June 12, 2020 • 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 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Deliver thyself as a row from the hand of the hunter,
and as a bird from the hand 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
(00:27):
of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. 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.
(00:48):
I was like, oh, let me check my scholarly Oxford
Annotated edition to the Bible to see if it's got
any insights on how 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. That yeah, because I had questions about this one.
(01:11):
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,
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
(01:32):
an aunt colony correct and also, uh, doesn't get hung
up on the idea of a central ruler like in
In 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
apologist to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because
(01:55):
it But but I gotta say this versus is pretty
dead on right. Uh. There is no guide overseer or ruler.
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 trying, you know,
wait around to be told what to do. It just
(02:17):
knows what to do and does it right. And uh.
Of course, then there's this bit about the gathering of
food 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 ravaging.
(02:39):
I guess yeah. For a biblical parallels, some of these
ants 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.
(03:02):
You know, a field known as entomology and the comparison
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,
(03:25):
and throughout India you'll find various customs that involve protecting
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 uh,
(03:45):
and likewise it's considered heinous to disturb an ant hill especially.
I was reading about all this in a book titled
The Sacred Animals of India by Nandita Krishna, which is
an excellent little book from Penguin Press. You can pick
it up most most places. I think I picked it
up at a yoga studio once while I was waiting
waiting for my wife to get her shoes on, and
(04:06):
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
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 but in this book, the
(04:28):
author describes a couple of cool details. First of all,
a tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace.
So 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
(04:52):
idea that ants, like all these other animals, are part
of the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that
of al Niki, 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
(05:13):
ant hill as part of their new emerged identity. That's
interesting and counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as
a place 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,
(05:35):
but us looking down at it, it's so chaotic and frenzied.
It seems like it would be impossible to focus. Yeah,
but then I guess you could also look at it
as a place of just pure order or two 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,
(05:56):
UH youth, social duty to the colony, and there's no
there's no room for aunt despair or aunt ambition. You know,
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
(06:18):
have to you know, fall back down to a lower
life form and then work your way back up an
it's a good place to start, kind of a form
of contrapostito, right, like the idea that the divine punishment
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 episode,
(06:39):
you've probably figured out that we're talking about aunts and UH.
And this is indeed the second in our Aunt Wars
UH series. So if you didn't listen 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 form the boundaries of their individual kingdoms.
(07:02):
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 mentioned that's also hosted on
his website at dor bugs dot com. He writes, quote,
in Ghana, I witnessed aceeeving carpet of workers of the
army ants species dorilyss Nigricans searching together across an area
(07:27):
hundred feet wide. These African army ants, which in species
such as de Nigricans 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
(07:49):
antelope caught in a snare, eaten alive by a colony
of driver ants. That highlights something that I was planning
on talking about in just a little bit. When we
get to one particular or species of army end 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
(08:12):
terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the 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 ants are the next thing, the Hollywood army ants
that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't seem
(08:36):
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 actually represent a threat like that,
(08:59):
like you can ease only 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 main prey species, which are going to be all
(09:21):
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 Blaine Bury's I mean, I'd be surprised if
he hasn't done it already. Well, no, it's the next
(09:44):
big confidence game, you know. So they got to walk
across the hot coals. That's like the confidence building exercise.
But but the next stage is the bury yourself up
to the neck and let the army ants come. 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 essential to aunt communication.
(10:05):
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 qutap or something
across the surface and then ants follow it and is
(10:25):
informative as well as a demonstration like this can be.
It 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 uses a whole palide of pheromones and chemical
signals to communicate. Yeah, it can be very complex, though
(10:46):
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 of pheromone
that creates the trail leading to food. And generally if
you deposit this pheromone, as you will see, you know,
humans can extract it and put it in the bottle,
(11:07):
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 easily do this yourself, even without um the extraction
of that kind of pheromone, simply by if you've ever
(11:29):
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.
It's all confused because the deposition of chemicals that has
created this trail has been broken. I've been I've been
(11:49):
noticing these ant trail ant 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 it and some of
them have lee 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, and invariably those
(12:12):
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
way that on Christmas Island they have to create these
(12:33):
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, now, speaking
of the Oh Wilson, I want to point out to
everybody we've talked about Io Wilson on the show before,
an EO. Wilson has of course authored a number of books, uh,
many of which are are ideal for a general audience.
(12:56):
But if you want to watch a documentary about them,
there is a wonderful PBO documentary that came out several
years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and NN. You
can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I
know that at least here in the United States. You
can get it on Prime. It's really good. Yeah, it's
so I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I
watched the first half and it's just a delight. There's
(13:18):
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
about the ones in my kitchen? And then he says, uh,
and here's what I tell them. You get a little
(13:40):
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
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, and
I mean to make sure there's no there's no food product,
(14:02):
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.
There there's a beautiful stoicism and enjoy in the way
that he observes ants even as they are, you know,
(14:23):
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
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
(14:45):
attitude 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
on ants coming out this fall. I noticed called Tails
from the Ant World. All right, 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
(15:07):
the wars that they rage. Alright, we're back. One of
the other sources that I was using in reading about
ants for these episodes is the excellent book Animal Weapons
by Douglas j Emlin, and in it the author has
has a whole bit where he's describing basically, the whole
(15:27):
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
quote giant jaws and thick distended 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
(15:47):
underlies just how you know, powerful the design is on
these little guys, uh, little gals rather um. Basically, he
was out doing field of some field experiments in Belize
and he accidentally sliced his thumb with a machete, and
without anything else to stitch at the wound, this is
what they did. First of all, they did have some
rum on them, so they stailized the wound with rum.
(16:10):
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
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
(16:30):
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
seems so hard to believe that. I mean, obviously I
don't think Emland's lying about this, But that's just that's amazing. Yeah,
(16:52):
it's I mean, this is it's also a great illustration
of like of a scientist, you know, thinking about about
the 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
a wonderful um uh, you know the description of just
how powerful these little jaws are. Now army and marauder
(17:14):
ants wage their war for food, uh and resources. They
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 are some of the most striking types of ants
that we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with
the ant warfare that we've discussed before, say between uh
(17:36):
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 answer marauder
ants is is a different kind of thing. This might
be a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel
of this one species of army ant that I've been
reading into a lot. Uh. And this is the species
(17:56):
known as eston Bercelli i. UH. There are a lot
of actually different species event that are commonly referred to
as army ants, but seton Bricellii is I think the
one species that people are most often talking about with
that general title. They're very charismatic, well observed and distributed species.
They live in the humid equatorial regions of Central and
(18:17):
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 rainforests,
and these ants will form colonies of several hundred thousand
adults at a time with this rapacious foraging behavior, satisfying
(18:41):
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 rhetten Meyer, who'll I'll
mention again in a moment their aunt experts. But the
figure is that on average, each colony of Seton Bricelli
i kills and eats about thirty thousands small animals every day. Wow,
(19:06):
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 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
(19:29):
really interesting thing about this species to me, which is
that they do not make permanent nests. Seton Brichelli I
do not make permanent nests. We often think of ant
colonies as defined by their nests, right the ant hills
answer environmental engineers. But due to the energy needs of
this species, they can't be tied down to one place
(19:52):
for too long. Imagine them trying to form a permanent
nest while their larvae are growing and they have these
huge require months for animal fat, you know, 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, Esseton Bricelli
(20:15):
I builds a mobile fortress known as a bivouac. This
is a moving fortress that protects the 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 four ants made out of the interlocked
(20:38):
bodies of living ants, like a cage of millions of legs, antennae,
and mandibles. I want to quote 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.
(21:00):
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 ferrying food and larvae. Only
after nightfall does the queen follow escorted by a massive
soldier ants that completely surround her and will defend her
with their lives. So the bivouac again, is this moving fortress.
(21:22):
The queen is inside and the cage cannot be breached.
Uh this this was 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. Imagine that
(21:44):
like a dangling fortress for ants made out of ants,
and it falls in line with a more general tendency
of some ant species, including this one, toward body based
engineering projects. These army ants are also known to say,
assist the mobility of their horses by filling in potholes
along the foraging route with plugs made out of live ants,
(22:06):
so you just smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants,
or also for building bridges out of themselves to allow
the rest of the army to cross gaps. And apparently
these BiVO wax also uh 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
(22:27):
what this smells like. You Now, all of this is
a wonderful example two of the super organism aspects of ants.
How with other creatures 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
(22:51):
use social um perfection that you can't look at an
individual ant to understand them. You have to look at
what the pliny itself 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
(23:12):
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, 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,
(23:35):
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 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
(23:56):
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 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
(24:18):
to be working well for them. I mean, it's not
like they busted this strategy out of on a test basis.
This has been honed over 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,
(24:40):
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, 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 a
(25:00):
company 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 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
(25:22):
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 of soldiers, or sell services
to soldiers, um, that kind of thing. But there are
also often bandits that follow around moving armies because you know,
when an army comes in and attacks somewhere, disturbs the
(25:44):
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 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
(26:07):
it just just totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um.
I think I think they probably, I think they probably
brought this out well in this series to to a
certain extent, especially early one. 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.
(26:28):
And 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. 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 that GEO by the always
(26:49):
great ed young Um that was focused on work by
Carl and Marian retten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago.
These are ant experts who created it a nearly exhaustive
catalog of all of the animals that follow the army
ant species seton Bercellia. So these are the camp followers
(27:10):
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, of which three hundred or so depend on
the ants for their survival. So in their disruption of
(27:34):
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 large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I
hadn't really thought about it. We talked about the ecological
(27:55):
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 insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids,
small invertebrates, and and so the ant birds will watch
(28:19):
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, is this bivouac about to march?
And if it looks like one is about to get
(28:39):
the war rig ready and send its workers out on raids,
and 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 prey animals as soon as they're driven out
of hiding. Interesting. You know, I wonder if anyone's ever
(29:02):
tackled this from a sci fi perspective. You know, we're
we're always encountering situations in sci fi where humanity is
locked in a you know, 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, the alien
force comes that decimates the planet. You end up with
(29:22):
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 I
bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if they have,
(29:43):
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 are a lot of species
of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed off
(30:05):
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
the bodies of other invertebrates. They also follow army ants
(30:25):
worms 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, and and flesh flies that lay their eggs
(30:47):
in the open wounds of animals that have been injured
but not dismembered by the ants. Oh wow, So in
some cases, not being killed by the ant horde um
is war worse than actually being decimated. About it, well,
I guess it depends on 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
(31:10):
be killed just to be disassembled out right? 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, like beetles, that survived
by mimicking ants and just sort of like hanging out
among the ants trying to be undetected. But this was
(31:33):
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 right under or
over their very jaws. So they hang out on the
ant head, eating the food that the ant is carrying. Again,
(31:54):
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 that are made possible by the
opportunities created by the chaos of a rating army. Yeah,
(32:15):
in a way, you kind of have to come back
to that that analogy of the superorganism, right, that the
the ant colony is what we might think of as
the individual, Like the ant colony is the body, and
so it is going to have its own parasites, It's
going to have its own uh symbiotic relationships and uh
and and that's kind of what we're seeing here. Absolutely,
(32:36):
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, we're back. So we've already
(32:59):
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 that really makes them interesting, uh,
(33:20):
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 types here. So if you're fielding droids,
(33:41):
for instance, on on on in 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 ecka droidka um roly poly guy.
If you're playing something like Warhammer, forty thousand. It's not
(34:03):
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 that's
what we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front
line and there these are just weak and hopeless, uh
individuals against adversaries. But there are tons of them, so
(34:25):
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 variety of this ant, but it's like a
it's a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some
of these individuals print the majors compared to the miners.
(34:49):
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 fantasy armies, like I'm thinking about some
of the big specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor.
(35:12):
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. If we're to
multiply that by five hundred, you're talking thirty four tons.
So in the real world, that's essentially the difference between
(35:32):
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. And it's
best I can tell based on some fan estimates. You
(35:54):
might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial stormtrooper
and one of those two legged a t ST walkers.
That would be the difference between a Marauder minor aunt
and a Marauder major aunt. This is what Mafata writes.
Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Ryans assure a
low mortality for the media's and the majors, which require
(36:17):
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
you'r a T S T S. Those are far more precious. Yeah,
that will they cost more to make? Yeah. Mafata also
(36:38):
points out that 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. He
also points out that marauders use what is known in
(37:00):
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,
tearing each other apart, and in contests that tend to
(37:23):
be even more brutal than the interspecies conflicts that also
take place. I'm gonna get to some of the logic
behind the differences in 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
tactics of these ants in particular is consistent with Lanchester's
square law, an equation developed in World War One by
(37:46):
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. Keep
coming back to the fantasy warfare now. So, Lanchester's laws
are a set of mathematical models trying to explain outcomes
(38:07):
in battle based on various kinds of initial force disparities. 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 of combat.
(38:28):
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 main takeaway is
(38:52):
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 its target, you can
(39:16):
work out that after one second of battle, both forces
will be reduced equally by about maybe after another second, etcetera.
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 one side gets an advantage early on.
(39:37):
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 much of an advantage the larger force has.
(39:58):
So if if you have the know the same kind
of thing working, after the first second, your hundred droids
will probably have destroyed roughly half of your opponent's 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 and more, until what you're left with in
(40:22):
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 droids than to win one single battle
(40:43):
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 multiplied by the square uh. In fact,
if you choose your battles wisely, you can even use
(41:05):
this to allow a smaller force to beat a bigger one.
So if you've got a hundred battle droids, general Grievas
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
(41:25):
this is 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
(41:46):
the number of units. And 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 conflict in narratives like
(42:12):
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, you're John
Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective enemies ganging
up on them. And for many types of combat, this
(42:32):
is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are significantly
more important than skills, Like better to have five hundred
off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah,
it 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
(42:55):
the tide of battle against against the faceless hord. Yeah yeah.
And we should not 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
(43:16):
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
(43:38):
enforced linear law scenarios 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 becomes
(44:00):
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 reduce
(44:21):
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 the size of forces and
the outcome, or is it the square model where the
(44:43):
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 how House in Klaus Jaffa called ant Wars Combat
(45:03):
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 Agata 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 recruiting
(45:27):
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 to do
(45:49):
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 been
(46:11):
solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated by
the square law. Along these lines, Mofa 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
(46:34):
trails with old and or maimed workers and in fire ants,
it's been observed that the old stay and fight, while
the very young runaway and and firemants 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
(46:54):
colony as a single superorganism. It's like it's it's putting
the the already day imaged 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 Aunt
War is heating up. Uh, we're gonna have to close
(47:17):
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.
(47:40):
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
(48:02):
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.
Deliver thyself as a row from the hand of the hunter,
and as a bird from the hand 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
(00:27):
of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. 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.
(00:48):
I was like, oh, let me check my scholarly Oxford
Annotated edition to the Bible to see if it's got
any insights on how 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. That yeah, because I had questions about this one.
(01:11):
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,
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
(01:32):
an aunt colony correct and also, uh, doesn't get hung
up on the idea of a central ruler like in
In 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
apologist to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because
(01:55):
it But but I gotta say this versus is pretty
dead on right. Uh. There is no guide overseer or ruler.
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 trying, you know,
wait around to be told what to do. It just
(02:17):
knows what to do and does it right. And uh.
Of course, then there's this bit about the gathering of
food 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 ravaging.
(02:39):
I guess yeah. For a biblical parallels, some of these
ants 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.
(03:02):
You know, a field known as entomology and the comparison
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,
(03:25):
and throughout India you'll find various customs that involve protecting
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 uh,
(03:45):
and likewise it's considered heinous to disturb an ant hill especially.
I was reading about all this in a book titled
The Sacred Animals of India by Nandita Krishna, which is
an excellent little book from Penguin Press. You can pick
it up most most places. I think I picked it
up at a yoga studio once while I was waiting
waiting for my wife to get her shoes on, and
(04:06):
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
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 but in this book, the
(04:28):
author describes a couple of cool details. First of all,
a tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace.
So 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
(04:52):
idea that ants, like all these other animals, are part
of the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that
of al Niki, 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
(05:13):
ant hill as part of their new emerged identity. That's
interesting and counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as
a place 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,
(05:35):
but us looking down at it, it's so chaotic and frenzied.
It seems like it would be impossible to focus. Yeah,
but then I guess you could also look at it
as a place of just pure order or two 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,
(05:56):
UH youth, social duty to the colony, and there's no
there's no room for aunt despair or aunt ambition. You know,
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
(06:18):
have to you know, fall back down to a lower
life form and then work your way back up an
it's a good place to start, kind of a form
of contrapostito, right, like the idea that the divine punishment
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 episode,
(06:39):
you've probably figured out that we're talking about aunts and UH.
And this is indeed the second in our Aunt Wars
UH series. So if you didn't listen 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 form the boundaries of their individual kingdoms.
(07:02):
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 mentioned that's also hosted on
his website at dor bugs dot com. He writes, quote,
in Ghana, I witnessed aceeeving carpet of workers of the
army ants species dorilyss Nigricans searching together across an area
(07:27):
hundred feet wide. These African army ants, which in species
such as de Nigricans 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
(07:49):
antelope caught in a snare, eaten alive by a colony
of driver ants. That highlights something that I was planning
on talking about in just a little bit. When we
get to one particular or species of army end 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
(08:12):
terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the 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 ants are the next thing, the Hollywood army ants
that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't seem
(08:36):
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 actually represent a threat like that,
(08:59):
like you can ease only 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 main prey species, which are going to be all
(09:21):
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 Blaine Bury's I mean, I'd be surprised if
he hasn't done it already. Well, no, it's the next
(09:44):
big confidence game, you know. So they got to walk
across the hot coals. That's like the confidence building exercise.
But but the next stage is the bury yourself up
to the neck and let the army ants come. 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 essential to aunt communication.
(10:05):
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 qutap or something
across the surface and then ants follow it and is
(10:25):
informative as well as a demonstration like this can be.
It 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 uses a whole palide of pheromones and chemical
signals to communicate. Yeah, it can be very complex, though
(10:46):
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 of pheromone
that creates the trail leading to food. And generally if
you deposit this pheromone, as you will see, you know,
humans can extract it and put it in the bottle,
(11:07):
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 easily do this yourself, even without um the extraction
of that kind of pheromone, simply by if you've ever
(11:29):
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.
It's all confused because the deposition of chemicals that has
created this trail has been broken. I've been I've been
(11:49):
noticing these ant trail ant 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 it and some of
them have lee 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, and invariably those
(12:12):
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
way that on Christmas Island they have to create these
(12:33):
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, now, speaking
of the Oh Wilson, I want to point out to
everybody we've talked about Io Wilson on the show before,
an EO. Wilson has of course authored a number of books, uh,
many of which are are ideal for a general audience.
(12:56):
But if you want to watch a documentary about them,
there is a wonderful PBO documentary that came out several
years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and NN. You
can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I
know that at least here in the United States. You
can get it on Prime. It's really good. Yeah, it's
so I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I
watched the first half and it's just a delight. There's
(13:18):
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
about the ones in my kitchen? And then he says, uh,
and here's what I tell them. You get a little
(13:40):
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
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, and
I mean to make sure there's no there's no food product,
(14:02):
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.
There there's a beautiful stoicism and enjoy in the way
that he observes ants even as they are, you know,
(14:23):
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
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
(14:45):
attitude 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
on ants coming out this fall. I noticed called Tails
from the Ant World. All right, 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
(15:07):
the wars that they rage. Alright, we're back. One of
the other sources that I was using in reading about
ants for these episodes is the excellent book Animal Weapons
by Douglas j Emlin, and in it the author has
has a whole bit where he's describing basically, the whole
(15:27):
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
quote giant jaws and thick distended 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
(15:47):
underlies just how you know, powerful the design is on
these little guys, uh, little gals rather um. Basically, he
was out doing field of some field experiments in Belize
and he accidentally sliced his thumb with a machete, and
without anything else to stitch at the wound, this is
what they did. First of all, they did have some
rum on them, so they stailized the wound with rum.
(16:10):
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
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
(16:30):
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
seems so hard to believe that. I mean, obviously I
don't think Emland's lying about this, But that's just that's amazing. Yeah,
(16:52):
it's I mean, this is it's also a great illustration
of like of a scientist, you know, thinking about about
the 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
a wonderful um uh, you know the description of just
how powerful these little jaws are. Now army and marauder
(17:14):
ants wage their war for food, uh and resources. They
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 are some of the most striking types of ants
that we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with
the ant warfare that we've discussed before, say between uh
(17:36):
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 answer marauder
ants is is a different kind of thing. This might
be a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel
of this one species of army ant that I've been
reading into a lot. Uh. And this is the species
(17:56):
known as eston Bercelli i. UH. There are a lot
of actually different species event that are commonly referred to
as army ants, but seton Bricellii is I think the
one species that people are most often talking about with
that general title. They're very charismatic, well observed and distributed species.
They live in the humid equatorial regions of Central and
(18:17):
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 rainforests,
and these ants will form colonies of several hundred thousand
adults at a time with this rapacious foraging behavior, satisfying
(18:41):
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 rhetten Meyer, who'll I'll
mention again in a moment their aunt experts. But the
figure is that on average, each colony of Seton Bricelli
i kills and eats about thirty thousands small animals every day. Wow,
(19:06):
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 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
(19:29):
really interesting thing about this species to me, which is
that they do not make permanent nests. Seton Brichelli I
do not make permanent nests. We often think of ant
colonies as defined by their nests, right the ant hills
answer environmental engineers. But due to the energy needs of
this species, they can't be tied down to one place
(19:52):
for too long. Imagine them trying to form a permanent
nest while their larvae are growing and they have these
huge require months for animal fat, you know, 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, Esseton Bricelli
(20:15):
I builds a mobile fortress known as a bivouac. This
is a moving fortress that protects the 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 four ants made out of the interlocked
(20:38):
bodies of living ants, like a cage of millions of legs, antennae,
and mandibles. I want to quote 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.
(21:00):
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 ferrying food and larvae. Only
after nightfall does the queen follow escorted by a massive
soldier ants that completely surround her and will defend her
with their lives. So the bivouac again, is this moving fortress.
(21:22):
The queen is inside and the cage cannot be breached.
Uh this this was 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. Imagine that
(21:44):
like a dangling fortress for ants made out of ants,
and it falls in line with a more general tendency
of some ant species, including this one, toward body based
engineering projects. These army ants are also known to say,
assist the mobility of their horses by filling in potholes
along the foraging route with plugs made out of live ants,
(22:06):
so you just smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants,
or also for building bridges out of themselves to allow
the rest of the army to cross gaps. And apparently
these BiVO wax also uh 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
(22:27):
what this smells like. You Now, all of this is
a wonderful example two of the super organism aspects of ants.
How with other creatures 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
(22:51):
use social um perfection that you can't look at an
individual ant to understand them. You have to look at
what the pliny itself 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
(23:12):
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, 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,
(23:35):
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 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
(23:56):
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 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
(24:18):
to be working well for them. I mean, it's not
like they busted this strategy out of on a test basis.
This has been honed over 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,
(24:40):
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, 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 a
(25:00):
company 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 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
(25:22):
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 of soldiers, or sell services
to soldiers, um, that kind of thing. But there are
also often bandits that follow around moving armies because you know,
when an army comes in and attacks somewhere, disturbs the
(25:44):
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 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
(26:07):
it just just totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um.
I think I think they probably, I think they probably
brought this out well in this series to to a
certain extent, especially early one. 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.
(26:28):
And 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. 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 that GEO by the always
(26:49):
great ed young Um that was focused on work by
Carl and Marian retten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago.
These are ant experts who created it a nearly exhaustive
catalog of all of the animals that follow the army
ant species seton Bercellia. So these are the camp followers
(27:10):
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, of which three hundred or so depend on
the ants for their survival. So in their disruption of
(27:34):
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 large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I
hadn't really thought about it. We talked about the ecological
(27:55):
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 insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids,
small invertebrates, and and so the ant birds will watch
(28:19):
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, is this bivouac about to march?
And if it looks like one is about to get
(28:39):
the war rig ready and send its workers out on raids,
and 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 prey animals as soon as they're driven out
of hiding. Interesting. You know, I wonder if anyone's ever
(29:02):
tackled this from a sci fi perspective. You know, we're
we're always encountering situations in sci fi where humanity is
locked in a you know, 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, the alien
force comes that decimates the planet. You end up with
(29:22):
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 I
bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if they have,
(29:43):
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 are a lot of species
of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed off
(30:05):
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
the bodies of other invertebrates. They also follow army ants
(30:25):
worms 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, and and flesh flies that lay their eggs
(30:47):
in the open wounds of animals that have been injured
but not dismembered by the ants. Oh wow, So in
some cases, not being killed by the ant horde um
is war worse than actually being decimated. About it, well,
I guess it depends on 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
(31:10):
be killed just to be disassembled out right? 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, like beetles, that survived
by mimicking ants and just sort of like hanging out
among the ants trying to be undetected. But this was
(31:33):
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 right under or
over their very jaws. So they hang out on the
ant head, eating the food that the ant is carrying. Again,
(31:54):
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 that are made possible by the
opportunities created by the chaos of a rating army. Yeah,
(32:15):
in a way, you kind of have to come back
to that that analogy of the superorganism, right, that the
the ant colony is what we might think of as
the individual, Like the ant colony is the body, and
so it is going to have its own parasites, It's
going to have its own uh symbiotic relationships and uh
and and that's kind of what we're seeing here. Absolutely,
(32:36):
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, we're back. So we've already
(32:59):
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 that really makes them interesting, uh,
(33:20):
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 types here. So if you're fielding droids,
(33:41):
for instance, on on on in 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 ecka droidka um roly poly guy.
If you're playing something like Warhammer, forty thousand. It's not
(34:03):
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 that's
what we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front
line and there these are just weak and hopeless, uh
individuals against adversaries. But there are tons of them, so
(34:25):
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 variety of this ant, but it's like a
it's a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some
of these individuals print the majors compared to the miners.
(34:49):
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 fantasy armies, like I'm thinking about some
of the big specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor.
(35:12):
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. If we're to
multiply that by five hundred, you're talking thirty four tons.
So in the real world, that's essentially the difference between
(35:32):
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. And it's
best I can tell based on some fan estimates. You
(35:54):
might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial stormtrooper
and one of those two legged a t ST walkers.
That would be the difference between a Marauder minor aunt
and a Marauder major aunt. This is what Mafata writes.
Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Ryans assure a
low mortality for the media's and the majors, which require
(36:17):
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
you'r a T S T S. Those are far more precious. Yeah,
that will they cost more to make? Yeah. Mafata also
(36:38):
points out that 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. He
also points out that marauders use what is known in
(37:00):
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,
tearing each other apart, and in contests that tend to
(37:23):
be even more brutal than the interspecies conflicts that also
take place. I'm gonna get to some of the logic
behind the differences in 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
tactics of these ants in particular is consistent with Lanchester's
square law, an equation developed in World War One by
(37:46):
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. Keep
coming back to the fantasy warfare now. So, Lanchester's laws
are a set of mathematical models trying to explain outcomes
(38:07):
in battle based on various kinds of initial force disparities. 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 of combat.
(38:28):
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 main takeaway is
(38:52):
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 its target, you can
(39:16):
work out that after one second of battle, both forces
will be reduced equally by about maybe after another second, etcetera.
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 one side gets an advantage early on.
(39:37):
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 much of an advantage the larger force has.
(39:58):
So if if you have the know the same kind
of thing working, after the first second, your hundred droids
will probably have destroyed roughly half of your opponent's 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 and more, until what you're left with in
(40:22):
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 droids than to win one single battle
(40:43):
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 multiplied by the square uh. In fact,
if you choose your battles wisely, you can even use
(41:05):
this to allow a smaller force to beat a bigger one.
So if you've got a hundred battle droids, general Grievas
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
(41:25):
this is 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
(41:46):
the number of units. And 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 conflict in narratives like
(42:12):
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, you're John
Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective enemies ganging
up on them. And for many types of combat, this
(42:32):
is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are significantly
more important than skills, Like better to have five hundred
off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah,
it 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
(42:55):
the tide of battle against against the faceless hord. Yeah yeah.
And we should not 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
(43:16):
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
(43:38):
enforced linear law scenarios 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 becomes
(44:00):
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 reduce
(44:21):
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 the size of forces and
the outcome, or is it the square model where the
(44:43):
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 how House in Klaus Jaffa called ant Wars Combat
(45:03):
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 Agata 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 recruiting
(45:27):
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 to do
(45:49):
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 been
(46:11):
solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated by
the square law. Along these lines, Mofa 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
(46:34):
trails with old and or maimed workers and in fire ants,
it's been observed that the old stay and fight, while
the very young runaway and and firemants 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
(46:54):
colony as a single superorganism. It's like it's it's putting
the the already day imaged 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 Aunt
War is heating up. Uh, we're gonna have to close
(47:17):
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.
(47:40):
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
(48:02):
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
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