army ants, which in species such as D niger
(07:53):
Kans that move and broad swaths, are called driver ants,
slice the flesh off their enemy or quarry with blade
like jaws and can make short work of victims thousands
of times their size, Although vertebrate creatures can usually outrun ants.
In Gabon, I once saw an antelope caught in a snare,
eaten alive by a colony of driver ants. That highlights
(08:15):
something that I was planning on talking about in just
a little bit when we get to one particular species
of army and that I was finding really fascinating. But uh,
but I guess we can address it now. So, you know,
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull vision, which goes back
to earlier movies and stuff where the the army ants
essentially are terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the
(08:36):
You've got the Hollywood acid that that strips the human
to the bone in in seconds. You've got the Hollywood
piranha that stripped the human to the bone in seconds.
I don't know if either of those are really very
accurately reflective of stuff that happens in the real world.
And then the answer the next thing, the Hollywood army
ants that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't
(08:56):
seem to be something that happens in reality. Certainly not.
I would say, with a with a large animal that
can move, a lot of army ants are are going
to be absolutely apocalyptic in their implications for smaller animals,
for insects, arachnids, centipedes, and even small vertebrates like little
frogs and snakes and stuff. But larger animals they don't
(09:18):
actually represent a threat like that, Like you can easily
get away from them. The only case I would imagine
where army ants might represent a real threat to larger
animals would be if you are totally immobilized, right, so
if you're caught in a snare, buried up to your
neck in the sand, that sort of thing. Right, And
even then I don't know if they would necessarily kill you,
because they're they're looking for their their main prey species,
(09:41):
which are going to be all kinds of invertebrates. Yeah,
they're probably going after something like termites or other ants. Uh,
heads sticking out of the ground not really on the
menu usually, But but I wouldn't want to try it.
I'm not saying necessarily safe. That could be the next
big Hollywood magician act though, right, David Blame, I mean,
(10:01):
I'd be surprised if he hasn't done it already. Well, no,
it's the next big confidence game, you know. So they
got to walk across the hot coals. That's like the
confidence building exercise. But the next stage is the bury
yourself up to the neck and let the army ants
come now. Well, another a little piece of health cleaning
from the last episode I want to throw in here.
In the last episode, I briefly mentioned pheromones as being
(10:23):
essential to aunt communication. And I don't want to gloss
over this too much because I imagine many of you
have have seen videos of pheromonal demonstrations, uh, you know,
the the the ant Overlord. EO. Wilson himself does this
at times, in which a pheromone is painted like a
paintbrush or a Q tip or something across the surface
(10:44):
and then ants follow it and is informative as as
a demonstration like this can be, don't take it to
mean that there's just there's a real blunt simplicity to it.
As as Wilson himself stresses, there is a pheromonal language
for ants. Uh. Any given ant species us as a
whole palette of pheromones and chemical signals to communicate. Yeah,
(11:05):
it can be very complex, though there are also very
simple ways to see it in action and like creating
the pheromone trails that are like. EO. Wilson was involved
in research that discovered one of the main glands in
the ants gaster that deposits the pheromone that creates the
trail leading to food. And generally if you deposit this
pheromone as you will see, you know, humans can extract
(11:26):
it and put it in the bottle like you're saying.
To these demonstrations where you just put a line of
it down on a table and suddenly the ants form
up and follow the line, those can be striking direct demonstrations,
even though the full web of pheromonal interactions can be
much more complex, and you can also is easily do
this yourself, even without um the extraction of that kind
(11:46):
of pheromone simply by if you've ever tried dragging your
finger across an ant trail, where like you know, if
you can smudge the chemicals away and maybe disrupt it
with some of the oils from your own finger, suddenly
the movement of the ants becomes chaotic, gets all confused
because the deposition of chemicals that has created this trail
(12:07):
has been broken. I've been I've been noticing these antrei
an trails a lot more on my walks recently. Uh,
my family and I will go out to some various
nature walking by trails in the area that they're not
that populated, and some of them haply you know, slabs
of concrete, and they'll be these little, essentially a little
trenches that stretch across them where one slab meets the other.
(12:30):
And invariably those are the trenches through which the ants moved,
not over the top where they're going to potentially get
smashed by a by bicycle tires are stepped on more easily. No,
they're in the trenches, moving across from one side to
the other. It almost makes me wonder if we've unintentionally
created little bridges or tunnels for the ants, the same
(12:51):
way that on Christmas Island they have to create these
crab bridges and tunnels for crabs to let their migration
get across the roads. Yeah, it does seem like that,
like accidental um pro ant design. Uh. Now, speaking of
E O. Wilson, I want to point out to everybody
we talked about EO. Wilson on the show before Anio.
Wilson has of course authored a number of books, uh,
(13:13):
many of which are are ideal for a general audience.
But if you want to watch a documentary about him,
there is a wonderful PBS documentary that came out several
years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and Men. You
can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I
know that at least in the United States you can
get it on Prime. Uh. It's really good. Yeah, it's so.
(13:34):
I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I watched
the first half and it's just a delight. There's a
great moment where so EO. Wilson, you know, one of
the world authorities on ants, revolutionary biologist for the world
of youth social insects, and he says at one point,
he says, the question people want to know the answer
to most often about ants is what do I do
(13:54):
about the ones in my kitchen? And then he says, uh,
and here's what I tell them. You get a little
piece of a cookie and you put it down near
the ants, and then you watch what they do. I
love that answer because, on one hand, it feels like
maybe he's trying to teach us something like, Oh, he's
(14:14):
trying to teach me a lesson about why the answer
there to begin with, you know, I need to watch
I need to make sure my kitchen is clean. I
mean to make sure there's no there's no food product,
or I need to think about why they've invaded my kitchen.
But on the other hand, it seems just as likely
that he's saying, you're not going to do anything about
these ants. You're going to enjoy them. You're going to
you're going to feed them and watch how they work.
(14:35):
There there's a beautiful stoicism and enjoy in the way
that he observes ants even as they are, you know,
doing things that most people would regard as an offense
or an irritation. You know, we talked several times now
about like the scene where he's just letting all the
fire ants sting his hand and he's watching it with
(14:55):
with such fascination and talking about what's going on is
they're all attacking his skin at the same time. And
uh and then yeah, and this is basically the same attitude,
but with the kitchen instead of your hand. It's like, no,
don't get upset, just take pleasure in watching nature work.
Oh and by the way, Wilson has a new book
(15:15):
on ants coming out this fall. I noticed, called Tales
from the Ant World. Alright, on that note, we're gonna
take one quick break but we'll be right back, and
we'll return to the world of the ants and the
wars that they rage. Thank alright, we're back. One of
the other sources that I was using in reading about
(15:37):
ants for these episodes is the excellent book Animal Weapons
by Douglas J. Mlin, And in it the author has
has a whole bit where he's describing basically, the whole
book has to do with with bioweapons and the evolution
of bioweapons and organisms and then comparing them to human warfare.
But there's a whole bit where he's talking about the
(15:57):
quote giant jaws and thick distinct heads of the army
ants that allow them in mass to topple so many opponents,
and he shares a fun bit of experience that really
underlies just how you know, powerful the design is on
these little guys, uh, little gals rather um. Basically, he
was an outdoing field of some field experiments in Belize,
(16:20):
and he accidentally sliced his thumb with a machete, and
without anything else to stitch up the wound, this is
what they did. First of all, they did have some
rum on them, so they stailized the wound with rum.
But then they suitured the wound with ants. They simply
placed the ants live ants allow along the line of
the cut while someone held the cut together and allowed
(16:42):
their little jaws to snap into place. And then they
tore the body away from the head and the heads
of which they only required five or six, kept their
jaws latch tight and this held the wound together and
allowed them to eventually get proper medical attention for the cut.
I would say, uh, if I just heard this story
in isolation, I would be inclined to doubt it. It
(17:04):
seems so hard to believe. But I mean, obviously I
don't think England's lying about this. But that's just that's amazing. Yeah,
it's I mean, this is it's also a great illustration
of like of a scientist, you know, thinking about about
how to solve a problem. I would never have thought, oh,
i'm cut, I really need to let's get some ants
attached to this wound. But but it's it's also just
(17:27):
a wonderful um uh, you know the description of just
how powerful these little jaws are. Now army and marauder
ants wage their war for food uh and resources. They
will battle other forces for control of food resources and
will also invade other ants societies in order to claim
their larva and their pupa as food. Yeah, and these
(17:49):
are some of the most striking types of ants that
we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with aunt
warfare that we've discussed before, say between h different types
of fire ants, even here in the in the Southern
United States. But seeing ants that forage on the scale
and with the tenacity of army ants or marauder ants,
is is a different kind of thing. This might be
a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel of
(18:12):
this one species of army ant that I've been reading
into a lot. Uh. And this is the species known
as eston Bercelli. I Uh. There are there are a
lot of actually different species of ant that are commonly
referred to as army ants, but seton Bricelli i is
I think the one species that people are most often
talking about with that general title. They're very charismatic, well
(18:33):
observed and distributed species. They live in the humid equatorial
regions of Central and South America, especially in the Amazon rainforest,
but with the range extending up through Mexico and down
south of Brazil into Argentina. Uh. But they're primarily in
the equatorial rainforest, and these ants will form colonies of
(18:54):
several hundred thousand adults at a time. With this rapacious
foraging behavior, you're satisfying the energy needs of the colony
with raids that cover hundreds of meters. According to one estimate,
I believe this was cited by Carl and Marion rhetton Meyer,
who I'll mention again in a moment. They're aunt experts.
But the figure is that on average, each colony of
(19:17):
Seton Bricelli I kills and eats about thirty thousand small
animals every day, wow, thirty every single day. Uh. And
so they have this carnivorous diet, this enormous carnivorous diet
that is especially important because they're trying to supply the
(19:38):
developing larvae of their colony with a high fat diet
that the larvae need in order to grow, so that
the babies need animal fat and the adults go out rating.
So there's another really interesting thing about this species to me,
which is that they do not make permanent nests. Seton
Bricelli I do not make permanent nests. We often think
(20:01):
of ant colonies as defined by their nests right the
ant hills. Ants are environmental engineers, but due to the
energy needs of this species, they can't be tied down
to one place for too long. Imagine them trying to
form a permanent nest while their larvae are growing, and
they have these huge requirements for animal fat, you know,
(20:22):
other insects to bring in and all that. Within a
day or two they probably would have cleared out all
of the food sources within I don't know, maybe a
few hundred square meters of wherever they are. So instead,
Esset and Bricelli I builds a mobile fortress known as
a bivouac. This is a moving fortress that protects the
(20:42):
queen and the developing larvae. But the fortress is made
not out of structures or materials from the environment. It
is made out of ants. Do you see Do you understand?
It is a war rig for ants, made out of
the interlocked bodies of living ants, like a cage of
millions of legs, antennae, and mandibles. I want to quote
(21:07):
from Peter Tyson, writing for Nova in an article about
these things. Quote this elliptical mass talking about the bivouac.
This elliptical mass maybe three feet across and hold up
to seven hundred thousand ants. When they need to move
to a new site, where they bivouac on the surface
rather than build a nest. Eber Chellii workers go first
(21:28):
ferrying food and larvae. Only after nightfall does the queen follow,
escorted by a mass of soldier ants that completely surround
her and will defend her with their lives. So the
bivouac again, is this moving fortress. The queen is inside
and the cage cannot be breached. Uh. This this was
(21:49):
just so captivating to me. And so if you're looking
for these things in the forest, the bivouac can sometimes
be found inside a hollow log or just on the
forest floor, but also sometimes it can be found hanging
suspended from tree limbs. So imagine that like a dangling
fortress for ants made out of ants, and it falls
in line with a more general tendency of some ant species,
(22:12):
including this one, toward body based engineering projects. These army
ants are also known to say assist the mobility of
their forces by filling in potholes along the foraging route
with plugs made out of live ants. So you just
smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants, or also
for building bridges out of themselves to allow the rest
(22:34):
of the army to cross gaps. And apparently these big
wax also emit an other worldly stinch, this amazing smell
that allows you to locate them by smell alone within
the rainforest. I would love to know what this smells like.
You know, all of this is a wonderful example two
of the super organism aspects of ants. How with other creatures,
(22:58):
we we we we talk about the individual, you know,
and in terms of understanding the species. But but with ants,
you look at behaviors like this, and you see there's
such cohesion, there's there's there's such you social um perfection
that you can't look at an individual aunt to understand,
and you have to look at what the colony itself
(23:21):
is doing. But there's another thing I was thinking about
with this model of ant life, the fact that these
ants create no permanent nests. It sort of reminds me
of the idea of the strategic advantage of offense. You know,
the old saying that the best defense is a good offense.
This is actually considered true in some cases in military theory,
(23:42):
because the reasoning goes that when you're on the attack,
you have freedom. Basically, you like, as you're on the attack,
you are creating options for yourself, versus when you're defending,
you have constraints, you have limited options. This is often
true just for example in chess. Uh. You know the
chess players talk about the initiative that you gain when
(24:03):
you're on the attack. You're constantly limiting the options for
your opponents next move if they have to defend their
pieces against an attack that you just set up. And
this is obviously true across multiple context It's known as
maintaining the initiative. Now, obviously there are there are many uh,
there are many advantages you can get from having a
(24:26):
defensive structure like a nest that's buried down in the ground.
You know, the queen is very well protected, but that
also limits your options, right and and this is sort
of the all offense strategy of the ant world. Well,
it seems to be working well for them. I mean
it's not like they busted this strategy out of on
a test basis. This is this has been honed over
(24:48):
for millions of years. So there's another thing that I
was thinking about because I was thinking about warfare and
game of thrones. And one thing I like that's acknowledged
in those books is sort of like the real resource
needs of moving armies. You know, It's not like a
lot of fantasy where it's just sort of like uh,
almost ethereal warriors just ranging limitlessly to do their heroic deeds.
(25:10):
You know, I mean, like you get the idea in
those books that, like, our armies need supplies and all that.
And and also it's acknowledged that there are huge numbers
of people that accompany armies that are not themselves warriors.
These are known as camp followers, and this is absolutely
something that that happens in real warfare. Large armies don't
(25:30):
operate in a vacuum. They have material needs that are
not necessarily related to battle, and they also create needs
and opportunities for resource capture as they move and fight.
And this this is why armies on campaign or historically
a company both by camp followers that you know might
like sell things to soldiers, or might be family members
(25:51):
of soldiers, or sell services to soldiers, um that kind
of thing. But they are also often bandits that follow
around moving armies. As you know, when an army comes
in and attacks somewhere disturbs the existing order, that creates
a lot of opportunities to exploit. Yeah. I mean it's
an absolute disruption, so it makes sense that opportunists would
(26:13):
be there to take advantage of it. And I agree.
I think this is something that that that that is
well explored in the Song of Ice and Fire books,
the idea of of war that just you know, ravages
the countryside in so many ways, like it just just
totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um. I
think I think they probably, I think they probably brought
(26:36):
this out well in this series to to a certain extent,
especially early on. Yeah, I mean towards the end of
that those human wars like West Ross is just decimated
and just tired and exhausted. Yeah, that's true. I mean
it reflects reality that that the war is not just
a clash between armies, but it's the sort of the
army versus the entire environment and everyone living within it. Um.
(27:00):
And I think this is in some ways very true
uh for ants as well. I was reading a really
good article. Uh it was a short article, but a
good one in nat Geo by the always great Ed
young Um that was focused on work by Carl and
Marian rhetten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago. These
are ant experts who created a nearly exhaustive catalog of
(27:24):
all of the animals that follow the army ant species
seton Bercellii. So these are the camp followers in the
bandits that accompany this army uh, ed writes quote there's
no doubting their success as predators, but army ants also
bring life wherever they march. They have an entourage of
over five hundred and fifty species that hang around their legions,
(27:48):
of which three hundred or so depend on the ants
for their survival. So in their disruption of of the
environment around them, they are also creating enough opportunities for
the exploitation of resources that a full like three hundred
or so species couldn't live without these ants, and another
two hundred something or so uh depend on them in
(28:10):
large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I hadn't really
thought about it. We talked about the ecological importance of
the hants, um and UH and this is just another
example of that. Yeah, So this includes like two hundred
or so species of bird. One example is the oscillated
ant bird. There are a number of antbirds ants as
they As they move along the army, ants will flush
(28:33):
insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids, small invertebrates,
and and so the ant birds will watch this happen
and swoop in and take advantage of the fleeing animals. Uh.
They actually almost never prey on the ants themselves. And
so the antbirds will fly around the forest checking in
on seething bivouacs. Right they perform a bivouac check, They're like, okay,
(28:56):
is this bivouac about to march? And if it looks
like one is about to get the war rig ready
and send its workers out on raids, the birds will
converge here and start looking for opportunities. Apparently, the ant
birds will fight amongst each other for the best spots.
Of course, the best spot would basically be positioned just
beyond the advancing front to catch all of the panic
(29:17):
pray animals as soon as they're driven out of hiding. Interesting.
You know, I wonder if anyone's ever tackled this from
a sci fi perspective. You know, we're always encountering situations
in sci fi where humanity is locked in an epic
strup will struggle against some alien adversary or there or
they've been partially wiped out by an alien adversary. I
wonder if anyone's ever explored the idea of of, you know,
(29:39):
the alien force comes that decimates the planet. You end
up with like a post apocalyptic scenario. But then the
primary antagonist is not the destroyer, because the destroyers moved on.
It's the opportunists to come in their wake, right, the
ant birds and the scavengers that come in after Earth
has been Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that would be
an interesting thing. I've never read anything like that, but
(30:00):
I bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if
they have, someone tell me what it is. And if
it doesn't exist, somebody write it so I can read it.
You know. Another interesting thing about these ant birds at
Young points out is that on top of them existing
as as sort of opportunists in what the ants do,
there are secondary opportunists. And these are a lot of
(30:21):
species of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed
off of their droppings after they have preyed on the
insects and other animals that are fleshed out by the ants.
But beyond that, that there are a lot of other species,
and there's not just species looking for food resources. Apparently
parasitic wasps and flies that reproduced by implanting larvae in
(30:41):
the bodies of other invertebrates. They also follow army ants warms,
watching for the ants to drive crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches and
other critters out of hiding, and then the parasites take
immediate advantage at young sites caladoxia flies, but also quote
stylo gaster flies which shoot harpoon like eggs at fleeing cockroaches,
(31:04):
and and flesh flies that lay their eggs in the
open wounds of animals that have been injured but not
dismembered by the ants. So in some cases, not being
killed by the ant horde um is worse than actually
being decimated by it. Well, I guess it depends on
(31:24):
what you think is worse. I mean, is it worse
to be injured by ants and then get maggots implanted
in you, or just to be killed just to be
disassembled outright? Yeah. Even more amazingly, some parasites actually live
within the ant bivouax themselves, having various adaptations. We've talked
about aunt mimics before. There are apparently some species like this,
(31:44):
like beetles that survived by mimicking ants and just sort
of like hanging out among the ants trying to be undetected.
But this was my favorite part. Ed Young writes that
some parasites quote use the ants as mobile restaurants, jumping
onto workers that are carrying food and eating their booty
(32:05):
right under or over their very jaws. So they hang
out on the ant head eating the food that the
ant is carrying. Oh wow, again, I think for a
lot of species this would require very special adaptations or
you know, you would immediately become prey yourself. But it's
just amazing to imagine the tiny, like full ecosystems basically
(32:28):
that are made possible by the opportunities created by the
chaos of a rating army. Yeah, in a way, you
kind of have to come back to that that analogy
of the superorganism, right, that the the ant colony is,
well we might think of as the individual, like the
ant colony is the body, and so it is going
to have its own parasite. It's going to have its
(32:50):
own symbiotic relationships and uh and and that's kind of
what we're seeing here. Absolutely, I think this is just
the most astonishing species. I feel like maybe we're not
even done with with with Ston. We can move on
in this episode, but but we may have to come
back to them in the future. All right, and that note,
we're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we will consider the marauder ants. All Right,
(33:17):
we're back. So we've already talked some about ant species
that are referred to as the marauder ants. You read
a passage from one of those articles by Martin W.
Moffatt about marauder ants. Yeah, Moffatt points out that marauder
ants excel in deploying troops in ways that increase efficiency
and reduce the cost to a colony. And one thing
(33:38):
that really makes them interesting, uh, is their variety in
sizes among the workers. They vary in size more than
workers in any other ant colony. So this is where
it gets interesting in a sort of war game point
of view manner, because essentially we're getting into different unit
(33:59):
types here. So if you're fielding droids, for instance, on
on on a battle, yeah, we're doing clone wars here.
You're not. You're not just busting out a ton of
standard B one battle droids, right, you're also busting out
B two super heavy battle droids or heavy weapon uh
droid deca, droidica um roly poly. Guys, if you're playing
(34:21):
something like Warhammer forty thousand, it's not just space marines.
You're also busting out specialized assault marines or heavy terminators,
that sort of thing. And so Moffatt points out that
the marauders deploy smaller miners, uh you know, that's what
we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front line,
and there these are just weak and hopeless uh individuals
(34:43):
against adversaries, but there are tons of them, so they
work as a kind of barricade. They bogged down the
enemy long enough for larger ants to move in the
media's and the majors. So again, same species, same essentially
um ver itty of this ant, but it's like it's
a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some of
(35:05):
these individuals, the majors, compared to the miners, they are
five hundred times as heavy as the smaller version. So
these are real bruisers, I mean, these are these are monsters. Uh.
My initial impulse would be to compare these like strictly
to larger um, you know, bruiser heavy class fighters and
(35:26):
fantasy armies, Like I'm thinking about some of the big
specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor. But but then
I was thinking about it. I was like, looking at
the size deferential here, and Okay, let's assume that an orc,
or say a stormtrooper, uh is roughly the average weight
of a human. Okay, we're to multiply that by five
(35:46):
hundred you're talking thirty four tons. So in the real world,
that's essentially the difference between a human and a humpback whale. Okay,
So that's crazy. Even even the troll would not really
capture the size difference appropriately. Yeah, Like I ended up
going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how
heavy different fantasy and sci fi army vehicles and units were.
(36:10):
And it's best I can tell based on some fan estimates.
You might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial
stormtrooper and one of those two legged A T S
T walkers. That would be the difference between a Marauder
minor ant and a Marauder major ant. This is what
Mofata writes. Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Rhymes
(36:33):
assure a low mortality for the media's and the majors,
which require far more resources for the colony to raise
and men maintain. Putting the easily replaced fighters at greatest
risk is a time honored battle technique. So, in other words,
stormtroopers are notoriously bad shots, and they are apparently easily replaced,
But your A. T. S. T S. Those are far
(36:54):
more precious. Yeah, that will they cost more to make? Yeah.
Ma Fata also points out at the marauders tactics here
line up with the example one season armies throughout history
the use of conscripted farmers and laborers alongside elite professional soldiers,
with the common soldiers absorbing the worst of it while
the elite units are protected and move in at strategic intervals.
(37:18):
He also points out that marauders use what is known
in military strategy as defeat in detail tactics, defeating an
enemy unit by unit, rather than engaging in enemy's full strength. Now,
marauder ants also battle their own kind, pitting colony against colony,
and in these contests, the majors and the media's also
hang back and let the miners do most of the fighting.
(37:40):
Tearing each other apart, and in contests that tend to
be even more brutal than the interspecies conflicts that also
take place. I'm gonna get to some of the logic
behind the differences and strategy here in just a minute.
By the way, yeah, because Moffatt refers to the work
of University of Bristol's Nigel Franks, who found that the
hactics of these ants in particular is consistent with Lanchester's
(38:03):
square law, an equation developed in World War One by
engineer Frederick Lanchester, who also devised Lanchester's linear law, which
will also touch based on here. Yeah, I keep wanting
to say, Lanister, so don't let me say that you're
coming back to the fantasy warfare analogy. So Lanchester's laws
are a set of mathematical models trying to explain outcomes
(38:28):
in battle based on various kinds of initial force disparity
is generally the main disparities are going to be individual
unit effectiveness, so like how much damage each unit can do,
and then also the numbers of combatants on either side.
Lanchester's square law in particular shows that in some types
(38:48):
of combat this is not all conflicts, but in some
types of combat, for example shooting wars involving masses of
soldiers armed with rifles that can aim in any direction.
In these types of combat, there are ways of organizing
confrontations majorly to your advantage, just just based on the
numbers of forces and how they're grouped specifically that the
(39:11):
main takeaway is don't split your forces. Um So, to
illustrate this, you can imagine, say you've got battle droids
in in star wars, and say maybe one side has
a hundred battle droids and the other side has exactly
a hundred battle droids as well. If you imagine each
of the battle droids can shoot its blaster one time
every second, and each shot has a chance of destroying
(39:34):
its target, you can work out that after one second
of battle, both forces will be reduced equally by about
maybe after another second, et cetera. And it just goes
on as the two sides decreased by attrition at roughly
the same rate, until both armies are mostly are fully
vanquished at around the same time, unless for some reason
(39:55):
one side gets an advantage early on. But that kind
of process does not scale in a linear way. So
if you have say a hundred droids versus an opponents
at general grievous is your opposing army and he's just
got fifty droids you you probably can assume that the
larger force will win, but you might not understand how
(40:16):
much of an advantage the larger force has. So if
if you have you know, the same kind of thing working.
After the first second, your hundred droids will probably have
destroyed roughly half of your opponents fifty droids, but they
really will not have destroyed many of yours at all,
maybe only like twelve or so. And as each second
of battle goes on, you reduce their fighting effectiveness more
(40:40):
and more, until what you're left with in the end
is very little casualties to the larger army and total
decimation of the smaller one. And so this shows, for example,
that if you have a force of a hundred battle droids,
it would be much easier for that those one hundred
battle droids to win two consecutive battles against fifty battle
(41:00):
droids than to win one single battle against a force
of one hundred. And this is exactly why divide and
conquer is such an important principle of warfare. If you
break your enemy up into smaller groupings. With these certain
types of combat, your advantage over them does not increase linearly.
It multiplies by the square. In fact, if you choose
(41:23):
your battles wisely, you can even use this to allow
a smaller force to beat a bigger one. So if
you've got a hundred battle droids, General Graves has two hundred,
you could still potentially beat him overall by keeping your
forces together and peeling off small segments of like ten
or twenty at a time to face sequentially, with negligible
losses to your own forces each time. So this is
(41:46):
again where we come back to defeat in detail exactly right. So,
in mathematical terms, what Lanchester predicted was that in these
certain types of scenarios, uh, the strength of a group
on the battlefield is the product of two things. The
effectiveness of each fighting unit not times the number of units,
but times the square of the number of units. And
(42:08):
that's why it's known as the square law. And it
tells you that for certain types of combat, sheer numbers
can easily overwhelm differences in the effectiveness of individual fighting units.
And it's interesting how this tends to go against what
seems to be people's desire to understand, like dramatic violent
(42:30):
conflict in narratives like in you know, epic poetry and
action movies and all that, where it seems like what people,
or at least what authors think people want to see, uh,
is the idea that a single highly effective combatant you know,
your John Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective
enemies ganging up on them. And for many types of combat,
(42:52):
this is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are
significantly more important than skills, Like better to have five
off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah,
it it certainly does run run counter to our our
our epic storytelling. Yeah, where it's like a one rag
tag group of talented individuals can can can turn the
(43:15):
tide of battle against against the faceless lord. Yeah yeah.
And we should know again that the square law is
not supposed to apply to all types of combat. For example,
in situations where combatants have to face one another in
one on one duels, one at a time, they're the
advantages of superior numbers are reduced to something closer to
(43:36):
a pure linear function, and the individual effectiveness of of
each unit becomes a lot more relevant. And so the
way this works out in the real world is that,
like in situations where your forces do not have numerical superiority,
military leaders who are conscious of these issues will try
to engineer battle conditions to avoid square law scenarios and
(43:58):
enforced linear laws in areas instead. One example would be
like using natural terrain or fortifications to create choke points
where the majority of the enemy forces are held back
from the action. That can't all fight you at once.
The number of them that can fight you at the
same time is limited by topography, and thus the battle
(44:19):
becomes it starts to resemble something more like a series
of sequential duels instead of a simultaneous war of all
against all. And of course examples of this in history
or you know the way the thing about the way
castles are constructed, narrow passageways, uh, you know, natural ravines, bridges, gates,
a spiral staircase in the castle tower. These tend to
(44:41):
reduce the salience of the square law advantage and help
you out, especially if you've got a smaller number of
more effective fighters. So, to bring this back to ants,
the question here is which of these models is better
at predicting the outcomes of ant wars. Is it the
linear model where there's this direct linear relationship between size
of forces in the outcome, or is it the square
(45:02):
model where the larger numbers of concentrated forces just easily
overwhelm other concerns like the like individual fighting unit effectiveness. Uh.
There was a paper that was published in the nineteen
nineties and the journal Animal Behavior. This was in nine
by Mary E. A. White House and Klaus Jaffa called
(45:22):
ant wars combat strategies territory and nest defense in the
leaf cutting ant Atta leave Agatta And according to their research,
they found quote the leaf cutting ant atta leave Agatta
responded to a simulated vertebrate threat by recruiting many soldiers,
and the soldiers would be a special special fighters large workers,
but responded to con specific and interspecific ant threats by
(45:47):
recruiting mainly small ants. So the vertebrate attack here was
simulated pretty much by poking a stick. And you know,
as they poke a stick into the entrance of the
colony nest and then shake it for twenty seconds. And
this was meant to mimic the mechanical disturbance that would
be caused by an ants by the ant's main predator,
the armadillo. In these attacks, what the ants would tend
(46:09):
to do is they would bring more of their elite
fighters to defend the nest. So in this situation it
appears evolution maybe favoring the linear reasoning in this case. Meanwhile,
when the ants are attacked by other ants, they tended
to respond instead with overwhelming numbers of less dedicated fighters.
So a threat from arrival ant colony seems to have
(46:32):
been solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated
by the square law. Along these lines, Mofat also points
out the quote a fighter's value to its colony bears
on the risks the ant takes. The more expendable she is,
the more likely she is to end up in harm's way.
As such, marauder ants, he writes, they guard their foraging
(46:54):
trails with old and or maimed workers, and in fire ants,
it's been observed the old stay and fight, while the
very young runaway and en fireman's more in their prime
will actually uh fake their own deaths. Wow, we'll fake
their own deaths. I mean. This is again something that
makes more sense if you think about the ant Colony
(47:15):
as a single super organism. It's like it's it's putting
the the already damaged or less effective parts of itself
out in front to absorb the brunt of the of
the violence. Yeah, alright, So at this point you're you're
you're probably thinking, oh my goodness, they're out of time,
and you you would be right, just as the ant
War is heating up. Uh, we're gonna have to close
(47:37):
out this episode, but fear not, we're gonna be back
with a third ant War episode that will more or
less round everything out. Though a word of warning, if
I am, if I'm looking at the schedule correctly, there
will be another episode that will publish before the third
ant War episode publishes, So just bear with us. The
third ant War installment is on its way in the meantime.
(48:00):
If you like to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, you can find us anywhere you
get your podcast and wherever that happens to be. Just
make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
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
(48:22):
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you 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 two, originally aired June. Let's let the aunt
Wars continue. Deliver thyself as a row from the hand
of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand
(00:27):
of the fowler. Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider
her ways and be wise, which, having no guide, overseer,
or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth
her food in the harvest. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your mind. Production of My Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome
(00:56):
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe mccorre mick. And that was a
reading from the King James translation of the Bible. It's
from the Book of Proverbs, chapter six. Uh. And I
was looking right before we started. I was like, oh,
let me check my Scholarly Oxford annotated addition to the
Bible to see if it's got any insights on how
(01:16):
the author of this passage knew that all of the
worker ants in the colony were female and no it
just says this passage appeals to the natural world. I
love that. Yeah, because I had questions about this one.
I was not familiar with this passage. We just kind
of we're looking for for fun things to read at
the at the top of our our second Ant War episode,
(01:40):
and I was like, Oh, I wonder what the what
what the old King James version had to say about ants?
And here we are a verse that at once seems
to to get the gender of the vast majority of
an Ant colony correct and also doesn't get hung up
on the idea of a central ruler like in In
(02:00):
a couple of ways, this is a very um accurate
reading of Ant civilization. You know, I didn't even think
about it, but I'm sure that means this is one
of those verses that's been employed by a Christian apologists
to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because it
But but I gotta say this versus is pretty dead
on right. Uh. There is no guide overseer or ruler.
(02:23):
It's just the swarm intelligence that emerges from the ants
evolved instinct. And uh. And it's true the Ants are
not lazy, like I think that's the point of the passage.
It's like, look, the ant doesn't wait around try, you know,
wait around to be told what to do. It just
knows what to do and does it right. And of
course then there's this bit about the gathering of food
(02:43):
and the storing of food, which, depending on which species
you're looking at, is also really accurate. Of course, as
we continue to look at examples of of ant civilization
and ant warfare, we're gonna get into some examples that
they are a bit more barbaric and uh ravageing. I
guess yeah, for a biblical parallels, some of these aunt
(03:03):
stories are going to be closer to the conquest of
Canaan than the Wisdom of Proverbs. But this is funny
because it also brings up the idea of you know,
in the last episode we were talking about obviously ancient
people had been looking at ants and trying to understand
their behavior long before there was a unified scientific study.
You know, a field known as entomology and the comparison
(03:25):
to military forces and armies has been there since ancient times.
But I think this is definitely not the only case
where people read spiritual significance into ant behavior. No, yeah,
I was I was reading about this, and ants have
a sacred role in a number of different religions. In
some African traditions, they are considered messengers of the gods.
And throughout India you'll find various customs that involve protecting
(03:50):
antlines and ant hills, even uh, leaving out food for
the ant hills or decorating them in some slight fashion,
like you know, the sprinkling of of you know, some
sort of colored or that sort of thing, and and
likewise it's considered heinous to disturb an ant hill. Especially.
I was reading about all this in a book titled
(04:12):
The Sacred Animals of India by Nandita Krishna, which is
an excellent little book from Penguin Press. You can pick
it up like most most places. I think I picked
it up at a yoga studio once while I was
waiting and waiting for my wife to get her shoes on,
and I'm like, oh, what's this a book about animals.
I started leaving through it, and it's just animal by animal, uh,
you know, some some some fascinating facts about how it
(04:35):
ties into Hindu traditions. But then also sometimes there's a
little science as well, so like there's a bit about
the ant and they also touch on some of the
basic facts about ants and their role in ecology that
we've been discussing here. But in this book the author
describes a couple of cool details. First of all, a
tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace. So
(04:57):
Vishnu comes to him and points out a line of
ants in the dirt and tells him that each and
every one of them is an Indra that rose to
the highest level of existence and then fell down again
via pride. So there's a you know, this recurring idea
that ants, like all these other animals, are part of
the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that Valmiki,
(05:20):
the author of the Ramayana, emerged from an ant hill
or a Valmika after ten years of meditation. So in
this case, the the author um of the Hindu epic
ends up taking on the name of the ant hill
as part of their new emerged identity. That's interesting and
counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as a place
(05:42):
that would be appropriate for meditation, solitude, you know, like
quiet contemplation, Whereas when I think of an ant hill,
I would think of the exact opposite something that is
certainly organized from from the ant's own genetic point of view,
but us looking down at it, it's so chaotic and frenzied,
it seemed like it would be impossible to focus. Yeah,
(06:02):
but then I guess you could also look at it
as a place of just pure order or to really
get into I guess some more of a you know,
a topic that's important in Hindu epics, a place of
pure duty, Like there's just there's you know, absolute duty
uh youth, social duty to the colony, and there's no
there's no room for aunt despair or aunt ambition. You know,
(06:26):
you're not going to be pulled in either of those directions.
It's just pure absolute duty. So really it's it's an
ideal place to fall um if you you know, you
achieve some demigotic state of pride and UH and then
have to you know, fall back down to a lower
life form and then work your way back up. And
it's a good place to start. Kind of a form
of contrapostito, right, like the idea that the divine punishment
(06:49):
or not necessarily punishment either, but the the divine justice
somehow fits the UH fits the original offense that brought
it on. Yeah, So if you're joining us in this
so do you've probably figured out that we're talking about
ants and uh. And this is indeed the second in
our aunt wars Um series. So if you didn't listen
(07:10):
to the last episode, we would recommend you go back
and give it a listen. We discussed the empire, the ants,
and and very broadly the endless wars that formed the
boundaries of their individual kingdoms. I want to go back
again to the writings of Mark W. Moffatt Uh and
this is from that Scientific American article that I previously
(07:31):
mentioned that's also hosted on his website at dr bugs
dot com. He writes, quote, in Ghana, I witness deceiving
carpet of workers of the army ants species Dori lists
Nigricans searching together across an area hundred feet wide. These
African army ants, which in species such as D niger
(07:53):
Kans that move and broad swaths, are called driver ants,
slice the flesh off their enemy or quarry with blade
like jaws and can make short work of victims thousands
of times their size, Although vertebrate creatures can usually outrun ants.
In Gabon, I once saw an antelope caught in a snare,
eaten alive by a colony of driver ants. That highlights
(08:15):
something that I was planning on talking about in just
a little bit when we get to one particular species
of army and that I was finding really fascinating. But uh,
but I guess we can address it now. So, you know,
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull vision, which goes back
to earlier movies and stuff where the the army ants
essentially are terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the
(08:36):
You've got the Hollywood acid that that strips the human
to the bone in in seconds. You've got the Hollywood
piranha that stripped the human to the bone in seconds.
I don't know if either of those are really very
accurately reflective of stuff that happens in the real world.
And then the answer the next thing, the Hollywood army
ants that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't
(08:56):
seem to be something that happens in reality. Certainly not.
I would say, with a with a large animal that
can move, a lot of army ants are are going
to be absolutely apocalyptic in their implications for smaller animals,
for insects, arachnids, centipedes, and even small vertebrates like little
frogs and snakes and stuff. But larger animals they don't
(09:18):
actually represent a threat like that, Like you can easily
get away from them. The only case I would imagine
where army ants might represent a real threat to larger
animals would be if you are totally immobilized, right, so
if you're caught in a snare, buried up to your
neck in the sand, that sort of thing. Right, And
even then I don't know if they would necessarily kill you,
because they're they're looking for their their main prey species,
(09:41):
which are going to be all kinds of invertebrates. Yeah,
they're probably going after something like termites or other ants. Uh,
heads sticking out of the ground not really on the
menu usually, But but I wouldn't want to try it.
I'm not saying necessarily safe. That could be the next
big Hollywood magician act though, right, David Blame, I mean,
(10:01):
I'd be surprised if he hasn't done it already. Well, no,
it's the next big confidence game, you know. So they
got to walk across the hot coals. That's like the
confidence building exercise. But the next stage is the bury
yourself up to the neck and let the army ants
come now. Well, another a little piece of health cleaning
from the last episode I want to throw in here.
In the last episode, I briefly mentioned pheromones as being
(10:23):
essential to aunt communication. And I don't want to gloss
over this too much because I imagine many of you
have have seen videos of pheromonal demonstrations, uh, you know,
the the the ant Overlord. EO. Wilson himself does this
at times, in which a pheromone is painted like a
paintbrush or a Q tip or something across the surface
(10:44):
and then ants follow it and is informative as as
a demonstration like this can be, don't take it to
mean that there's just there's a real blunt simplicity to it.
As as Wilson himself stresses, there is a pheromonal language
for ants. Uh. Any given ant species us as a
whole palette of pheromones and chemical signals to communicate. Yeah,
(11:05):
it can be very complex, though there are also very
simple ways to see it in action and like creating
the pheromone trails that are like. EO. Wilson was involved
in research that discovered one of the main glands in
the ants gaster that deposits the pheromone that creates the
trail leading to food. And generally if you deposit this
pheromone as you will see, you know, humans can extract
(11:26):
it and put it in the bottle like you're saying.
To these demonstrations where you just put a line of
it down on a table and suddenly the ants form
up and follow the line, those can be striking direct demonstrations,
even though the full web of pheromonal interactions can be
much more complex, and you can also is easily do
this yourself, even without um the extraction of that kind
(11:46):
of pheromone simply by if you've ever tried dragging your
finger across an ant trail, where like you know, if
you can smudge the chemicals away and maybe disrupt it
with some of the oils from your own finger, suddenly
the movement of the ants becomes chaotic, gets all confused
because the deposition of chemicals that has created this trail
(12:07):
has been broken. I've been I've been noticing these antrei
an trails a lot more on my walks recently. Uh,
my family and I will go out to some various
nature walking by trails in the area that they're not
that populated, and some of them haply you know, slabs
of concrete, and they'll be these little, essentially a little
trenches that stretch across them where one slab meets the other.
(12:30):
And invariably those are the trenches through which the ants moved,
not over the top where they're going to potentially get
smashed by a by bicycle tires are stepped on more easily. No,
they're in the trenches, moving across from one side to
the other. It almost makes me wonder if we've unintentionally
created little bridges or tunnels for the ants, the same
(12:51):
way that on Christmas Island they have to create these
crab bridges and tunnels for crabs to let their migration
get across the roads. Yeah, it does seem like that,
like accidental um pro ant design. Uh. Now, speaking of
E O. Wilson, I want to point out to everybody
we talked about EO. Wilson on the show before Anio.
Wilson has of course authored a number of books, uh,
(13:13):
many of which are are ideal for a general audience.
But if you want to watch a documentary about him,
there is a wonderful PBS documentary that came out several
years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and Men. You
can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I
know that at least in the United States you can
get it on Prime. Uh. It's really good. Yeah, it's so.
(13:34):
I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I watched
the first half and it's just a delight. There's a
great moment where so EO. Wilson, you know, one of
the world authorities on ants, revolutionary biologist for the world
of youth social insects, and he says at one point,
he says, the question people want to know the answer
to most often about ants is what do I do
(13:54):
about the ones in my kitchen? And then he says, uh,
and here's what I tell them. You get a little
piece of a cookie and you put it down near
the ants, and then you watch what they do. I
love that answer because, on one hand, it feels like
maybe he's trying to teach us something like, Oh, he's
(14:14):
trying to teach me a lesson about why the answer
there to begin with, you know, I need to watch
I need to make sure my kitchen is clean. I
mean to make sure there's no there's no food product,
or I need to think about why they've invaded my kitchen.
But on the other hand, it seems just as likely
that he's saying, you're not going to do anything about
these ants. You're going to enjoy them. You're going to
you're going to feed them and watch how they work.
(14:35):
There there's a beautiful stoicism and enjoy in the way
that he observes ants even as they are, you know,
doing things that most people would regard as an offense
or an irritation. You know, we talked several times now
about like the scene where he's just letting all the
fire ants sting his hand and he's watching it with
(14:55):
with such fascination and talking about what's going on is
they're all attacking his skin at the same time. And
uh and then yeah, and this is basically the same attitude,
but with the kitchen instead of your hand. It's like, no,
don't get upset, just take pleasure in watching nature work.
Oh and by the way, Wilson has a new book
(15:15):
on ants coming out this fall. I noticed, called Tales
from the Ant World. Alright, on that note, we're gonna
take one quick break but we'll be right back, and
we'll return to the world of the ants and the
wars that they rage. Thank alright, we're back. One of
the other sources that I was using in reading about
(15:37):
ants for these episodes is the excellent book Animal Weapons
by Douglas J. Mlin, And in it the author has
has a whole bit where he's describing basically, the whole
book has to do with with bioweapons and the evolution
of bioweapons and organisms and then comparing them to human warfare.
But there's a whole bit where he's talking about the
(15:57):
quote giant jaws and thick distinct heads of the army
ants that allow them in mass to topple so many opponents,
and he shares a fun bit of experience that really
underlies just how you know, powerful the design is on
these little guys, uh, little gals rather um. Basically, he
was an outdoing field of some field experiments in Belize,
(16:20):
and he accidentally sliced his thumb with a machete, and
without anything else to stitch up the wound, this is
what they did. First of all, they did have some
rum on them, so they stailized the wound with rum.
But then they suitured the wound with ants. They simply
placed the ants live ants allow along the line of
the cut while someone held the cut together and allowed
(16:42):
their little jaws to snap into place. And then they
tore the body away from the head and the heads
of which they only required five or six, kept their
jaws latch tight and this held the wound together and
allowed them to eventually get proper medical attention for the cut.
I would say, uh, if I just heard this story
in isolation, I would be inclined to doubt it. It
(17:04):
seems so hard to believe. But I mean, obviously I
don't think England's lying about this. But that's just that's amazing. Yeah,
it's I mean, this is it's also a great illustration
of like of a scientist, you know, thinking about about
how to solve a problem. I would never have thought, oh,
i'm cut, I really need to let's get some ants
attached to this wound. But but it's it's also just
(17:27):
a wonderful um uh, you know the description of just
how powerful these little jaws are. Now army and marauder
ants wage their war for food uh and resources. They
will battle other forces for control of food resources and
will also invade other ants societies in order to claim
their larva and their pupa as food. Yeah, and these
(17:49):
are some of the most striking types of ants that
we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with aunt
warfare that we've discussed before, say between h different types
of fire ants, even here in the in the Southern
United States. But seeing ants that forage on the scale
and with the tenacity of army ants or marauder ants,
is is a different kind of thing. This might be
a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel of
(18:12):
this one species of army ant that I've been reading
into a lot. Uh. And this is the species known
as eston Bercelli. I Uh. There are there are a
lot of actually different species of ant that are commonly
referred to as army ants, but seton Bricelli i is
I think the one species that people are most often
talking about with that general title. They're very charismatic, well
(18:33):
observed and distributed species. They live in the humid equatorial
regions of Central and South America, especially in the Amazon rainforest,
but with the range extending up through Mexico and down
south of Brazil into Argentina. Uh. But they're primarily in
the equatorial rainforest, and these ants will form colonies of
(18:54):
several hundred thousand adults at a time. With this rapacious
foraging behavior, you're satisfying the energy needs of the colony
with raids that cover hundreds of meters. According to one estimate,
I believe this was cited by Carl and Marion rhetton Meyer,
who I'll mention again in a moment. They're aunt experts.
But the figure is that on average, each colony of
(19:17):
Seton Bricelli I kills and eats about thirty thousand small
animals every day, wow, thirty every single day. Uh. And
so they have this carnivorous diet, this enormous carnivorous diet
that is especially important because they're trying to supply the
(19:38):
developing larvae of their colony with a high fat diet
that the larvae need in order to grow, so that
the babies need animal fat and the adults go out rating.
So there's another really interesting thing about this species to me,
which is that they do not make permanent nests. Seton
Bricelli I do not make permanent nests. We often think
(20:01):
of ant colonies as defined by their nests right the
ant hills. Ants are environmental engineers, but due to the
energy needs of this species, they can't be tied down
to one place for too long. Imagine them trying to
form a permanent nest while their larvae are growing, and
they have these huge requirements for animal fat, you know,
(20:22):
other insects to bring in and all that. Within a
day or two they probably would have cleared out all
of the food sources within I don't know, maybe a
few hundred square meters of wherever they are. So instead,
Esset and Bricelli I builds a mobile fortress known as
a bivouac. This is a moving fortress that protects the
(20:42):
queen and the developing larvae. But the fortress is made
not out of structures or materials from the environment. It
is made out of ants. Do you see Do you understand?
It is a war rig for ants, made out of
the interlocked bodies of living ants, like a cage of
millions of legs, antennae, and mandibles. I want to quote
(21:07):
from Peter Tyson, writing for Nova in an article about
these things. Quote this elliptical mass talking about the bivouac.
This elliptical mass maybe three feet across and hold up
to seven hundred thousand ants. When they need to move
to a new site, where they bivouac on the surface
rather than build a nest. Eber Chellii workers go first
(21:28):
ferrying food and larvae. Only after nightfall does the queen follow,
escorted by a mass of soldier ants that completely surround
her and will defend her with their lives. So the
bivouac again, is this moving fortress. The queen is inside
and the cage cannot be breached. Uh. This this was
(21:49):
just so captivating to me. And so if you're looking
for these things in the forest, the bivouac can sometimes
be found inside a hollow log or just on the
forest floor, but also sometimes it can be found hanging
suspended from tree limbs. So imagine that like a dangling
fortress for ants made out of ants, and it falls
in line with a more general tendency of some ant species,
(22:12):
including this one, toward body based engineering projects. These army
ants are also known to say assist the mobility of
their forces by filling in potholes along the foraging route
with plugs made out of live ants. So you just
smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants, or also
for building bridges out of themselves to allow the rest
(22:34):
of the army to cross gaps. And apparently these big
wax also emit an other worldly stinch, this amazing smell
that allows you to locate them by smell alone within
the rainforest. I would love to know what this smells like.
You know, all of this is a wonderful example two
of the super organism aspects of ants. How with other creatures,
(22:58):
we we we we talk about the individual, you know,
and in terms of understanding the species. But but with ants,
you look at behaviors like this, and you see there's
such cohesion, there's there's there's such you social um perfection
that you can't look at an individual aunt to understand,
and you have to look at what the colony itself
(23:21):
is doing. But there's another thing I was thinking about
with this model of ant life, the fact that these
ants create no permanent nests. It sort of reminds me
of the idea of the strategic advantage of offense. You know,
the old saying that the best defense is a good offense.
This is actually considered true in some cases in military theory,
(23:42):
because the reasoning goes that when you're on the attack,
you have freedom. Basically, you like, as you're on the attack,
you are creating options for yourself, versus when you're defending,
you have constraints, you have limited options. This is often
true just for example in chess. Uh. You know the
chess players talk about the initiative that you gain when
(24:03):
you're on the attack. You're constantly limiting the options for
your opponents next move if they have to defend their
pieces against an attack that you just set up. And
this is obviously true across multiple context It's known as
maintaining the initiative. Now, obviously there are there are many uh,
there are many advantages you can get from having a
(24:26):
defensive structure like a nest that's buried down in the ground.
You know, the queen is very well protected, but that
also limits your options, right and and this is sort
of the all offense strategy of the ant world. Well,
it seems to be working well for them. I mean
it's not like they busted this strategy out of on
a test basis. This is this has been honed over
(24:48):
for millions of years. So there's another thing that I
was thinking about because I was thinking about warfare and
game of thrones. And one thing I like that's acknowledged
in those books is sort of like the real resource
needs of moving armies. You know, It's not like a
lot of fantasy where it's just sort of like uh,
almost ethereal warriors just ranging limitlessly to do their heroic deeds.
(25:10):
You know, I mean, like you get the idea in
those books that, like, our armies need supplies and all that.
And and also it's acknowledged that there are huge numbers
of people that accompany armies that are not themselves warriors.
These are known as camp followers, and this is absolutely
something that that happens in real warfare. Large armies don't
(25:30):
operate in a vacuum. They have material needs that are
not necessarily related to battle, and they also create needs
and opportunities for resource capture as they move and fight.
And this this is why armies on campaign or historically
a company both by camp followers that you know might
like sell things to soldiers, or might be family members
(25:51):
of soldiers, or sell services to soldiers, um that kind
of thing. But they are also often bandits that follow
around moving armies. As you know, when an army comes
in and attacks somewhere disturbs the existing order, that creates
a lot of opportunities to exploit. Yeah. I mean it's
an absolute disruption, so it makes sense that opportunists would
(26:13):
be there to take advantage of it. And I agree.
I think this is something that that that that is
well explored in the Song of Ice and Fire books,
the idea of of war that just you know, ravages
the countryside in so many ways, like it just just
totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um. I
think I think they probably, I think they probably brought
(26:36):
this out well in this series to to a certain extent,
especially early on. Yeah, I mean towards the end of
that those human wars like West Ross is just decimated
and just tired and exhausted. Yeah, that's true. I mean
it reflects reality that that the war is not just
a clash between armies, but it's the sort of the
army versus the entire environment and everyone living within it. Um.
(27:00):
And I think this is in some ways very true
uh for ants as well. I was reading a really
good article. Uh it was a short article, but a
good one in nat Geo by the always great Ed
young Um that was focused on work by Carl and
Marian rhetten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago. These
are ant experts who created a nearly exhaustive catalog of
(27:24):
all of the animals that follow the army ant species
seton Bercellii. So these are the camp followers in the
bandits that accompany this army uh, ed writes quote there's
no doubting their success as predators, but army ants also
bring life wherever they march. They have an entourage of
over five hundred and fifty species that hang around their legions,
(27:48):
of which three hundred or so depend on the ants
for their survival. So in their disruption of of the
environment around them, they are also creating enough opportunities for
the exploitation of resources that a full like three hundred
or so species couldn't live without these ants, and another
two hundred something or so uh depend on them in
(28:10):
large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I hadn't really
thought about it. We talked about the ecological importance of
the hants, um and UH and this is just another
example of that. Yeah, So this includes like two hundred
or so species of bird. One example is the oscillated
ant bird. There are a number of antbirds ants as
they As they move along the army, ants will flush
(28:33):
insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids, small invertebrates,
and and so the ant birds will watch this happen
and swoop in and take advantage of the fleeing animals. Uh.
They actually almost never prey on the ants themselves. And
so the antbirds will fly around the forest checking in
on seething bivouacs. Right they perform a bivouac check, They're like, okay,
(28:56):
is this bivouac about to march? And if it looks
like one is about to get the war rig ready
and send its workers out on raids, the birds will
converge here and start looking for opportunities. Apparently, the ant
birds will fight amongst each other for the best spots.
Of course, the best spot would basically be positioned just
beyond the advancing front to catch all of the panic
(29:17):
pray animals as soon as they're driven out of hiding. Interesting.
You know, I wonder if anyone's ever tackled this from
a sci fi perspective. You know, we're always encountering situations
in sci fi where humanity is locked in an epic
strup will struggle against some alien adversary or there or
they've been partially wiped out by an alien adversary. I
wonder if anyone's ever explored the idea of of, you know,
(29:39):
the alien force comes that decimates the planet. You end
up with like a post apocalyptic scenario. But then the
primary antagonist is not the destroyer, because the destroyers moved on.
It's the opportunists to come in their wake, right, the
ant birds and the scavengers that come in after Earth
has been Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that would be
an interesting thing. I've never read anything like that, but
(30:00):
I bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if
they have, someone tell me what it is. And if
it doesn't exist, somebody write it so I can read it.
You know. Another interesting thing about these ant birds at
Young points out is that on top of them existing
as as sort of opportunists in what the ants do,
there are secondary opportunists. And these are a lot of
(30:21):
species of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed
off of their droppings after they have preyed on the
insects and other animals that are fleshed out by the ants.
But beyond that, that there are a lot of other species,
and there's not just species looking for food resources. Apparently
parasitic wasps and flies that reproduced by implanting larvae in
(30:41):
the bodies of other invertebrates. They also follow army ants warms,
watching for the ants to drive crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches and
other critters out of hiding, and then the parasites take
immediate advantage at young sites caladoxia flies, but also quote
stylo gaster flies which shoot harpoon like eggs at fleeing cockroaches,
(31:04):
and and flesh flies that lay their eggs in the
open wounds of animals that have been injured but not
dismembered by the ants. So in some cases, not being
killed by the ant horde um is worse than actually
being decimated by it. Well, I guess it depends on
(31:24):
what you think is worse. I mean, is it worse
to be injured by ants and then get maggots implanted
in you, or just to be killed just to be
disassembled outright? Yeah. Even more amazingly, some parasites actually live
within the ant bivouax themselves, having various adaptations. We've talked
about aunt mimics before. There are apparently some species like this,
(31:44):
like beetles that survived by mimicking ants and just sort
of like hanging out among the ants trying to be undetected.
But this was my favorite part. Ed Young writes that
some parasites quote use the ants as mobile restaurants, jumping
onto workers that are carrying food and eating their booty
(32:05):
right under or over their very jaws. So they hang
out on the ant head eating the food that the
ant is carrying. Oh wow, again, I think for a
lot of species this would require very special adaptations or
you know, you would immediately become prey yourself. But it's
just amazing to imagine the tiny, like full ecosystems basically
(32:28):
that are made possible by the opportunities created by the
chaos of a rating army. Yeah, in a way, you
kind of have to come back to that that analogy
of the superorganism, right, that the the ant colony is,
well we might think of as the individual, like the
ant colony is the body, and so it is going
to have its own parasite. It's going to have its
(32:50):
own symbiotic relationships and uh and and that's kind of
what we're seeing here. Absolutely, I think this is just
the most astonishing species. I feel like maybe we're not
even done with with with Ston. We can move on
in this episode, but but we may have to come
back to them in the future. All right, and that note,
we're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we will consider the marauder ants. All Right,
(33:17):
we're back. So we've already talked some about ant species
that are referred to as the marauder ants. You read
a passage from one of those articles by Martin W.
Moffatt about marauder ants. Yeah, Moffatt points out that marauder
ants excel in deploying troops in ways that increase efficiency
and reduce the cost to a colony. And one thing
(33:38):
that really makes them interesting, uh, is their variety in
sizes among the workers. They vary in size more than
workers in any other ant colony. So this is where
it gets interesting in a sort of war game point
of view manner, because essentially we're getting into different unit
(33:59):
types here. So if you're fielding droids, for instance, on
on on a battle, yeah, we're doing clone wars here.
You're not. You're not just busting out a ton of
standard B one battle droids, right, you're also busting out
B two super heavy battle droids or heavy weapon uh
droid deca, droidica um roly poly. Guys, if you're playing
(34:21):
something like Warhammer forty thousand, it's not just space marines.
You're also busting out specialized assault marines or heavy terminators,
that sort of thing. And so Moffatt points out that
the marauders deploy smaller miners, uh you know, that's what
we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front line,
and there these are just weak and hopeless uh individuals
(34:43):
against adversaries, but there are tons of them, so they
work as a kind of barricade. They bogged down the
enemy long enough for larger ants to move in the
media's and the majors. So again, same species, same essentially
um ver itty of this ant, but it's like it's
a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some of
(35:05):
these individuals, the majors, compared to the miners, they are
five hundred times as heavy as the smaller version. So
these are real bruisers, I mean, these are these are monsters. Uh.
My initial impulse would be to compare these like strictly
to larger um, you know, bruiser heavy class fighters and
(35:26):
fantasy armies, Like I'm thinking about some of the big
specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor. But but then
I was thinking about it. I was like, looking at
the size deferential here, and Okay, let's assume that an orc,
or say a stormtrooper, uh is roughly the average weight
of a human. Okay, we're to multiply that by five
(35:46):
hundred you're talking thirty four tons. So in the real world,
that's essentially the difference between a human and a humpback whale. Okay,
So that's crazy. Even even the troll would not really
capture the size difference appropriately. Yeah, Like I ended up
going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how
heavy different fantasy and sci fi army vehicles and units were.
(36:10):
And it's best I can tell based on some fan estimates.
You might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial
stormtrooper and one of those two legged A T S
T walkers. That would be the difference between a Marauder
minor ant and a Marauder major ant. This is what
Mofata writes. Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Rhymes
(36:33):
assure a low mortality for the media's and the majors,
which require far more resources for the colony to raise
and men maintain. Putting the easily replaced fighters at greatest
risk is a time honored battle technique. So, in other words,
stormtroopers are notoriously bad shots, and they are apparently easily replaced,
But your A. T. S. T S. Those are far
(36:54):
more precious. Yeah, that will they cost more to make? Yeah.
Ma Fata also points out at the marauders tactics here
line up with the example one season armies throughout history
the use of conscripted farmers and laborers alongside elite professional soldiers,
with the common soldiers absorbing the worst of it while
the elite units are protected and move in at strategic intervals.
(37:18):
He also points out that marauders use what is known
in military strategy as defeat in detail tactics, defeating an
enemy unit by unit, rather than engaging in enemy's full strength. Now,
marauder ants also battle their own kind, pitting colony against colony,
and in these contests, the majors and the media's also
hang back and let the miners do most of the fighting.
(37:40):
Tearing each other apart, and in contests that tend to
be even more brutal than the interspecies conflicts that also
take place. I'm gonna get to some of the logic
behind the differences and strategy here in just a minute.
By the way, yeah, because Moffatt refers to the work
of University of Bristol's Nigel Franks, who found that the
hactics of these ants in particular is consistent with Lanchester's
(38:03):
square law, an equation developed in World War One by
engineer Frederick Lanchester, who also devised Lanchester's linear law, which
will also touch based on here. Yeah, I keep wanting
to say, Lanister, so don't let me say that you're
coming back to the fantasy warfare analogy. So Lanchester's laws
are a set of mathematical models trying to explain outcomes
(38:28):
in battle based on various kinds of initial force disparity
is generally the main disparities are going to be individual
unit effectiveness, so like how much damage each unit can do,
and then also the numbers of combatants on either side.
Lanchester's square law in particular shows that in some types
(38:48):
of combat this is not all conflicts, but in some
types of combat, for example shooting wars involving masses of
soldiers armed with rifles that can aim in any direction.
In these types of combat, there are ways of organizing
confrontations majorly to your advantage, just just based on the
numbers of forces and how they're grouped specifically that the
(39:11):
main takeaway is don't split your forces. Um So, to
illustrate this, you can imagine, say you've got battle droids
in in star wars, and say maybe one side has
a hundred battle droids and the other side has exactly
a hundred battle droids as well. If you imagine each
of the battle droids can shoot its blaster one time
every second, and each shot has a chance of destroying
(39:34):
its target, you can work out that after one second
of battle, both forces will be reduced equally by about
maybe after another second, et cetera. And it just goes
on as the two sides decreased by attrition at roughly
the same rate, until both armies are mostly are fully
vanquished at around the same time, unless for some reason
(39:55):
one side gets an advantage early on. But that kind
of process does not scale in a linear way. So
if you have say a hundred droids versus an opponents
at general grievous is your opposing army and he's just
got fifty droids you you probably can assume that the
larger force will win, but you might not understand how
(40:16):
much of an advantage the larger force has. So if
if you have you know, the same kind of thing working.
After the first second, your hundred droids will probably have
destroyed roughly half of your opponents fifty droids, but they
really will not have destroyed many of yours at all,
maybe only like twelve or so. And as each second
of battle goes on, you reduce their fighting effectiveness more
(40:40):
and more, until what you're left with in the end
is very little casualties to the larger army and total
decimation of the smaller one. And so this shows, for example,
that if you have a force of a hundred battle droids,
it would be much easier for that those one hundred
battle droids to win two consecutive battles against fifty battle
(41:00):
droids than to win one single battle against a force
of one hundred. And this is exactly why divide and
conquer is such an important principle of warfare. If you
break your enemy up into smaller groupings. With these certain
types of combat, your advantage over them does not increase linearly.
It multiplies by the square. In fact, if you choose
(41:23):
your battles wisely, you can even use this to allow
a smaller force to beat a bigger one. So if
you've got a hundred battle droids, General Graves has two hundred,
you could still potentially beat him overall by keeping your
forces together and peeling off small segments of like ten
or twenty at a time to face sequentially, with negligible
losses to your own forces each time. So this is
(41:46):
again where we come back to defeat in detail exactly right. So,
in mathematical terms, what Lanchester predicted was that in these
certain types of scenarios, uh, the strength of a group
on the battlefield is the product of two things. The
effectiveness of each fighting unit not times the number of units,
but times the square of the number of units. And
(42:08):
that's why it's known as the square law. And it
tells you that for certain types of combat, sheer numbers
can easily overwhelm differences in the effectiveness of individual fighting units.
And it's interesting how this tends to go against what
seems to be people's desire to understand, like dramatic violent
(42:30):
conflict in narratives like in you know, epic poetry and
action movies and all that, where it seems like what people,
or at least what authors think people want to see, uh,
is the idea that a single highly effective combatant you know,
your John Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective
enemies ganging up on them. And for many types of combat,
(42:52):
this is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are
significantly more important than skills, Like better to have five
off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah,
it it certainly does run run counter to our our
our epic storytelling. Yeah, where it's like a one rag
tag group of talented individuals can can can turn the
(43:15):
tide of battle against against the faceless lord. Yeah yeah.
And we should know again that the square law is
not supposed to apply to all types of combat. For example,
in situations where combatants have to face one another in
one on one duels, one at a time, they're the
advantages of superior numbers are reduced to something closer to
(43:36):
a pure linear function, and the individual effectiveness of of
each unit becomes a lot more relevant. And so the
way this works out in the real world is that,
like in situations where your forces do not have numerical superiority,
military leaders who are conscious of these issues will try
to engineer battle conditions to avoid square law scenarios and
(43:58):
enforced linear laws in areas instead. One example would be
like using natural terrain or fortifications to create choke points
where the majority of the enemy forces are held back
from the action. That can't all fight you at once.
The number of them that can fight you at the
same time is limited by topography, and thus the battle
(44:19):
becomes it starts to resemble something more like a series
of sequential duels instead of a simultaneous war of all
against all. And of course examples of this in history
or you know the way the thing about the way
castles are constructed, narrow passageways, uh, you know, natural ravines, bridges, gates,
a spiral staircase in the castle tower. These tend to
(44:41):
reduce the salience of the square law advantage and help
you out, especially if you've got a smaller number of
more effective fighters. So, to bring this back to ants,
the question here is which of these models is better
at predicting the outcomes of ant wars. Is it the
linear model where there's this direct linear relationship between size
of forces in the outcome, or is it the square
(45:02):
model where the larger numbers of concentrated forces just easily
overwhelm other concerns like the like individual fighting unit effectiveness. Uh.
There was a paper that was published in the nineteen
nineties and the journal Animal Behavior. This was in nine
by Mary E. A. White House and Klaus Jaffa called
(45:22):
ant wars combat strategies territory and nest defense in the
leaf cutting ant Atta leave Agatta And according to their research,
they found quote the leaf cutting ant atta leave Agatta
responded to a simulated vertebrate threat by recruiting many soldiers,
and the soldiers would be a special special fighters large workers,
but responded to con specific and interspecific ant threats by
(45:47):
recruiting mainly small ants. So the vertebrate attack here was
simulated pretty much by poking a stick. And you know,
as they poke a stick into the entrance of the
colony nest and then shake it for twenty seconds. And
this was meant to mimic the mechanical disturbance that would
be caused by an ants by the ant's main predator,
the armadillo. In these attacks, what the ants would tend
(46:09):
to do is they would bring more of their elite
fighters to defend the nest. So in this situation it
appears evolution maybe favoring the linear reasoning in this case. Meanwhile,
when the ants are attacked by other ants, they tended
to respond instead with overwhelming numbers of less dedicated fighters.
So a threat from arrival ant colony seems to have
(46:32):
been solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated
by the square law. Along these lines, Mofat also points
out the quote a fighter's value to its colony bears
on the risks the ant takes. The more expendable she is,
the more likely she is to end up in harm's way.
As such, marauder ants, he writes, they guard their foraging
(46:54):
trails with old and or maimed workers, and in fire ants,
it's been observed the old stay and fight, while the
very young runaway and en fireman's more in their prime
will actually uh fake their own deaths. Wow, we'll fake
their own deaths. I mean. This is again something that
makes more sense if you think about the ant Colony
(47:15):
as a single super organism. It's like it's it's putting
the the already damaged or less effective parts of itself
out in front to absorb the brunt of the of
the violence. Yeah, alright, So at this point you're you're
you're probably thinking, oh my goodness, they're out of time,
and you you would be right, just as the ant
War is heating up. Uh, we're gonna have to close
(47:37):
out this episode, but fear not, we're gonna be back
with a third ant War episode that will more or
less round everything out. Though a word of warning, if
I am, if I'm looking at the schedule correctly, there
will be another episode that will publish before the third
ant War episode publishes, So just bear with us. The
third ant War installment is on its way in the meantime.
(48:00):
If you like to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, you can find us anywhere you
get your podcast and wherever that happens to be. Just
make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
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
(48:22):
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listening to your favorite shows.
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