June 18, 2020 • 45 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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part three of our Aunt Wars episodes. Now.
In the previous episodes, we've already covered a ton of
(00:23):
different topics, the evolution of you social insects like ants um.
We talked about the conflicts between army, ants and and
everything in their path. We talked about theories of combat
disparities and how those may apply to ants and and
control the ways that's aunts sometimes select which members of
the colony go out to fight. We talked about the bivouax,
(00:44):
the big war rig for the Queen made out of
army ants um. It's been it's been a great journey
so far, but we have to press on. That's right.
Uh So, one thing I want to talk about it
at the very start here is the idea of empires
of the ants, because, as with human civilizations, apparently it's
the larger ant societies that spread the most violence. Smaller
(01:07):
ant societies are less likely to engage in any kind
of protracted war against other ant species. But but here's
an interesting point raised by entomologists Shaun O'Donnell in Ant
Wars for Serious Science. Some species of highly successful invasive
ants demonstrate unicolonality. Uh. They develop a willingness to identify
(01:28):
members of other colonies as part of their own, and
the result is a super colony, a true empire of
the ants. Yeah. We discuss the super colony adaptation in
our episodes about the multiple species of ants known as
crazy ants, and this name comes from their rapid, almost
frantic or radic looking movements sometimes when you like, if
(01:51):
you watch video of them moving around on the ground,
it almost looks like flies buzzing around. It looks like
they're flying. Yeah, it's it's it's visual, at least to us,
starkly different from the sort of you know, linear lines
were used to seeing for ants. Yeah, but the super
coloniality issue came up in our episodes on the mystery
of crazy ants supposedly being attracted to electricity or electrical appliances.
(02:15):
Remember that where we were talking about all those stories
people had of like the their TV being full of
crazy ants and people didn't know why that was happening.
That was, of course the raspberry crazy ant of the
genus Nylanderia, and then we also talked about them in
our episodes on Christmas Island. Remember it was the invasive
species of crazy ant known as yellow crazy ants or
(02:35):
an apolo Lepis grass sillipps that was severely threatening the
Christmas Island crabs. It was actually colonies of those ants
that were spraying formic acid into the eyes of the
crabs and into the leg joints until they were immobilized,
and then the ants just eat them. And there was
an interesting project to try to introduce a species of
(02:56):
insect there too Christmas Island that would help cut down
on the populations of invasive ants. But anyway, it's the
tendency for crazy ants to form super colonies that is
considered one factor in their success as an invasive species. UM.
You know. So they're super colonial, meaning that when colonies
of the same species meet one another, instead of duking
(03:19):
it out and going to battle with one another, they
just act as if they were from the same colony.
They team up instead of antagonizing one another. Um. And
there are examples where people think they've detected gigantic super
colonies of these ants. One that we read in one
of those previous episodes was a New York Times article
that that quotes Edward Lebrun, who's an ecologist at the
(03:41):
University of Texas at Austin UM, and he apparently believes
that there was a single super colony in the Texas
town called Iowa Colony. I know, that's confusing because we're
talking about ant colonies and it's in Texas, not Iowa.
But that's a town. It's called Iowa Colony. And he
believes that there was a super colony of Crazy. It's
occupying up to forty two hundred acres in that town
(04:04):
and spreading two hundred meters a year in every direction.
But that's by no means the only Aunt supercolony that's
been found there. There are other species and other super
colonies that have been found all over the continents. That's right.
Mark W. Moten mentioned an extremely large super colony of
Argentine Aunt that ranges from San Francisco to the Mexican border.
(04:26):
Trillions strong and united. It's a it's a super colony,
and wars rage just perpetually along its borders. He writes.
Each month, millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that
extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with
three other colonies and wars that may have been going
on since the species arrived in the state a century ago. Wow.
(04:49):
And these wars, as we've discussed in our previous episodes,
that are far from random thrashings of aunt brutality. Uh.
These are wars that align with some of the same
mathematics and tactics and principles that we see at play
in human military history. And we have another example of
this to consider. Another interesting parallel that's drawn between the
wars of ants and the wars of humans, and that
(05:12):
is uh, the the the this thing that we refer
to as ant tournaments or ant tournament sites. Wow. So
for starters, you might need to dismiss whatever sort of
Mortal Kombat scenario is entering your mind here at the
thought of an ant tournament. Yeah, but don't worry, because
the reality is much cooler than just like a single
(05:33):
or double elimination tournament for ants. Uh. So here's the
Here's an example that Moffatt, EO. Wilson and others bring
up frequently, and that is honey pot ants. Now, these
ants are astonishing creatures in their own right, even before
you get to the tournament issue. Uh. Their their way
of storing food is something that you must see for yourself.
(05:54):
You you should look up video of them. Yeah, because
their name honey pot ants. Because what happens is the
workers will the workers have the ability to gorge themselves
unto their abdomens are enormously swelled and they look like
little honeypots, uh, just filled with liquid food. So instead
of storing excess food within a stash within the colony
(06:15):
like a lot of ants do, uh, the honey pot
ants store it within themselves in these little mobile depositories
that are themselves and swollen workers that we call replets.
And then if if you're another ant in the colony
you need a little food, will you come up to
one of the repletes uh? And I believe you, like
you can touch their antenna and just the right way
(06:36):
and they'll regurgitate up some food for you. You you you,
you poke your nestmate and it will barf up your dinner. Yeah.
They're like little vending machines. Ah. And I see you
included a picture of this in our in our notes
here for me to look at, Joe. They're wondrous, they're beautiful.
They do look like little drugs. They're so swollen they
look like droplets of honey, or like extremely golden chickpeas.
(06:59):
They're they're back lit in this image that I've shared
with Robert, and it makes their swollen abdomens look like
bits of amber. Now, in addition to this, there are
there are other wrinkles to their their peculiarity. So they're
highly territorial. They frequently prey on foraging termites, and should
two different groups of honey pot ants happen upon the
(07:19):
same resource, a tournament begins to determine who shall claim it.
So what happens is the workers from each colony circle
around each other, standing up as high as possible on
their legs, behavior that biologists called stilting. So yes, what
they're doing is they're trying to look as imposing as possible,
as large as possible. And basically the idea here seems
(07:42):
to be that that that the larger colonies of honey
pot ants tend to have larger individuals. So it's not
only a show of immediate force, like hey, look how
big we are to get away from our resources. It's
also a show of what kind of backup forces you
have uh to call in. That's interesting. So it's just
(08:02):
like you can almost count on the fact that if
if this ant is big, all of her buddies are
big too. Yeah. It actually reminds me a little bit
of the Imperial invasion of hot and the Empire strikes
back with the deployment of those enormous A T eighties uh,
which I recently saw described online as quote a giant
impractical terror weapon. Absolutely, Why the legs? Why make your
(08:27):
all terrain attack vehicles so vulnerable to a simple harpoon
and tow cable? These these tall spindle legs make no sense. Well, yeah,
if you think too hard about it. But as my
my son was recently telling me, we were watching the
Clone War series and he said, you know, walkers are
just always cool. It doesn't matter which side they're on,
They're just cool. And it's true. But but I think
(08:48):
also you can look at it like, yes, it's a
it's an impractical terror weapon. It sends a message, Hey,
we're the Empire and we have resources on this scale
at our disposal, so you'd best just abandoned the ice anitis.
And so that's what the weaker honeypot and force ends
up doing this whole tournament. Uh. Practice limits the need
for conflict and avoids the need for full scale and war.
(09:11):
The smaller ant army flees, but much like the rebel alliance,
they have to be darn sure that the forces there
uh they're seeding to don't follow them and trace them
to their primary base, because the larger honeypot force will
attempt to do this and they will not hesitate to
follow them back to their colony, decimate that colony, and
(09:33):
then enslave the swollen repletes as their own food stores. Now,
this is really interesting, the idea that they make this
display and try and make a calculation about whether it's
worthwhile to fight. It's something that goes against the naive
version of the nature red and tooth and claw idea
that you know, animals are just always fighting and killing
each other. It's always a violent struggle for survival. I
(09:55):
don't know how you could quantify this, but my gut
feeling is that the vast majority of conflicts in nature
never come to violence. There are displays between animals and
then one side backs down. Yeah, I believe we've talked
about this before. And discussing like animal weapons and animal violence.
(10:16):
Is that, you know, how often does one animal outright
kill another? You know it? I mean certainly in predation. Yeah,
apart from predation, like the idea of two animals fighting
to the death in a scenario where one is not
trying to eat the other is is more of a rarity.
But even so, It's like if you have a t
rex and a triceratops, Like the t rex wants to
(10:37):
kill the the triceratops in this scenario, but it of
course does not want to be killed itself the you know,
so it would potentially fight to the death. But on
the other hand, they try Steratops doesn't want to eat
the t rex. It just wants to not be eaten
by the t rex. Yeah, I mean, it just brings
to mind the fact that animals they don't want to
(10:59):
lose a con licked, but probably even more than that,
they don't want to die. And so if if things
are not looking like a like a pretty clear wind
for them, they will very often just back down and
try to get away. Now EO. Wilson and biologists Burnt
a Whole Dobbler have have compared this tournament scenario to
these symbolic battles and the highlands of New Guinea, the
(11:21):
initial phase of of a of a battle or war
in which the two sides square off at a distance,
and what they'll do. Yeah, this so the scrap at
a distance. They're not gonna immediately, you know, rush into
each other like some sort of brave heart scenario. That's
cinematic um trope that we all have grown so used to. Instead,
they're gonna throw spears. They're gonna fire arrows at each other,
(11:43):
but with range and wooden shields in place, so there's
actually like a a low possibility for fatality. And from
here it might give way to a heated, closer battle,
but the its aggressions might actually end right here. And
this apparently is something that one sees throughout the history
of human conflict, especially when it concerns smaller clans of fighters,
(12:08):
because such groups like this simply don't have the resources
to enter freely into a state of total warfare. Yeah,
I think that state is more common, as we were
talking about earlier, in in like larger empires where you
also have you know, the army that arrives on the
battlefield also has the force of like a huge state
behind it that will not let it walk away. It's
(12:30):
a you know that that maybe the emperor back home
is not going to be pleased. If you see that
this battle doesn't look good for you and decide it's
better not to fight, yes, you'll find that he's not
as forgiving, right. So yeah, I think this is obviously
a smart strategy, and there's a reason humans do this
and ants do this. It makes sense to try to
(12:50):
avoid conflict if you can. I also can't help but
wonder if there's a comparison to be made here. And
this is just me, this is not any of these
other commentators that I've read. They might have gotten into this,
and maybe I just haven't read it, But I wonder
if you can make a comparison here to the proxy
wars between superpowers in the human world. You know, human
cases in which each side certainly has immense resources, but
(13:13):
in which case the destructive potential of atomic weaponry essentially
reduces both sides to smaller, more vulnerable clans on their
respective hillsides. There was something I was trying to look
up because this also made me think of the at
least epic literary tradition of the champion warfare. That is,
(13:34):
you know, you read about it in the Iliad. It
shows up actually in a lot of of ancient epics
and stuff where armies will meet, but instead of you know,
the whole armies clashing with one another, they will each
select their greatest fighter and then those two will fight
a duel that is supposed to, at least in some cases,
symbolically settle the outcome of the fight. So think of
(13:56):
Hector versus Achilles. And I was looking for example, was
do ants ever do this? So I was trying to
find examples of champion warfare among ants, but I couldn't
find anything. I don't know if you've come across anything
like that. But if there were an example of something
like that, that would be really interesting, that would man that. Yeah,
I didn't read anything about that in the sources I
(14:19):
was looking at it. I wonder how that would have
something like that would evolve. You know, it's kind of
hard to imagine being a real state of affairs without
I don't know, I guess symbolic thinking among I mean,
maybe that is something that would be limited. I mean,
it's even more than that. It's seems like something that's
more limited to epic poetry and storytelling than than happens
(14:43):
in real life. Right, it kind of brings maybe it's
the kind of story that makes the most sense for
people that are so centered on the individual, you know,
like here is the individual in the war, the individual
that is changing the course of the battle. That sort
of thing um, and it enables you to to take
larger scenarios of battle that are more difficult to fathom
(15:04):
and putting them in a one on one scenario, like
in the last episode we were talking about the Lanchester
square law. You know, we can you know, we can
certainly imagine that in our head with forces of on
one side versus the other. But then you can also
put it in the scenario of David and Goliath, right,
and there you instantly have this very individual based story
of smaller force and larger force. Even though it tells
(15:26):
it ultimately tells a story like if we were to
take that and extrapolate it to just a smaller force
against a larger force, uh, per those laws we were discussing,
that makes no sense, Like ultimately the Goliath force is
going to win unless there is some sort of crazy
you know, outside context event, right, or I mean it
depends on conditions, right, because not all combat is equivalent,
(15:49):
but yeah, generally. All right, on that note, we're going
to take a quick break, but when we come back,
we will get into some of these specialized units of
the ant war. All right, we're back, Robert. When you
were a kid, did you get one of those Star
Wars visual encyclopedias and just like devour all of the
(16:10):
different types of Star Wars stormtroopers that we never saw
in the movies. Because in the movies you see the
main storm troopers. You see the ones in the snow
with like the big robes and capes almost I guess
that's to keep warm or something. But then I remember
reading about these other types that never show up in
the movies, like lava troopers or something. I don't know.
(16:31):
Did you never read about this? Uh No, I've never
heard of lava troopers. Um. I mean, I'm trying. I'm
only vaguely remembering, but it seemed very interesting to me.
I was like, why isn't there a movie about that?
I mean, it's it's drawing on the idea that, of course,
you would have different types of specialized units for different
terrain yeah, I, uh Star Wars specific I never had
that book, but certainly just by virtue of being into
(16:55):
like miniature war games and even even you know, playing
of games I don't play, or collecting, I love to
just pour over the army list like okay, here your
here your ranking files, and okay, here your specialist. Here
you're you're fast moving troops. Here are you're heavy troops.
Here are your infiltration units. Here you're close combat units.
There's there's something um yeah, just just endlessly appealing about
(17:18):
about going through the rank and file of a system
like that totally. Uh. And of course it shouldn't come
as any surprise that many different kinds of ants have
their own specialized units. Yes, absolutely, So we're gonna discuss
some of these. We're not gonna be of course, we're
not gonna be able to really do justice to the
entire rich diversity of the ant world, you know, plenty
of which is still being discovered and is yet to
(17:40):
be uh discovered by scientists. Uh, but we'll touch on
some highlights here that are known. So first I want
to talk a little bit about specialized defenses. Uh. You know,
we've talked so much about offense with ants. Uh, but
but sometimes said there is a particular defensive strategy in
mind as well. Zoologist and entomologist Sean O'Donnell points out
(18:00):
that leaf cutter ants and army ants are both dominant
ants species, and when they wage war, those wars can
wage for days. So it's a it's a classic matchup
in many respects, right, It's a ravaging warriors on one
side and foraging agriculturists on the other. Right, So you
would think of the army answers primarily like rating carnivores
that are on the attack, and the leaf cutter ants
(18:22):
are there their cultivators of their environment, right, Yeah, So
leaf cutter ants very famously depend on their workers. They
have to go out, they have to cut the leaf portions,
bring the leaf portions back, and then those leaf portions
are used to grow their precious fruit crop, which is
a fungus I believe, right, Yeah, fungus that is uh
if I remember correctly, extinct in the wild is purely
(18:44):
domesticated by ants long before humans came on the scene. Unbelievable.
So it's mostly the work of these you know, these
female workers. But there they do have a cast of
larger soldiers, and apparently they were something of a mystery
for a while. Researchers would look at them and they
would ask, what are these guys for. They don't seem
to be doing anything, they don't seem to have a purpose.
(19:04):
But by seating army and invasions in leaf cutter nests,
researchers were able to discover that they seem to be
specialists just for army ant invasions, sent to the front
lines by the thousands uh to in an attempt to
defend the colony. Even though it does seem like they
tend to fail in the end, but I mean even
(19:25):
in cases where they fail, it's possible they could be say,
buying time for the rest of the colony. Yeah, and
it's interesting to look at that. That's that reality in
terms of how other ant species deal with army ants,
because apparently you very roughly you kind of have you
have two extremes. On one hand, those who just put
up a fight, they're like army answer attacking, We're going
(19:46):
to fight them back, We're gonna give it everything we have.
But then you also have some varieties of ants that
evacuate everybody at the first sign of an attack. The
army answer coming, So pack it all up. We're getting
out of here. But then they can move back in
after the invaders have left, because their army ants they're
not gonna live there. They're not gonna hang out in
your colony and wait for you to come back. They're
(20:06):
they're they're here for the goods, and if the goods
are not here, they have to keep moving. Now here's
another just super interesting adaptation. Um. In the last episode,
I mentioned Douglas j Emlin's book Animal Weapons, which deals
with the evolution of bioweapons and organisms as well as
the development of tool based weapons and humans, and he
(20:26):
discusses the feodole aunt genus, in which individuals fall into
various casts. So there, of course the reproductive male and females.
They're the small workers, they're larger workers. And then there
are the soldiers and the soldiers of this genus boast
quote grossly enlarged heads, jaws, and teeth. These are these
(20:47):
a particular ants are also known as the big headed ants.
But then he also goes on to discuss another genus
of ants. This is Odonto marcus uh, the trap jaw
ants whose lock and release jawstra uture functions a lot
like a mantis shrimp. You know, there's all this stored
potential energy like a crossbow that has been pulled back
(21:08):
and locked. So when these jaws shut on these trap
jaw ants, they can shut it speeds a one hundred
and forty three miles per hour, so they slam shut
really fast. Right, and here's where it gets That was
a stupid restatement of what you said, but let's keep it. Okay, Yes,
very very fast, especially on this scale too. Right. Um,
(21:31):
but but here's where he gets even more interason. This
is where he gets kind of cunning because the trap
jaw ants, of course, they can release this bite at
their adversaries, but they can also unleash this bite at
the ground and in doing so launch themselves backwards through
the air twenty body lengths as a successful escape tactic.
(21:52):
So this reminds me of indungeons and dragons. There's this
ability that rogues have called the cunning action ability that
allows them to effect actively disengage in backtrack out of battle,
so they're able to strike it an enemy and then
get out of there really quick of so the enemy
can't smite them back the next round. Um. Yeah, Yeah,
it's it's so it's it's crazy to think. It's almost
(22:13):
like they have jet packs these ants. Yeah, I was
trying to think of what a what a human technological
comparison would be. I was thinking about, like, I guess
escape pods or ejector seats from fighter planes, or or
just like maybe like it's kind of like a sky hook.
Maybe a plane flies over just picks you up. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't even know if there is truly a direct
(22:36):
because when we're when we're talking about retreat and effectively, um,
you know, backing your forces out in a military scenario.
I mean generally it's a very delicate situation with with
with human military forces. I can't think of anything offhand
it seems like a direct parallel to this. Now, a
lot of ants boast chemical weapons. We touched on this
(22:56):
in the very first episode where we talked about the
basic evolution of ants, in which early on it seems
like you had more like powerful stings that were aimed
at large pit for instance, vertebrate threats to the the ants.
But then the the evolutionary pressure becomes more focused on
uh at warfare, and there so therefore you see all
(23:18):
these various um adaptations emerge where it's more about waging
war against ants, and sometimes it takes a place of
new chemical weapons that they may use. So a very
famous one, of course would be formic acid. The word
formic coming from the word for ants formic a day. Yeah,
and so that's what we see with the the formic
(23:39):
acid of the formica would ants. So these ants can
spray formic acid from the tips of their abdomen. In fact,
formic acid was first extracted in six seventy one by
the English naturalist John Ray. Is John Ray, the guy
we talked about who was doing the experiments with with
ants and formic acid and was comparing it to urine.
I don't think it is. I had to pull him
(24:01):
up and granted a lot of these individuals with portraits
from from the late seventeen early eighteenth century, UH kind
of look the same to me. But um, I don't
think we touched on him before. Could be wrong, But anyway,
the formic acid of these ants that this is a
great example of one variety of of reverally in and
(24:22):
of itself, amazing chemical weapons that have been developed by
UH that have evolved in these ants species. But there
are even more exotic examples to look at, and in
this we're getting into the topic of exploding ants, which
this is so good. Yeah, and this is a lot
of you probably heard about about examples of this before,
(24:43):
because I mean, it's just such an amazing topic and
it's certainly made the rounds in science communication and science journalism.
Uh and in fact, I think we've probably mentioned it
on the show in the past. However, we're going to
touch on some new stuff as well here, like the
new findings new species that have been discovered just in
the last uh year or so so um well, one
in one example that comes up a lot is uh
(25:04):
Camponatis sunders of Malaysia and Brunei, whose bodies are riddled
with poison sacks, and so when they attack. When they're attacked,
they constrict and rupture, fatally, forcing sticky poison out of
their mouth, anus and through their exoskeleton. And again, don't
think of this as of the individual in this scenario,
Think of the group. Think of the colony, the good
(25:27):
of the colony. So this is a situation where the
individual is a biological weapon and they can readily sacrifice
themselves to do damage against or in some way slow
down an invading species. Yeah. I mean again, think of
the colony as an organism. So this is sort of
like an animal with poison skin. The ant is sort
(25:49):
of like the skin of the poison arrow frog, right,
And but in this case they can they can like
bear down and burst themselves like a like a like
a cooked sausage, you know. Uh, yeah, exactly. Uh. This
is called autopsis, and it's involved independently in a number
(26:13):
of termite species as well. But uh, but you see
different varieties of it the kind of shed light on
how this seems to have evolved. So sometimes you'll have
an autopsis utilizing species it simply defecates on their enemies.
Get too close and I'm going to poop onto you.
Other times you see it more a situation where they're, uh,
(26:34):
they're bearing down, like they're pooping so hard that they're
going to ruptures or abdomen. And from this we get
into sort of more exaggerated modes of just absolute abdominal explosion.
And in fact, like I was saying, there's a there's
a nice new example of this that's come out. I
was just reading in April Establishments published in Zoo Keys
(26:55):
via lacity at all about another variety of exploding at
known as uh Colobopsis explodings explodons. I love this explodings
a k a. Yellow do ants, but we're just gonna
call him explodings because that's that's clearly where the fun is.
So this is a wonderfully fascinating species because minor workers
(27:18):
in the colony have this exploding ability. Uh. They can
burst themselves into this yellow chemical goo that is kind
of like a spice that you know, again will kill
or slow down or or aggravate damage an invader. But
then they also have um have these larger major type
workers and they're referred to as door keepers because they
(27:40):
have quote big plug shaped heads which they use to
block intruders in the tunnels. Pause to appreciate this for
a moment. So this is something that other species event
have have a version of this too, specialized members that
essentially have a locked door for ahead. It's like this
is a sinating bio mechanical way to raise the drawbridge
(28:03):
on your colony. Right, These would be ants that have dug,
you know, excavated colonies with tunnels, and the ants themselves
to become part of the defensive structure by closing the
entrances of the tunnels with their heads. Yeah, this is amazing.
I also point out I believe there's another variety of
ant that seals its entrances with stones, and we'll get
into some stone examples here in a bet. But I
(28:26):
want to get back to explodings though. So this is
a particularly elegant adaptation for defense. But it also, at
least on the surface, seems to buck the trend we
see earlier with marauder ants. For the marauders, the majors
of the big guns, they're the A T S T
s that move into tear apart enemies that have been
bogged down amid the individually less impressive miners. For explodons,
(28:48):
the majors are the plug heads, so they functioned mostly
as barricade engines. Perhaps you know, one can make a
loose comparison to like a mobile field generator in Star
Wars or something. In with explodings. The majors rarely leave
the nest. They're they're purely domestic defenses. It's the miners, however,
that packed the explosive punch that are that are self detonating,
(29:11):
uh sacrificing themselves UH ending their lives in an attempt
to strike out against the invaders. So these are literally
suicide missions. Yeah yeah, Like what apparently will happen is
um Like with the Marauder miners, the Explodings miners are
indeed the first wave. So there's an attack on the
(29:32):
nest then they pour into battle. They latch onto an
enemy with their mandibles, and then they hold their abdomen
close to their grappled enemy. Then they bear down and
they burst oozing out of a thick spiced yellow goo
that again either kills them or hinders the attacker. And
then again the marauder style, the Explodings majors burst in
(29:53):
with their plug heads to barricade the tunnels against increased invasion.
And I guess one of the interesting things to think
about year is that we're really getting into a whole
specialized realm evant warfare, defensive warfare fought within the nest um,
you know, defensive urban warfare UH specialists here tunnel warfare specialists,
which is something of course we see tunnel warfare and
(30:16):
urban warfare in human scenarios. And it makes me think
back to the linear Lanchester's linear loft that we discussed
in the last episode Yeah again as a refresher, the
linear law tends to apply more to UH conflicts that
are close something closer to a series of sequential duels,
where a force with larger numbers can't use the square
(30:39):
power of those larger numbers too easily overwhelm smaller forces. Uh.
You use defenses to your advantage to try to limit
the scope of how much battle can take place at
the same time. And a classic way to do this
is to create choke points to create tunnels. Yeah. And
so this species would seem a master at chuckpoints. So
you're you're pouring into their uh to their home, and
(31:01):
you've got, you know, hundreds of of soldier ants that
their at their disposal. Like they have numbers on their side,
but they have specialists that can explode uh and a
specialists that can seal off the tunnel. UH. So, which
it gives us seems to give them, uh, you know,
more or less equal footing with the invaders. And I
want to stress again that explode ens is a newly
(31:22):
discovered variety of self sacrificing aunt first written about in
and so more remains to be explored about them, but
also in general. It just drives home how many aunt
species are out there in the world that we just
that we haven't fully documented yet, how many, how many
strange and wonderful adaptations are out there, They just simply
(31:43):
haven't been chronicled yet. Isn't that amazing? Just just to
know that there's so much more to learn that will
be things like this, just bizarre, amazing adaptations that already exist.
It's not like they're gonna come into being in the future.
I mean, obviously new species will come into being. They're
already out there. We just never looked at them before,
(32:03):
or never at least never documented them in a in
a thorough way. Absolutely. All right, on that note, we're
gonna take one last break, but when we come back
we'll discuss the Stone Age tactics of bicolor ants. Than
all right, we're back. So the next variety of and
I want to touch on is the dory Meyer mix
(32:24):
bicolor ants. So if you have the higher ground, you
know all you need is gravity and mass. Right, soldiers
can defend cliffs or the walls of a castle by
dropping stones on the heads of attackers. But of course
you can also go on the offense particularly via the
technologies and the human realm of bombardment. An enemy might
drop things such as stones, bodies, or explosives upon an
(32:47):
enemy city. Yeah, in the human realm. I mean, one
way you can think about the evolution of an air
force is that it is a it is a force
evolved to give you permanent high ground. Uh. And sometimes
ants definitely take advantage of this. In particular, these dory
miromix by color ants of arizona um previously known as
Cono mirma by color ants, they were discovered back in
(33:10):
nineteen seventy nine by Moglik and Alpert to actually use
small stones to drop um on their adversaries. Basically ant
tool use. Yeah, now, I mean, I guess when you
think about aunt tool use, you do have to like
take a step back and think about what ants are
(33:31):
always doing their manipulating, uh, the soil. They're manipulating little
grains of sand and moving them around, and this is
just kind of a byproduct of that. What are else
are you doing with those pieces of the ground. So basically,
the researchers back in seventy nine observed that workers surrounding
(33:52):
the nest would pick up small stones and other objects
and drop them down the nest entrances of rival nests
that were reasonably close by. Now, comparing it to bombardment
might be a bit much, but it is at the
very least active interference in a competitors industry, So so
perhaps one might think of it more as uh like
(34:13):
industrial sabotage. I don't know, I mean, it's it seems
like that would sort of count. I mean, it's using
gravity and high ground to your advantage in the attack
on the enemy's infrastructure. So in many ways it seems
a lot like bombing or shelling. Yeah, yeah, I mean
I think you could make an argument for it. Again,
going back to our first episode, nothing in the ant
(34:33):
world is gonna be one to one right with the
human world. But uh, like Moffatt said, you know, good comparisons,
you know, worthy comparisons are not going to be direct
one to once. But there are a few other possible
cases of soil and pebble based tool used by ants um,
which again shouldn't be really all that surprising given their
intense manipulation of the Earth. Four sixty five paper from
(34:58):
Lynn at All reported paved and ants using soil to
attack bees and the desert harvester ant will apparently drop
bits of soil into honey water and then carry the
soil particles back as a way to bring the honey
water to the nest. This was This was via a
study conducted eighty four by Philip McDonald of the New
(35:20):
York Intomological Society, and it it seems to be related
to the similar use of of of soil to cover
up liquids that ants cannot just outright remove. Okay, So
the idea here is that you come across a liquid
food source that you want to bring back to the nest.
You obviously you can't carry liquid the same way you
(35:42):
could carry like a part of another insect's body back
is food, so they will pour like soil into the
liquid to create a sponge full of sugar, and then
carry that soil sponge, the sugary soil sponge back towards
the queen. That seems to be the case here. Now, Uh,
it's it's possible that this is something that more is
(36:04):
obvious in experimental scenarios. I'm not entirely certain on that,
but it certainly underlines like what is possible using the
properties of soil at that scale and Again, it seems
like the more uh usual activity that you see is
like there's some sort of sale poison or a chemical.
The ants don't know what to do with that. They
(36:25):
can't really interact with it directly, but they can put
soil on it. They can essentially bury it. They can
cover it up, like kicking soil onto a smoldering camp
fire or something. Yeah. So yeah, I would imagine that
these studies alleging some form of ant tool use, like
most of the studies alleging types of tool use and animals,
probably have encountered some dispute, you know about interpretation of
(36:47):
the behaviors. Uh. That seems like that always comes up.
Now here's another one that's pretty interesting. This is an
example brought up by moffat Uh concerning the so called
slave maker ants. So slave making is also known is
u duosis in the biology world. So these are cases
where you'll have ants that are brood parasites that in
(37:09):
some species rely on the practice absolutely, but another species
are not obligate slave makers. So basically what they do
is they invade a colony, they capture the brood of
another ant. Usually they're capturing the young and generally it
is a very specific species that they're focusing on, and
then they bring those young back to their own nest
(37:31):
where they're made to work, while members of the slave
maker species itself just focus on rating more nests for
more workers. Now, Moffatt shares that while slave making ants
are generally heavily armored, heavily armed with superior fighting abilities,
some species use a propaganda chemical uh is the term
(37:52):
he uses to throw off the enemy during raids. Uh.
So you have to think about this, right. You may
be big and strong, but it goes back to that
linear law that if you're going in to invade a colony,
if you're gonna go into the thick of it, then
great armor, great weapons, that's only gonna get you so
far if you're outnumbered. But if you have some sort
(38:14):
of chemical um advantage, if you're able to trick the
others into thinking you're supposed to be there, then do
you have an enormous advantage. Doesn't matter about their superior numbers.
And so in these cases, these propaganda chemical using slave
maker ants, they can often carry all of this out
without any fighting or killing taking place. You know, it's
(38:37):
not just forms of rival ants there. It almost seems
like there is a whole genre across different types of
animals that's just adaptations for the safe infiltration of ant colonies. Yeah,
Mermica philes. So the the whole classification of animals that
have have come to depend upon the ants and in
(39:00):
many cases use some sort of chemical signal to trick
the colon into thinking they're supposed to be there. Now
here's another example just of of general sort of ant
war um strategies that is that has brought up mof
it brings this one up as well. Uh, weaver ants.
So we've answered not merely an army on the move,
but they hold and control territory. They spread their workers
(39:23):
out across it and then focus resources around key choke points.
They even establish leafy barrack nests in the crowns of trees.
And Moffatt points out that that we've answered therefore less
rigid compared to army ants. Quote. Weavers, in contrast, wander
more freely and are more versatile in their response to
opportunities and threats. The difference in style calls to mind
(39:45):
the contrast between the rigidity of Frederick the Great's armies
and the flexibility and mobility of Napoleon Bonaparte troops. That's interesting. Yeah.
So so the idea is that if a weaver aunt
does encounter a problem in the empire, he uses their
recruitment pheromone to call in reinforcements from the immediate area,
as opposed to just having like one war gang ravaging
(40:07):
around the territory. So, again, these are not This is
not an attempt to create an exhaustive list of all
the amazing adaptations that ants have developed to wage wars
against each other defend against each other, but hopefully it
helps provide uh more of an idea of the rich
diversity out there. This is one of my favorite types
of topics that that frequently comes up on the show.
(40:29):
It's one of those where you feel like you've gotten
just a tiny glimpse, you know, behind through through a
curtain or through a window into a vast uh you know,
mansion of possibilities and and and rich relationships, uh that
that you don't even think about most of your waking hours,
that you know that the world is just shocking. Yeah. Absolutely,
(40:53):
and um and I think it's really interesting to look
at the work of of your Wilson mof it uh
and others when they compare ants to the human world,
Because on one hand, it helps us better understand the ants, right,
you know, that's how humans work. Like, if we can
see ourselves reflected to some degree and another organism, then
(41:15):
we can understand that organism better, even if it's you know,
we're kind of anthropomorphizing to get there. But then on
the other hand, it does seem like we potentially have
a lot to learn about what we are, right, we're
getting into, you know, the sociobiology of V. O. Wilson
or can or you know, certainly Moffatt gets into this
a lot in his book The Human Swarm, where he's
(41:36):
he's he's not just looking at the ant world, he's
he's moving from there into the human world and trying
to make sense of what we're doing. Yeah, and of course,
you know, we're we're incredibly different creatures than ants, but
some of the same resource dynamics and things like that
are always going to be in play no matter what
species you're talking about. Yeah. In that E. O. Wilson documentary,
(41:57):
I believe he shares this quote, Uh, he said, quote
the real problem of humanity is the following. We have
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology, and it is
terrifyingly dangerous and it is now approaching a point of
crisis overall. I think in many ways that's true, and
it brings to mind, you know, something that's been sort
(42:18):
of simmering for me throughout these episodes is that what
I would hope we could learn by by looking at
the warfare of other organized species like you social insects,
and uh, comparing that to to get perspective on human
life is not that we learn how better to wage
war through it, but maybe how not to wage war
(42:39):
and how to avoid war. Yeah. Yeah, there's sort of
the lesson that we don't need to live like ants. Um.
I mean, because ants, for all the comparisons we've made,
you know, they're they're free of these human burdens that
we mentioned, you know, they're emotionless. There, their ways, while
comparable to human institutions in some way, are free of
institutional constraints or Robert. While I agree with you in
(43:00):
a sense about that, though, I would I would be
careful about the idea that they're emotionless given our well true, yes,
our our invertebrate emotions episode. But yeah, we we don't know.
We don't think that they have complex inner lives the
way that we do, even though they have these internal
states that you could probably recognize as being something like
fear or joy. Possibly, right, Yeah, I mean I think
(43:22):
I have heard before. I forget who there was an entomology.
I don't think it was Wilson Um. Maybe it was
Moffett and an NPR piece talking about the watching ants
and feeling that some ants had almost a personality. So
you're you're correct, I shouldn't be too fast to dismiss
them as emotionless, though an individual ant soldier is well
(43:47):
far I think, far less of an individual than a
than a human. I think we can we can at
least focus on that um and then in terms of
like what they can do. I mean, certainly they are
a powerful force within the ecosystem. It's been observed that
if all humans died today, ants would can proceed just fine,
but if all the ants died, the world would be
(44:07):
in a state of absolute chaos. All right, we're gonna
go ahead and close it out right there. We hope
you've enjoyed this three part look at aunt warfare. But
obviously there's so so much in the ant world, we
can easily return. Probably we will return at some point
in the future to discuss ants once more, especially as
researchers continue to make new discoveries totally in the meantime,
(44:31):
if you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever
you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
We just asked that 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,
(44:51):
you can email us at contact that's Stuff to Blow
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part three of our Aunt Wars episodes. Now.
In the previous episodes, we've already covered a ton of
(00:23):
different topics, the evolution of you social insects like ants um.
We talked about the conflicts between army, ants and and
everything in their path. We talked about theories of combat
disparities and how those may apply to ants and and
control the ways that's aunts sometimes select which members of
the colony go out to fight. We talked about the bivouax,
(00:44):
the big war rig for the Queen made out of
army ants um. It's been it's been a great journey
so far, but we have to press on. That's right.
Uh So, one thing I want to talk about it
at the very start here is the idea of empires
of the ants, because, as with human civilizations, apparently it's
the larger ant societies that spread the most violence. Smaller
(01:07):
ant societies are less likely to engage in any kind
of protracted war against other ant species. But but here's
an interesting point raised by entomologists Shaun O'Donnell in Ant
Wars for Serious Science. Some species of highly successful invasive
ants demonstrate unicolonality. Uh. They develop a willingness to identify
(01:28):
members of other colonies as part of their own, and
the result is a super colony, a true empire of
the ants. Yeah. We discuss the super colony adaptation in
our episodes about the multiple species of ants known as
crazy ants, and this name comes from their rapid, almost
frantic or radic looking movements sometimes when you like, if
(01:51):
you watch video of them moving around on the ground,
it almost looks like flies buzzing around. It looks like
they're flying. Yeah, it's it's it's visual, at least to us,
starkly different from the sort of you know, linear lines
were used to seeing for ants. Yeah, but the super
coloniality issue came up in our episodes on the mystery
of crazy ants supposedly being attracted to electricity or electrical appliances.
(02:15):
Remember that where we were talking about all those stories
people had of like the their TV being full of
crazy ants and people didn't know why that was happening.
That was, of course the raspberry crazy ant of the
genus Nylanderia, and then we also talked about them in
our episodes on Christmas Island. Remember it was the invasive
species of crazy ant known as yellow crazy ants or
(02:35):
an apolo Lepis grass sillipps that was severely threatening the
Christmas Island crabs. It was actually colonies of those ants
that were spraying formic acid into the eyes of the
crabs and into the leg joints until they were immobilized,
and then the ants just eat them. And there was
an interesting project to try to introduce a species of
(02:56):
insect there too Christmas Island that would help cut down
on the populations of invasive ants. But anyway, it's the
tendency for crazy ants to form super colonies that is
considered one factor in their success as an invasive species. UM.
You know. So they're super colonial, meaning that when colonies
of the same species meet one another, instead of duking
(03:19):
it out and going to battle with one another, they
just act as if they were from the same colony.
They team up instead of antagonizing one another. Um. And
there are examples where people think they've detected gigantic super
colonies of these ants. One that we read in one
of those previous episodes was a New York Times article
that that quotes Edward Lebrun, who's an ecologist at the
(03:41):
University of Texas at Austin UM, and he apparently believes
that there was a single super colony in the Texas
town called Iowa Colony. I know, that's confusing because we're
talking about ant colonies and it's in Texas, not Iowa.
But that's a town. It's called Iowa Colony. And he
believes that there was a super colony of Crazy. It's
occupying up to forty two hundred acres in that town
(04:04):
and spreading two hundred meters a year in every direction.
But that's by no means the only Aunt supercolony that's
been found there. There are other species and other super
colonies that have been found all over the continents. That's right.
Mark W. Moten mentioned an extremely large super colony of
Argentine Aunt that ranges from San Francisco to the Mexican border.
(04:26):
Trillions strong and united. It's a it's a super colony,
and wars rage just perpetually along its borders. He writes.
Each month, millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that
extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with
three other colonies and wars that may have been going
on since the species arrived in the state a century ago. Wow.
(04:49):
And these wars, as we've discussed in our previous episodes,
that are far from random thrashings of aunt brutality. Uh.
These are wars that align with some of the same
mathematics and tactics and principles that we see at play
in human military history. And we have another example of
this to consider. Another interesting parallel that's drawn between the
wars of ants and the wars of humans, and that
(05:12):
is uh, the the the this thing that we refer
to as ant tournaments or ant tournament sites. Wow. So
for starters, you might need to dismiss whatever sort of
Mortal Kombat scenario is entering your mind here at the
thought of an ant tournament. Yeah, but don't worry, because
the reality is much cooler than just like a single
(05:33):
or double elimination tournament for ants. Uh. So here's the
Here's an example that Moffatt, EO. Wilson and others bring
up frequently, and that is honey pot ants. Now, these
ants are astonishing creatures in their own right, even before
you get to the tournament issue. Uh. Their their way
of storing food is something that you must see for yourself.
(05:54):
You you should look up video of them. Yeah, because
their name honey pot ants. Because what happens is the
workers will the workers have the ability to gorge themselves
unto their abdomens are enormously swelled and they look like
little honeypots, uh, just filled with liquid food. So instead
of storing excess food within a stash within the colony
(06:15):
like a lot of ants do, uh, the honey pot
ants store it within themselves in these little mobile depositories
that are themselves and swollen workers that we call replets.
And then if if you're another ant in the colony
you need a little food, will you come up to
one of the repletes uh? And I believe you, like
you can touch their antenna and just the right way
(06:36):
and they'll regurgitate up some food for you. You you you,
you poke your nestmate and it will barf up your dinner. Yeah.
They're like little vending machines. Ah. And I see you
included a picture of this in our in our notes
here for me to look at, Joe. They're wondrous, they're beautiful.
They do look like little drugs. They're so swollen they
look like droplets of honey, or like extremely golden chickpeas.
(06:59):
They're they're back lit in this image that I've shared
with Robert, and it makes their swollen abdomens look like
bits of amber. Now, in addition to this, there are
there are other wrinkles to their their peculiarity. So they're
highly territorial. They frequently prey on foraging termites, and should
two different groups of honey pot ants happen upon the
(07:19):
same resource, a tournament begins to determine who shall claim it.
So what happens is the workers from each colony circle
around each other, standing up as high as possible on
their legs, behavior that biologists called stilting. So yes, what
they're doing is they're trying to look as imposing as possible,
as large as possible. And basically the idea here seems
(07:42):
to be that that that the larger colonies of honey
pot ants tend to have larger individuals. So it's not
only a show of immediate force, like hey, look how
big we are to get away from our resources. It's
also a show of what kind of backup forces you
have uh to call in. That's interesting. So it's just
(08:02):
like you can almost count on the fact that if
if this ant is big, all of her buddies are
big too. Yeah. It actually reminds me a little bit
of the Imperial invasion of hot and the Empire strikes
back with the deployment of those enormous A T eighties uh,
which I recently saw described online as quote a giant
impractical terror weapon. Absolutely, Why the legs? Why make your
(08:27):
all terrain attack vehicles so vulnerable to a simple harpoon
and tow cable? These these tall spindle legs make no sense. Well, yeah,
if you think too hard about it. But as my
my son was recently telling me, we were watching the
Clone War series and he said, you know, walkers are
just always cool. It doesn't matter which side they're on,
They're just cool. And it's true. But but I think
(08:48):
also you can look at it like, yes, it's a
it's an impractical terror weapon. It sends a message, Hey,
we're the Empire and we have resources on this scale
at our disposal, so you'd best just abandoned the ice anitis.
And so that's what the weaker honeypot and force ends
up doing this whole tournament. Uh. Practice limits the need
for conflict and avoids the need for full scale and war.
(09:11):
The smaller ant army flees, but much like the rebel alliance,
they have to be darn sure that the forces there
uh they're seeding to don't follow them and trace them
to their primary base, because the larger honeypot force will
attempt to do this and they will not hesitate to
follow them back to their colony, decimate that colony, and
(09:33):
then enslave the swollen repletes as their own food stores. Now,
this is really interesting, the idea that they make this
display and try and make a calculation about whether it's
worthwhile to fight. It's something that goes against the naive
version of the nature red and tooth and claw idea
that you know, animals are just always fighting and killing
each other. It's always a violent struggle for survival. I
(09:55):
don't know how you could quantify this, but my gut
feeling is that the vast majority of conflicts in nature
never come to violence. There are displays between animals and
then one side backs down. Yeah, I believe we've talked
about this before. And discussing like animal weapons and animal violence.
(10:16):
Is that, you know, how often does one animal outright
kill another? You know it? I mean certainly in predation. Yeah,
apart from predation, like the idea of two animals fighting
to the death in a scenario where one is not
trying to eat the other is is more of a rarity.
But even so, It's like if you have a t
rex and a triceratops, Like the t rex wants to
(10:37):
kill the the triceratops in this scenario, but it of
course does not want to be killed itself the you know,
so it would potentially fight to the death. But on
the other hand, they try Steratops doesn't want to eat
the t rex. It just wants to not be eaten
by the t rex. Yeah, I mean, it just brings
to mind the fact that animals they don't want to
(10:59):
lose a con licked, but probably even more than that,
they don't want to die. And so if if things
are not looking like a like a pretty clear wind
for them, they will very often just back down and
try to get away. Now EO. Wilson and biologists Burnt
a Whole Dobbler have have compared this tournament scenario to
these symbolic battles and the highlands of New Guinea, the
(11:21):
initial phase of of a of a battle or war
in which the two sides square off at a distance,
and what they'll do. Yeah, this so the scrap at
a distance. They're not gonna immediately, you know, rush into
each other like some sort of brave heart scenario. That's
cinematic um trope that we all have grown so used to. Instead,
they're gonna throw spears. They're gonna fire arrows at each other,
(11:43):
but with range and wooden shields in place, so there's
actually like a a low possibility for fatality. And from
here it might give way to a heated, closer battle,
but the its aggressions might actually end right here. And
this apparently is something that one sees throughout the history
of human conflict, especially when it concerns smaller clans of fighters,
(12:08):
because such groups like this simply don't have the resources
to enter freely into a state of total warfare. Yeah,
I think that state is more common, as we were
talking about earlier, in in like larger empires where you
also have you know, the army that arrives on the
battlefield also has the force of like a huge state
behind it that will not let it walk away. It's
(12:30):
a you know that that maybe the emperor back home
is not going to be pleased. If you see that
this battle doesn't look good for you and decide it's
better not to fight, yes, you'll find that he's not
as forgiving, right. So yeah, I think this is obviously
a smart strategy, and there's a reason humans do this
and ants do this. It makes sense to try to
(12:50):
avoid conflict if you can. I also can't help but
wonder if there's a comparison to be made here. And
this is just me, this is not any of these
other commentators that I've read. They might have gotten into this,
and maybe I just haven't read it, But I wonder
if you can make a comparison here to the proxy
wars between superpowers in the human world. You know, human
cases in which each side certainly has immense resources, but
(13:13):
in which case the destructive potential of atomic weaponry essentially
reduces both sides to smaller, more vulnerable clans on their
respective hillsides. There was something I was trying to look
up because this also made me think of the at
least epic literary tradition of the champion warfare. That is,
(13:34):
you know, you read about it in the Iliad. It
shows up actually in a lot of of ancient epics
and stuff where armies will meet, but instead of you know,
the whole armies clashing with one another, they will each
select their greatest fighter and then those two will fight
a duel that is supposed to, at least in some cases,
symbolically settle the outcome of the fight. So think of
(13:56):
Hector versus Achilles. And I was looking for example, was
do ants ever do this? So I was trying to
find examples of champion warfare among ants, but I couldn't
find anything. I don't know if you've come across anything
like that. But if there were an example of something
like that, that would be really interesting, that would man that. Yeah,
I didn't read anything about that in the sources I
(14:19):
was looking at it. I wonder how that would have
something like that would evolve. You know, it's kind of
hard to imagine being a real state of affairs without
I don't know, I guess symbolic thinking among I mean,
maybe that is something that would be limited. I mean,
it's even more than that. It's seems like something that's
more limited to epic poetry and storytelling than than happens
(14:43):
in real life. Right, it kind of brings maybe it's
the kind of story that makes the most sense for
people that are so centered on the individual, you know,
like here is the individual in the war, the individual
that is changing the course of the battle. That sort
of thing um, and it enables you to to take
larger scenarios of battle that are more difficult to fathom
(15:04):
and putting them in a one on one scenario, like
in the last episode we were talking about the Lanchester
square law. You know, we can you know, we can
certainly imagine that in our head with forces of on
one side versus the other. But then you can also
put it in the scenario of David and Goliath, right,
and there you instantly have this very individual based story
of smaller force and larger force. Even though it tells
(15:26):
it ultimately tells a story like if we were to
take that and extrapolate it to just a smaller force
against a larger force, uh, per those laws we were discussing,
that makes no sense, Like ultimately the Goliath force is
going to win unless there is some sort of crazy
you know, outside context event, right, or I mean it
depends on conditions, right, because not all combat is equivalent,
(15:49):
but yeah, generally. All right, on that note, we're going
to take a quick break, but when we come back,
we will get into some of these specialized units of
the ant war. All right, we're back, Robert. When you
were a kid, did you get one of those Star
Wars visual encyclopedias and just like devour all of the
(16:10):
different types of Star Wars stormtroopers that we never saw
in the movies. Because in the movies you see the
main storm troopers. You see the ones in the snow
with like the big robes and capes almost I guess
that's to keep warm or something. But then I remember
reading about these other types that never show up in
the movies, like lava troopers or something. I don't know.
(16:31):
Did you never read about this? Uh No, I've never
heard of lava troopers. Um. I mean, I'm trying. I'm
only vaguely remembering, but it seemed very interesting to me.
I was like, why isn't there a movie about that?
I mean, it's it's drawing on the idea that, of course,
you would have different types of specialized units for different
terrain yeah, I, uh Star Wars specific I never had
that book, but certainly just by virtue of being into
(16:55):
like miniature war games and even even you know, playing
of games I don't play, or collecting, I love to
just pour over the army list like okay, here your
here your ranking files, and okay, here your specialist. Here
you're you're fast moving troops. Here are you're heavy troops.
Here are your infiltration units. Here you're close combat units.
There's there's something um yeah, just just endlessly appealing about
(17:18):
about going through the rank and file of a system
like that totally. Uh. And of course it shouldn't come
as any surprise that many different kinds of ants have
their own specialized units. Yes, absolutely, So we're gonna discuss
some of these. We're not gonna be of course, we're
not gonna be able to really do justice to the
entire rich diversity of the ant world, you know, plenty
of which is still being discovered and is yet to
(17:40):
be uh discovered by scientists. Uh, but we'll touch on
some highlights here that are known. So first I want
to talk a little bit about specialized defenses. Uh. You know,
we've talked so much about offense with ants. Uh, but
but sometimes said there is a particular defensive strategy in
mind as well. Zoologist and entomologist Sean O'Donnell points out
(18:00):
that leaf cutter ants and army ants are both dominant
ants species, and when they wage war, those wars can
wage for days. So it's a it's a classic matchup
in many respects, right, It's a ravaging warriors on one
side and foraging agriculturists on the other. Right, So you
would think of the army answers primarily like rating carnivores
that are on the attack, and the leaf cutter ants
(18:22):
are there their cultivators of their environment, right, Yeah, So
leaf cutter ants very famously depend on their workers. They
have to go out, they have to cut the leaf portions,
bring the leaf portions back, and then those leaf portions
are used to grow their precious fruit crop, which is
a fungus I believe, right, Yeah, fungus that is uh
if I remember correctly, extinct in the wild is purely
(18:44):
domesticated by ants long before humans came on the scene. Unbelievable.
So it's mostly the work of these you know, these
female workers. But there they do have a cast of
larger soldiers, and apparently they were something of a mystery
for a while. Researchers would look at them and they
would ask, what are these guys for. They don't seem
to be doing anything, they don't seem to have a purpose.
(19:04):
But by seating army and invasions in leaf cutter nests,
researchers were able to discover that they seem to be
specialists just for army ant invasions, sent to the front
lines by the thousands uh to in an attempt to
defend the colony. Even though it does seem like they
tend to fail in the end, but I mean even
(19:25):
in cases where they fail, it's possible they could be say,
buying time for the rest of the colony. Yeah, and
it's interesting to look at that. That's that reality in
terms of how other ant species deal with army ants,
because apparently you very roughly you kind of have you
have two extremes. On one hand, those who just put
up a fight, they're like army answer attacking, We're going
(19:46):
to fight them back, We're gonna give it everything we have.
But then you also have some varieties of ants that
evacuate everybody at the first sign of an attack. The
army answer coming, So pack it all up. We're getting
out of here. But then they can move back in
after the invaders have left, because their army ants they're
not gonna live there. They're not gonna hang out in
your colony and wait for you to come back. They're
(20:06):
they're they're here for the goods, and if the goods
are not here, they have to keep moving. Now here's
another just super interesting adaptation. Um. In the last episode,
I mentioned Douglas j Emlin's book Animal Weapons, which deals
with the evolution of bioweapons and organisms as well as
the development of tool based weapons and humans, and he
(20:26):
discusses the feodole aunt genus, in which individuals fall into
various casts. So there, of course the reproductive male and females.
They're the small workers, they're larger workers. And then there
are the soldiers and the soldiers of this genus boast
quote grossly enlarged heads, jaws, and teeth. These are these
(20:47):
a particular ants are also known as the big headed ants.
But then he also goes on to discuss another genus
of ants. This is Odonto marcus uh, the trap jaw
ants whose lock and release jawstra uture functions a lot
like a mantis shrimp. You know, there's all this stored
potential energy like a crossbow that has been pulled back
(21:08):
and locked. So when these jaws shut on these trap
jaw ants, they can shut it speeds a one hundred
and forty three miles per hour, so they slam shut
really fast. Right, and here's where it gets That was
a stupid restatement of what you said, but let's keep it. Okay, Yes,
very very fast, especially on this scale too. Right. Um,
(21:31):
but but here's where he gets even more interason. This
is where he gets kind of cunning because the trap
jaw ants, of course, they can release this bite at
their adversaries, but they can also unleash this bite at
the ground and in doing so launch themselves backwards through
the air twenty body lengths as a successful escape tactic.
(21:52):
So this reminds me of indungeons and dragons. There's this
ability that rogues have called the cunning action ability that
allows them to effect actively disengage in backtrack out of battle,
so they're able to strike it an enemy and then
get out of there really quick of so the enemy
can't smite them back the next round. Um. Yeah, Yeah,
it's it's so it's it's crazy to think. It's almost
(22:13):
like they have jet packs these ants. Yeah, I was
trying to think of what a what a human technological
comparison would be. I was thinking about, like, I guess
escape pods or ejector seats from fighter planes, or or
just like maybe like it's kind of like a sky hook.
Maybe a plane flies over just picks you up. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't even know if there is truly a direct
(22:36):
because when we're when we're talking about retreat and effectively, um,
you know, backing your forces out in a military scenario.
I mean generally it's a very delicate situation with with
with human military forces. I can't think of anything offhand
it seems like a direct parallel to this. Now, a
lot of ants boast chemical weapons. We touched on this
(22:56):
in the very first episode where we talked about the
basic evolution of ants, in which early on it seems
like you had more like powerful stings that were aimed
at large pit for instance, vertebrate threats to the the ants.
But then the the evolutionary pressure becomes more focused on
uh at warfare, and there so therefore you see all
(23:18):
these various um adaptations emerge where it's more about waging
war against ants, and sometimes it takes a place of
new chemical weapons that they may use. So a very
famous one, of course would be formic acid. The word
formic coming from the word for ants formic a day. Yeah,
and so that's what we see with the the formic
(23:39):
acid of the formica would ants. So these ants can
spray formic acid from the tips of their abdomen. In fact,
formic acid was first extracted in six seventy one by
the English naturalist John Ray. Is John Ray, the guy
we talked about who was doing the experiments with with
ants and formic acid and was comparing it to urine.
I don't think it is. I had to pull him
(24:01):
up and granted a lot of these individuals with portraits
from from the late seventeen early eighteenth century, UH kind
of look the same to me. But um, I don't
think we touched on him before. Could be wrong, But anyway,
the formic acid of these ants that this is a
great example of one variety of of reverally in and
(24:22):
of itself, amazing chemical weapons that have been developed by
UH that have evolved in these ants species. But there
are even more exotic examples to look at, and in
this we're getting into the topic of exploding ants, which
this is so good. Yeah, and this is a lot
of you probably heard about about examples of this before,
(24:43):
because I mean, it's just such an amazing topic and
it's certainly made the rounds in science communication and science journalism.
Uh and in fact, I think we've probably mentioned it
on the show in the past. However, we're going to
touch on some new stuff as well here, like the
new findings new species that have been discovered just in
the last uh year or so so um well, one
in one example that comes up a lot is uh
(25:04):
Camponatis sunders of Malaysia and Brunei, whose bodies are riddled
with poison sacks, and so when they attack. When they're attacked,
they constrict and rupture, fatally, forcing sticky poison out of
their mouth, anus and through their exoskeleton. And again, don't
think of this as of the individual in this scenario,
Think of the group. Think of the colony, the good
(25:27):
of the colony. So this is a situation where the
individual is a biological weapon and they can readily sacrifice
themselves to do damage against or in some way slow
down an invading species. Yeah. I mean again, think of
the colony as an organism. So this is sort of
like an animal with poison skin. The ant is sort
(25:49):
of like the skin of the poison arrow frog, right,
And but in this case they can they can like
bear down and burst themselves like a like a like
a cooked sausage, you know. Uh, yeah, exactly. Uh. This
is called autopsis, and it's involved independently in a number
(26:13):
of termite species as well. But uh, but you see
different varieties of it the kind of shed light on
how this seems to have evolved. So sometimes you'll have
an autopsis utilizing species it simply defecates on their enemies.
Get too close and I'm going to poop onto you.
Other times you see it more a situation where they're, uh,
(26:34):
they're bearing down, like they're pooping so hard that they're
going to ruptures or abdomen. And from this we get
into sort of more exaggerated modes of just absolute abdominal explosion.
And in fact, like I was saying, there's a there's
a nice new example of this that's come out. I
was just reading in April Establishments published in Zoo Keys
(26:55):
via lacity at all about another variety of exploding at
known as uh Colobopsis explodings explodons. I love this explodings
a k a. Yellow do ants, but we're just gonna
call him explodings because that's that's clearly where the fun is.
So this is a wonderfully fascinating species because minor workers
(27:18):
in the colony have this exploding ability. Uh. They can
burst themselves into this yellow chemical goo that is kind
of like a spice that you know, again will kill
or slow down or or aggravate damage an invader. But
then they also have um have these larger major type
workers and they're referred to as door keepers because they
(27:40):
have quote big plug shaped heads which they use to
block intruders in the tunnels. Pause to appreciate this for
a moment. So this is something that other species event
have have a version of this too, specialized members that
essentially have a locked door for ahead. It's like this
is a sinating bio mechanical way to raise the drawbridge
(28:03):
on your colony. Right, These would be ants that have dug,
you know, excavated colonies with tunnels, and the ants themselves
to become part of the defensive structure by closing the
entrances of the tunnels with their heads. Yeah, this is amazing.
I also point out I believe there's another variety of
ant that seals its entrances with stones, and we'll get
into some stone examples here in a bet. But I
(28:26):
want to get back to explodings though. So this is
a particularly elegant adaptation for defense. But it also, at
least on the surface, seems to buck the trend we
see earlier with marauder ants. For the marauders, the majors
of the big guns, they're the A T S T
s that move into tear apart enemies that have been
bogged down amid the individually less impressive miners. For explodons,
(28:48):
the majors are the plug heads, so they functioned mostly
as barricade engines. Perhaps you know, one can make a
loose comparison to like a mobile field generator in Star
Wars or something. In with explodings. The majors rarely leave
the nest. They're they're purely domestic defenses. It's the miners, however,
that packed the explosive punch that are that are self detonating,
(29:11):
uh sacrificing themselves UH ending their lives in an attempt
to strike out against the invaders. So these are literally
suicide missions. Yeah yeah, Like what apparently will happen is
um Like with the Marauder miners, the Explodings miners are
indeed the first wave. So there's an attack on the
(29:32):
nest then they pour into battle. They latch onto an
enemy with their mandibles, and then they hold their abdomen
close to their grappled enemy. Then they bear down and
they burst oozing out of a thick spiced yellow goo
that again either kills them or hinders the attacker. And
then again the marauder style, the Explodings majors burst in
(29:53):
with their plug heads to barricade the tunnels against increased invasion.
And I guess one of the interesting things to think
about year is that we're really getting into a whole
specialized realm evant warfare, defensive warfare fought within the nest um,
you know, defensive urban warfare UH specialists here tunnel warfare specialists,
which is something of course we see tunnel warfare and
(30:16):
urban warfare in human scenarios. And it makes me think
back to the linear Lanchester's linear loft that we discussed
in the last episode Yeah again as a refresher, the
linear law tends to apply more to UH conflicts that
are close something closer to a series of sequential duels,
where a force with larger numbers can't use the square
(30:39):
power of those larger numbers too easily overwhelm smaller forces. Uh.
You use defenses to your advantage to try to limit
the scope of how much battle can take place at
the same time. And a classic way to do this
is to create choke points to create tunnels. Yeah. And
so this species would seem a master at chuckpoints. So
you're you're pouring into their uh to their home, and
(31:01):
you've got, you know, hundreds of of soldier ants that
their at their disposal. Like they have numbers on their side,
but they have specialists that can explode uh and a
specialists that can seal off the tunnel. UH. So, which
it gives us seems to give them, uh, you know,
more or less equal footing with the invaders. And I
want to stress again that explode ens is a newly
(31:22):
discovered variety of self sacrificing aunt first written about in
and so more remains to be explored about them, but
also in general. It just drives home how many aunt
species are out there in the world that we just
that we haven't fully documented yet, how many, how many
strange and wonderful adaptations are out there, They just simply
(31:43):
haven't been chronicled yet. Isn't that amazing? Just just to
know that there's so much more to learn that will
be things like this, just bizarre, amazing adaptations that already exist.
It's not like they're gonna come into being in the future.
I mean, obviously new species will come into being. They're
already out there. We just never looked at them before,
(32:03):
or never at least never documented them in a in
a thorough way. Absolutely. All right, on that note, we're
gonna take one last break, but when we come back
we'll discuss the Stone Age tactics of bicolor ants. Than
all right, we're back. So the next variety of and
I want to touch on is the dory Meyer mix
(32:24):
bicolor ants. So if you have the higher ground, you
know all you need is gravity and mass. Right, soldiers
can defend cliffs or the walls of a castle by
dropping stones on the heads of attackers. But of course
you can also go on the offense particularly via the
technologies and the human realm of bombardment. An enemy might
drop things such as stones, bodies, or explosives upon an
(32:47):
enemy city. Yeah, in the human realm. I mean, one
way you can think about the evolution of an air
force is that it is a it is a force
evolved to give you permanent high ground. Uh. And sometimes
ants definitely take advantage of this. In particular, these dory
miromix by color ants of arizona um previously known as
Cono mirma by color ants, they were discovered back in
(33:10):
nineteen seventy nine by Moglik and Alpert to actually use
small stones to drop um on their adversaries. Basically ant
tool use. Yeah, now, I mean, I guess when you
think about aunt tool use, you do have to like
take a step back and think about what ants are
(33:31):
always doing their manipulating, uh, the soil. They're manipulating little
grains of sand and moving them around, and this is
just kind of a byproduct of that. What are else
are you doing with those pieces of the ground. So basically,
the researchers back in seventy nine observed that workers surrounding
(33:52):
the nest would pick up small stones and other objects
and drop them down the nest entrances of rival nests
that were reasonably close by. Now, comparing it to bombardment
might be a bit much, but it is at the
very least active interference in a competitors industry, So so
perhaps one might think of it more as uh like
(34:13):
industrial sabotage. I don't know, I mean, it's it seems
like that would sort of count. I mean, it's using
gravity and high ground to your advantage in the attack
on the enemy's infrastructure. So in many ways it seems
a lot like bombing or shelling. Yeah, yeah, I mean
I think you could make an argument for it. Again,
going back to our first episode, nothing in the ant
(34:33):
world is gonna be one to one right with the
human world. But uh, like Moffatt said, you know, good comparisons,
you know, worthy comparisons are not going to be direct
one to once. But there are a few other possible
cases of soil and pebble based tool used by ants um,
which again shouldn't be really all that surprising given their
intense manipulation of the Earth. Four sixty five paper from
(34:58):
Lynn at All reported paved and ants using soil to
attack bees and the desert harvester ant will apparently drop
bits of soil into honey water and then carry the
soil particles back as a way to bring the honey
water to the nest. This was This was via a
study conducted eighty four by Philip McDonald of the New
(35:20):
York Intomological Society, and it it seems to be related
to the similar use of of of soil to cover
up liquids that ants cannot just outright remove. Okay, So
the idea here is that you come across a liquid
food source that you want to bring back to the nest.
You obviously you can't carry liquid the same way you
(35:42):
could carry like a part of another insect's body back
is food, so they will pour like soil into the
liquid to create a sponge full of sugar, and then
carry that soil sponge, the sugary soil sponge back towards
the queen. That seems to be the case here. Now, Uh,
it's it's possible that this is something that more is
(36:04):
obvious in experimental scenarios. I'm not entirely certain on that,
but it certainly underlines like what is possible using the
properties of soil at that scale and Again, it seems
like the more uh usual activity that you see is
like there's some sort of sale poison or a chemical.
The ants don't know what to do with that. They
(36:25):
can't really interact with it directly, but they can put
soil on it. They can essentially bury it. They can
cover it up, like kicking soil onto a smoldering camp
fire or something. Yeah. So yeah, I would imagine that
these studies alleging some form of ant tool use, like
most of the studies alleging types of tool use and animals,
probably have encountered some dispute, you know about interpretation of
(36:47):
the behaviors. Uh. That seems like that always comes up.
Now here's another one that's pretty interesting. This is an
example brought up by moffat Uh concerning the so called
slave maker ants. So slave making is also known is
u duosis in the biology world. So these are cases
where you'll have ants that are brood parasites that in
(37:09):
some species rely on the practice absolutely, but another species
are not obligate slave makers. So basically what they do
is they invade a colony, they capture the brood of
another ant. Usually they're capturing the young and generally it
is a very specific species that they're focusing on, and
then they bring those young back to their own nest
(37:31):
where they're made to work, while members of the slave
maker species itself just focus on rating more nests for
more workers. Now, Moffatt shares that while slave making ants
are generally heavily armored, heavily armed with superior fighting abilities,
some species use a propaganda chemical uh is the term
(37:52):
he uses to throw off the enemy during raids. Uh.
So you have to think about this, right. You may
be big and strong, but it goes back to that
linear law that if you're going in to invade a colony,
if you're gonna go into the thick of it, then
great armor, great weapons, that's only gonna get you so
far if you're outnumbered. But if you have some sort
(38:14):
of chemical um advantage, if you're able to trick the
others into thinking you're supposed to be there, then do
you have an enormous advantage. Doesn't matter about their superior numbers.
And so in these cases, these propaganda chemical using slave
maker ants, they can often carry all of this out
without any fighting or killing taking place. You know, it's
(38:37):
not just forms of rival ants there. It almost seems
like there is a whole genre across different types of
animals that's just adaptations for the safe infiltration of ant colonies. Yeah,
Mermica philes. So the the whole classification of animals that
have have come to depend upon the ants and in
(39:00):
many cases use some sort of chemical signal to trick
the colon into thinking they're supposed to be there. Now
here's another example just of of general sort of ant
war um strategies that is that has brought up mof
it brings this one up as well. Uh, weaver ants.
So we've answered not merely an army on the move,
but they hold and control territory. They spread their workers
(39:23):
out across it and then focus resources around key choke points.
They even establish leafy barrack nests in the crowns of trees.
And Moffatt points out that that we've answered therefore less
rigid compared to army ants. Quote. Weavers, in contrast, wander
more freely and are more versatile in their response to
opportunities and threats. The difference in style calls to mind
(39:45):
the contrast between the rigidity of Frederick the Great's armies
and the flexibility and mobility of Napoleon Bonaparte troops. That's interesting. Yeah.
So so the idea is that if a weaver aunt
does encounter a problem in the empire, he uses their
recruitment pheromone to call in reinforcements from the immediate area,
as opposed to just having like one war gang ravaging
(40:07):
around the territory. So, again, these are not This is
not an attempt to create an exhaustive list of all
the amazing adaptations that ants have developed to wage wars
against each other defend against each other, but hopefully it
helps provide uh more of an idea of the rich
diversity out there. This is one of my favorite types
of topics that that frequently comes up on the show.
(40:29):
It's one of those where you feel like you've gotten
just a tiny glimpse, you know, behind through through a
curtain or through a window into a vast uh you know,
mansion of possibilities and and and rich relationships, uh that
that you don't even think about most of your waking hours,
that you know that the world is just shocking. Yeah. Absolutely,
(40:53):
and um and I think it's really interesting to look
at the work of of your Wilson mof it uh
and others when they compare ants to the human world,
Because on one hand, it helps us better understand the ants, right,
you know, that's how humans work. Like, if we can
see ourselves reflected to some degree and another organism, then
(41:15):
we can understand that organism better, even if it's you know,
we're kind of anthropomorphizing to get there. But then on
the other hand, it does seem like we potentially have
a lot to learn about what we are, right, we're
getting into, you know, the sociobiology of V. O. Wilson
or can or you know, certainly Moffatt gets into this
a lot in his book The Human Swarm, where he's
(41:36):
he's he's not just looking at the ant world, he's
he's moving from there into the human world and trying
to make sense of what we're doing. Yeah, and of course,
you know, we're we're incredibly different creatures than ants, but
some of the same resource dynamics and things like that
are always going to be in play no matter what
species you're talking about. Yeah. In that E. O. Wilson documentary,
(41:57):
I believe he shares this quote, Uh, he said, quote
the real problem of humanity is the following. We have
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology, and it is
terrifyingly dangerous and it is now approaching a point of
crisis overall. I think in many ways that's true, and
it brings to mind, you know, something that's been sort
(42:18):
of simmering for me throughout these episodes is that what
I would hope we could learn by by looking at
the warfare of other organized species like you social insects,
and uh, comparing that to to get perspective on human
life is not that we learn how better to wage
war through it, but maybe how not to wage war
(42:39):
and how to avoid war. Yeah. Yeah, there's sort of
the lesson that we don't need to live like ants. Um.
I mean, because ants, for all the comparisons we've made,
you know, they're they're free of these human burdens that
we mentioned, you know, they're emotionless. There, their ways, while
comparable to human institutions in some way, are free of
institutional constraints or Robert. While I agree with you in
(43:00):
a sense about that, though, I would I would be
careful about the idea that they're emotionless given our well true, yes,
our our invertebrate emotions episode. But yeah, we we don't know.
We don't think that they have complex inner lives the
way that we do, even though they have these internal
states that you could probably recognize as being something like
fear or joy. Possibly, right, Yeah, I mean I think
(43:22):
I have heard before. I forget who there was an entomology.
I don't think it was Wilson Um. Maybe it was
Moffett and an NPR piece talking about the watching ants
and feeling that some ants had almost a personality. So
you're you're correct, I shouldn't be too fast to dismiss
them as emotionless, though an individual ant soldier is well
(43:47):
far I think, far less of an individual than a
than a human. I think we can we can at
least focus on that um and then in terms of
like what they can do. I mean, certainly they are
a powerful force within the ecosystem. It's been observed that
if all humans died today, ants would can proceed just fine,
but if all the ants died, the world would be
(44:07):
in a state of absolute chaos. All right, we're gonna
go ahead and close it out right there. We hope
you've enjoyed this three part look at aunt warfare. But
obviously there's so so much in the ant world, we
can easily return. Probably we will return at some point
in the future to discuss ants once more, especially as
researchers continue to make new discoveries totally in the meantime,
(44:31):
if you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever
you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
We just asked that 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,
(44:51):
you can email us at contact that's Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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