May 15, 2018 • 47 mins
Do crazy ants crave electronics? Do they feast on that sweet, sweet juice? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick dispel some myths and explore the science of this particular insect invader.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, are you welcome to stuff to
blow your mind? My name is Robert Land and Joe McCormick. Robert,
Let's have a reading from our holy book The Daily Mail. Shelly, Yes,
let's do headline June crazy ants that feast on electronics
(00:27):
and are invading the US cannot be killed with normal insecticide.
Oh wow, I love I love everything about that headline
because it just implies that these ants are coming to
eat your precious xbox and there's nothing you can do
to penetrate its exo skeleton. It's just gonna laugh at you.
They feast on electronics, They're crazy, cannot be killed, cannot
(00:49):
as capitalized. Um, they've got the little subheads here. Since
it was first spotted in Houston in two thousand two,
it's spread to some twenty one counties in Texas, twenty
counties in Florida, and a few locations in Mississippi and Louisiana.
The omnivorous and attacks and kills other species, as well
as monopolizing food sources to the detriment of the entire ecosystem.
(01:10):
It also attacks electrical wiring causing millions of dollars worth
of damage. So it's just an unstoppable force. It's like
an invasion. I'm imagining those ants from Indiana Jones and
The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Did you watch there?
You didn't watch it? No, you know that the buzz
wasn't all that great, so I just never got around
(01:31):
to it. Robert, I get mad when people haven't watched
the same bad movies I have. You've got to go
subject yourself to this. Have you heard about the gopher? No,
there's a gopher like in Caddyshack Gopher. Yeah, this is
like a c g I gopher in it. And there's
also c g I ants marching through the forest and
attacking people. M I should probably check it out at
(01:54):
some point. No, don't waste your time. It's the best
part of it is Cape Blanchet, who's the best part
of everything she does. But there are crazy ants. They're
essentially crazy ants or their giant crazy ants. Is that
what you're saying. No, I think it's actually not a
very good point of comparison once we get into the
details on crazy ants. But man, so I I put
this up here because I hate the Daily Mail. That's
(02:16):
I shouldn't say I hate things, but uh, yeah, I
I kind of hate the way their their headlines work.
But I also can't resist that they just go for it.
They say, cannot be killed and feast on electronics. But
of course we are talking about a real organism here, Yeah,
one that's not quite as outlandish as this. Uh, these
(02:38):
headlines and subheads make it sound. No, And while the
idea of feasting on electronics is not quite exactly right,
it's not as far off as you might imagine based
on I don't know, you know, whatever you found out
when you clicked on that Daily Mail article about the
Longness monster washing up on the beach, you know. And
I also have to point out that I have I
(02:59):
have heard versions of this where people think that the
crazy ants eat electricity, which is also not true. Yeah,
like their RoboCop they need to charge up at not right, Yeah,
they're seeking out your electronics so that they can they
can they just jagg onto that that that precious juice.
Did you ever see that mid career West Craven movie Shocker? No,
(03:20):
but this is one that that you've been telling me
about for years. Yeah, it's so it's West Craven at
at the height of his I don't care, and he
makes a movie with the Oh what's a Mitch Pelegie,
the boss from the X Files. Yeah, he plays like
a murderer who gets sent to the electric chair, and
then he turns into an electricity killer who like can
(03:41):
fly through TVs, and he can go through power lines,
and he when he gets hurt, he can heal himself
by sticking his fingers in an electrical He's basically the
electricity gremlin from Gremlins to the New Batch. You know,
I've never seen Grimlin's too. How many people hate me? Now?
Uh no, So let's explain. Are a little bit more
anecdotes about what the deal with this crazy aunt is
(04:04):
and why people say it feasts on electricity, even if
that's not exactly true. So there is a New York
Times story on crazy ants by the writer John Muallam,
and it tells stories of people with crazy ant nightmares
in their homes, specifically with the ants attacking their electronics.
So there's one story about a man named Mike who
had his house infested to an unbelievable degree. Quote one day,
(04:28):
his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from
the vents in his living room floor, so he powered
up his shop back to clear them. By the time
he was done, he had sucked out five gallons of ants.
Soon he and his wife were waking up to find
vast frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor
in all directions. When the picture on their fifty inch
(04:50):
box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel
and found the guts throbbing with ants. Oh that's that's lovely.
I mean that just sounds like like Tales from the
Dark Side episode. Yeah, you can't, well there, what's in
the Tales from the Crypt movie? There's a guy who
gets flooded with It's not ants. I think it's cockroaches,
isn't it? Oh, are you thinking about Stephen King's creep show?
(05:14):
Not Tales from the Crypt creep show? But you know
the Tales from the Crypt. I'm sure it has an
insect horror episode that I'm forgetting. Yeah. Another story from
that New York Times article, there's a man named strom Duke.
The story of strom Duke quote, one evening his iron
stopped working, Then sparks shot from the appliance, and a
tide of crazy ants came rushing out. Other Dukes lived
(05:38):
in neighboring houses, and they all had similar stories. The
ants had caused six dollars of electrical damage to one
woman's car, infiltrated the glass break detector of one house's
alarm system, causing the alarm to blare, and just the
previous night, shut off the water at Strom's brother Melvin's
house by disabling the pressure switch on his well. It
(06:01):
really sounds like it could be a horror movie. I
can imagine all these essentially the movie Squirm, except instead
of screaming earthworms, you have ants just streaming out of
telephones in various household gadgets. Yeah, and if you don't
dig too deep, if somebody just says it, it sounds
like it could be plausible. Right. The answer eating electricity.
You keep finding them inside the TV, inside the iron,
(06:22):
inside the sensor, the air conditioner, compressor, the gas pump.
They're everywhere the wires are, So why why wouldn't we
assume they're eating electricity? Yeah? I mean, the mere idea
of ants being drowned electricity isn't that crazy? I mean
eating electronics? Yes, that's nuts. But organisms are inherently bioelectric,
even in the know the mighty electric eel. It's nothing
(06:45):
compared to lightning or the lethal volts coiled inside your
household electric outlets, but it's there. It's it's really not
that grandiose to think of it as as a sparkle
of life. Even so. Yeah, just the mere connection between
electricity organisms, uh, you know, one can easily buy into that. Yeah,
you can easily imagine they're trying to power up right,
(07:08):
or at least that Yeah, there's maybe some kind of
electromagnetic field being omitted, and that field tends to draw
in insects of a certain sort. It makes me think of, um, Robert,
did you ever see that ants circling the iPhone viral video?
I don't think I ever did, know, Well, allow me
to show you something. Oh wow, So it's just a
(07:32):
phone looks like it's receiving a call, and ants are
just circling around it like uh, like they're they're intending
to invade it where they was sieging it, corralling it
even yea. As I look at this video now, it's
got almost five million views. It obviously was a viral
hit and It was published by something on YouTube called
Viral Video Lab. I'm pretty sure it's fake. I looked
(07:56):
at the Snopes thing on it. The Snopes article is like, well,
you know, we haven't proven it's real. It's hard to
prove a video like that is fake. But a lot
of the people who have been analyzing it, you know,
their Reddit threads on it and stuff, and people are like,
you know, if you look at certain parts of it,
it really looks like the ants are blurry kind of
animations that have been edited into the to the picture.
(08:18):
But yet again, it doesn't seem impossible that a phone
which puts out an electromagnetic field could cause something like
ants to circle around it. I mean, we know that
certain animals like birds use a certain amount of magnetic
kind of path finding to orient themselves for migration. We
know that there are electromagnetically sensitive animals that live in
(08:41):
the water. Sharks and rays have a certain amount of
electromagnetic sensitivity. So you kind of might assume, even though
this video turns out to be fake, that there could
be things like that there's some kind of field being
put out that sucks in all the insects around it.
But with crazy ants. Uh, that does not appear to
be the case. But the answer, that answer is still
(09:01):
quite fascinating, right it is. So there is more than
one kind of crazy ant. Actually, the kind we're talking
about is Nylandria Fulva, commonly known as the Raspberry crazy
aunt Raspberry without a P because it's named after a
guy named Raspberry r A S B E r r Y,
or also known as the Tawny crazy ant. Maybe we
(09:21):
can mostly call it Nylanderia Fulva or something, because who
wants to say raspberry or tawny when you're talking about ants?
They sound delicious, though, Yeah, this is it a flavor
of ants? Yeah? I think so. It's kind of I'm
imagining ice cream cone crawling and crazy ants. Well, I'm
sure there are ice cream cones like that. Another point
of comparison I should make is that when reading about
how these ants pile up, you know they're these massive
(09:44):
volumes of ants. The guy talked about sucking five gallons
of ants out of his air conditioner with a vacuum cleaner.
The people who have really bad infestations of Nyland Area
Fulva in Texas and stuff say that the ants will
sort of like pile up head against the sides of
their house like snow drifts, and if you don't know
(10:04):
what you're looking at, it can look like huge piles
of coffee grounds or something, suggesting there could be a flavor.
It sounds like the zombies and war Zy right where
they're just kind of piling up against the wall. Well,
that's a that's a kind of interesting thing, the way
that ants can behave a little bit like the zombies
in the World War Z movie if you haven't seen
the movie, zombies are getting over a barrier by just
(10:28):
like piling their bodies up against it and eventually forming
a staircase made out of other zombies to get to
the top of the wall. Yeah, they're really just playing
ant like behavior in that in that in that film,
because I'm instantly reminded of cases that we've talked about
in the past of uh, you know, I believe the
fire ants in particular forming a raft, Yes, exactly. Yeah,
(10:49):
they'll they'll make a raft for themselves when it floods,
a raft made out of ants for ants to survive
a flood. I want to see zombies do that. Maybe
the zombies have done that in a in a film
or a TV show I just haven't seen it. It's
kind of a reminder of the bizarre, deep, almost kind
of group intelligence that you see in use social insects
like ants and bees. But anyway, as we were saying,
(11:11):
there's more than one kind of crazy ant. Crazy ants
are native to South America, specifically northern Argentina and southern Brazil,
so picture kind of middle Middle region in South America.
And they were first discovered in Texas by an exterminator
named Tom Raspberry in two thousand two, and since then
they've been spreading throughout the Gulf Coast. They're now in
(11:32):
Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi. And people thought in those
regions that the red fire ant was pretty bad. They
thought it was a troubling invasive species. But the crazy
ant has actually been replacing the red fire ant for
many years there Now it's also displacing other arthropods like
spiders and centipedes, which can destabilize the food chain because
(11:54):
larger predators like birds need to be able to eat
things like spiders and centipedes. They're not so keen on
a crazy ants. All right, hold that thought. We're gonna
take a quick break and when we come back, we
will jump back into the swarm of crazy ants. Than alright,
we're back. So we mentioned that the crazy ants are
of the genus Nyland area. Um, you might wonder how
(12:16):
do they get the name crazy ants? Is it because
they're crazy because they want to get into your TV?
That doesn't really seem like how a name would come about.
Apparently they get this name from just descriptions of their
foraging behavior. And if you've never seen what this looks like,
you should go to YouTube and you should look up
videos of crazy ants foraging because it's it's kind of
(12:37):
hard to describe. It's this frantic, erratic, extremely fast movement.
Uh to me, crazy ants moving around in a swarm.
It almost looks like a swarm of gnats zipping around
in the air, except the movement is confined to a
flat surface on the ground. Yeah, if you're used to
sing and you know ants embarking on journeys generally like
(13:01):
a path from one place to another, you look at
this and it just looks like they're just a scramble.
They're just a mess. Yeah, it's just a mindless swarm. Well,
you think it's a different kind of foraging strategy based
on different mathematics. Right, when you've got a single line
between two things, you're maximizing efficiency there, Like the ants
are not expending any more energy than they need to
to get from one place to another in order to
(13:23):
transport goods and seek out new stuff and all that.
But when you see these these ants moving around, you
get a very different idea. It's almost as if they're
going for a different type of investment bet payoff matrix,
Like they're betting more on random movement leading to possible
discoveries of things leading to potential payoffs in in a
(13:44):
kind of like cloud type movement. Yeah, they're just scouring
the terrain to see what they can find. Now, I
listened to an interview with a U. T. Austin researcher
named Dr Edward Lebrun, who is an expert on crazy
antswer who studies invasive ants in general and um, one
of the things you're saying is that they're very successful
invasive species because they share traits with other successful invasive ants,
(14:07):
one of which is that the crazy ants are what
he calls super colonial, meaning you've got no divisions between
colonies of the same species. So some other ants might
set up a colony here and then a colony over
in the neighbor's yard. And if the ants of those
two colonies come into contact with another, they're going to
fight it out right, like rival kingdoms exactly. They're in
(14:28):
competition for the same resources. It's like, you know, you
and your neighbor fighting over I don't know what you
would fight over with your neighbor. You found treasure, yeah,
buried treasure right on the property line, and you say,
I'm getting my sword, that's my treasure. But the crazy
ants don't necessarily behave that way. Crazy ants from different
colonies apparently treat one another with deference in respect. They
(14:50):
come across members of another colony, and they treat them
basically as if they were members of the same colony. So,
con specifics, members of the same crazy aunt species don't
tend to antagonize one another. They team up. And from
that New York Times article I mentioned earlier by Mullum Lebroun,
the researchers says that he believes there's a single super
colony of crazy ants that occupies quote as many as
(15:13):
four thousand, two hundred acres in Iowa Colony, which is
a place in Texas strangely enough, uh, and is spreading
two hundred meters a year in all directions. It's basically
just this one giant organism because in many ways a
colony of ants or a colony of any youth social
insects kind of does behave like a single organism split
(15:34):
across multiple bodies. Wow. So yeah, this is they're essentially
the the the Tyrannids from Warhammer forty thousand. There just
this invading superorganism. Well you've mentioned the Tyrannids before, but
you've got to tell me a little more about him, Robert. Basically,
it's an army of xenomorph inspired sort of biohr is
also very inspired by the the alien antagonists from Starship Troopers,
(15:56):
so that kind of adversary and the ideas that they
just come and they just lay waste two entire planets.
You know, it's funny you should mention Starship Troopers because
we were just talking about the World War Z kinda
and aunt. What what World War Z zombies and ants
have in common is that they'll make mega structures out
of their own bodies to climb over things and stuff.
The bugs in Starship Troopers do the same thing. Yeah, Yeah,
(16:19):
that's right. They did in the film version. Yeah. Oh,
I don't know if they do in the book. Yeah, yeah,
I've I've read the book, but I don't I don't recall. Well,
I think it's time we've got to address this question.
Why do the crazy ants keep invading electronics? Why do
you find them in the TV and the iron in
the detector and the all that stuff. Well, part of
the answer, of course, is based on the way they
(16:41):
hunt for food and resources. They are simply going to
come across electronics, right, I mean, they are going to
find them because that's they're They're just scouring everywhere. They're
gonna scour your home and they're going to run across
your various electronic gadgets. Yeah, you're exactly right. I Mean
one of the things that comes through in the stories
about crazy and infestations is that that they they become
(17:05):
so pervasive in everywhere. You know, if you've got an
infestation in your house, they're gonna be all over the place,
and so they will be scouting out all kinds of things.
And this actually leads to one thing that Edward Lebrun
said that I thought was pretty interesting. He didn't use
these words, but he said essentially that there's got to
be some selection bias in the characterization of them, mainly
(17:26):
invading electronics. And his exact quote was quote, when your
power goes out, you want to know why you find
a bunch of ants. That's a good reason to get
your video camera. Which is a very good point about
the way that we tend to notice things, right, We
tend to notice something when it's an unusual problem. You're
much less likely to get the camera out if it's
(17:48):
you know, not turning off something that you might be
trying to use. That's right. And then of course the
reason that that that they wind up in your electronics,
the reason why it becomes a problem has a lot
to do with not so much the certainly not the
electronic components there, but just the case itself. Like if
if they end up in your computer tower for your
(18:09):
your PC, it's not because there's a you know, there's
an active battery in there or anything, right, it's the
it's it's the tower itself is an ideal container for
the ants exactly. So crazy ants are different than many
other types of ants. If you've got a group of
red fire ants, Solenopsis invicta, which they've got a great
Latin name, Solenopsis in victa. They're gonna build a colony, right,
(18:32):
They're gonna dig, and they're gonna build a mound, and
they're gonna dig tunnels in the mound. Their their ecosystem engineers, right,
like we were talking about in the City Evolution episode.
They build their own ecosystem and then they guard it
to the death. Crazy ants are different. They don't dig
very much. They dig a little bit and not much.
They prefer to nest in existing cavities they come across
(18:53):
in the environment. So the insides of boxes containing electronics
tend to be an eye deal type of enclosed protected
space that's perfect for them to climb into and form
a nest inside. Yeah, enclosed spaces with with space in
there and a limited numbers of of entrances and exits, right,
(19:15):
and very small entrances and exits, so predators, it's gonna
be hard for them to get in there. When was
the last time an ant eater got inside your TV? Rightly,
it's it's true, it's it's it's it's pretty safe from
less than five times. It's got to be. But also
Lebron and other experts have pointed out another reason why
you might tend to find tons of ants and the
guts of your TV, or tons of crazy ants pouring
(19:38):
out of a compressor box or something. Lebron says that
when the crazy ants get agitated, they released something known
as an alarm pheromone. Now we know that a lot
of the communication between ants who share a colony is
pheromone base. They release chemical signals that are distributed through
the air that can essentially smell messages from one another,
(19:58):
and the alarm pheromone is a chemical that has a
smell that alerts conspecific ants to danger or trouble. Now
you can imagine that this could work several different ways
in the wild. Right, one way an animal might use
an alarm pheromone would be to say, Hey, I'm in danger.
There's something dangerous here, you better stay away. But not
so with the crazy ants. You know, I feel like
(20:19):
this sort of pheromone based behavior you often see this
pop up in monster movies, is a way to outsmart
or defeat the adversary. Blade too comes to mind. There's
the end up like mimicking the pheromones of the reaper
vampires and you know, directing where they swarm. But I
feel like it's rarely explored as that the prime motivator.
(20:40):
Is there a monster movie out there where the whole
crazy interspecies conflict comes down to a misunderstanding over alarm pheromone?
May be interesting. I've never heard of that, but you
could easily see how, especially given what I'm about to say,
that that things could get mixed up and go bad.
So another what Lebron says is, actually, it's not the
(21:01):
way that I just mentioned. It's not that they put
out an alarm pheromone that says I'm in danger, stay away.
When you put crazy ants in a vial, he says,
they get very agitated, and they get mad, they release
their alarm pheromone. And if you take a vial of
these really angry agitated ants and you put it next
to a trail of other crazy ants, instead of avoiding
(21:22):
the vial, the ants are going to swarm all over it.
They're actually attracted to the alarm pheromone. And this kind
of makes sense for ants because being used social insects,
this is how they defend nests. Like if you've got
a nest and something's in the nest. Attacking the nest,
what you want to do is bring all of your
family members in to fight the attacker off. So basically
(21:43):
they're there. Their whole way about doing things is if
you mess with one crazy ant, you're messing with all
the crazy ants, right, I mean, one crazy ant doesn't
stand much of a chance right there. They're they're very small.
Crazy antswer tiny, especially compared to some other AUNT competitors
of theirs, which are bigger and have powerful venom glands
and stingers and stuff. Crazy an'ts are little things. But
(22:04):
of course the problem here is someone with an invaded xbox.
They're they're not intentionally messing with the crazy ants. They're
not trying to eat crazy ants. They're not They're not
they're not trying to do the uh, the colony's harm.
But what happens if, if, if a if a single
crazy ant comes to harm within your xbox. That's exactly
(22:24):
the problem. So it has been hypothesized by Lebron and
others that what may be going on here is you've
got an electronic device, or an electrical power box or
something crazy ant comes in, maybe multiple crazy ants come in,
either one ant or a group of ants touching one
another create a short circuit. They touched the wrong contact points,
(22:45):
they close a circuit and get electrocuted or burned because
they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how
circuits work. No, they're like Indiana Jones's buddy wandering through
the temple. They don't know there are traps here. They
don't know to stay out of the light, so that
so they they just get burned or get electrocuted. And
then when there's trauma, they release the alarm pheromone, and
(23:06):
of course this draws in more ants, and maybe more
ants get electrocuted or burned or something like that, and
they release more alarm pheromone, and it draws in even
more ants, until you've just got a TV sagging with ants.
And this again, this could work wonderfully. And say a
zombie movie, what if the whole reason the zombies are
attacking the the house all odd night of the Living
(23:27):
Dead is because one zombie happened to, uh, you know,
burn up in a toaster. I feel like there's got
to be a good monster movie that already has a
treatment of this. It must exist. I can't call anything
to mind right now. Yeah, like I say, it seems
like you see the pheromone angle used as a as
a brilliant scientific, you know, tactic against the monsters, but
(23:48):
it's rarely the uh, the the actual cause of the
of the encounter. Now, if you don't already live within
range of Nylondaria fulva, I'm sure you're wondering when can
I get them in my EXAs well. The fortunate thing
is that they don't tend to travel very far on
their own because they don't have wing dispersal, so they
don't you know, fly off new queens to set up
(24:11):
new colonies far away. They move very slowly. I've seen
it characterized as on average about two hundred meters per
year is about as far as they go unless somebody
moves them. And you can imagine how somebody might move
them by accident if they tend to inhabit cavities. So
say one of these things gets inside your car or
(24:32):
gets inside your TV and you move houses, or gets
inside something else, and that is how these things can
be transported to new places. Now, there are some questions
that haven't been fully answered yet about what's the up
upwards northern end of their possible range. How how far
north could they go before, for example, of freezes hard
(24:53):
freezes in the winter would prevent them from surviving. And
we don't fully know the answers tell those questions yet.
But once we answer those questions, then of course who
knows if climate change is gonna affect that over the
coming decades anyway, So right, there's gonna that's changing the
playing field for so many different organisms. Yeah, so what
ultimately is at steak here with the crazy ants? I mean,
(25:13):
it truly goes beyond just the the average, the the
the odds shorted out xbox right right. Well, the the
damage is mainly not too human electronics. It's mainly going
to be too ecosystems. Because they can out compete native insects.
They can destroy beehives and other ant colonies. Um, I've
read that they can even sometimes they're so thick, they swarm,
(25:37):
so thick that they can smother and suffocate ground dwelling birds.
It's horrible to picture, but yeah, they just get into
the nasal cavities of chickens and other ground dwelling birds
and asphyxiate them. U they can get in the eyes
of live stock. It's really gross as far as damage goes,
I actually have read that there was at least one
(25:58):
time when they shut down a chemical plant by getting
into electronics. So we've been saying, okay, here are these
these more reasonable explanations. Is not that they eat electricity,
it's that there's this pheromone and here's what happens to
get them inside your electronics. I should note that in
that New York Times story I mentioned earlier, Dr David Oi,
an entomologist with the U. S Department of Agriculture. He
(26:20):
according to him, he said, you know, we can't rule
out the possibility that the ants are in some way
actually attracted to electromagnetic fields and get in there. For
that reason, that just hasn't been you know, we haven't
demonstrated that, but you can't rule it out as an
influencing factor. So who knows. Maybe they are, maybe they
are shocker material. But anyway, as as far as their
effect on humans goes, I mean, I think a lot
(26:42):
of it is actually more psychological than material damage. When
you read about people who live in the places where
they're dealing with infestations of these ants, they they they
hate them, They're they are freaking out. I mean, I'm
sure not everybody is like that, but there there are
some people who are really distressed. I can't at a
(27:03):
voluminous the antsw are I can't imagine anyone not freaking
out like we. We don't really want our homes to
be um habitats for anything besides ourselves and our sanctioned pets. Nobody,
nobody wants to see ants in their house. That is
always a problem. You know that John Muellam article in
The Times, It takes a dark turn when he quotes uh.
(27:26):
He quotes the American psychologist James Hillman and says that
Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception
of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your
individual consciousness to a merely numerical or statistical level. Well,
I can't say that's exactly how I think about it.
When I encounter ants in the house. Usually I'm I
(27:49):
think more, Oh, well, we left something out, the ants
came in and are trying to eat it, and now
I've got to set out some of these grotesque traps
to try and kill them. Everyone loses, the ants lose,
I lose. Nobody wants this situation. You know, I I
don't like killing bugs and wildlife, but when I've had
aunt infestations in my house, I've noticed that, like I
(28:09):
just turned into a cold hearted murderer. I'm just like, yeah,
I'm gonna kill you all it. It does something to
my brain. Well, they're they're just they're out of place.
They're not supposed to be here. That's not what the
house is for. I feel like I should learn to
be a better person. It's it's easy to do that
when you were out and about and encounter the ants
(28:29):
in the yard, But it's just in the house that
changes everything. Now, one of the things that a lot
of the conversation on crazy ants has centered on has
actually been like bureaucratic, scientific and government response to them.
Like a lot of that New York Times article I mentioned.
While it's got some great anecdotes and stuff in it,
a lot of the article is actually focused on the
scientific community and the government's alleged slowness to identify the
(28:52):
species and respond to its spread in a way that
might not be fair. Right. Yeah. I found an interesting
response to this particular New York Times article by a
research scientist, Alex Wilde and he offered this critique. He said, quote,
this is not accurate. Scientists did not, in fact, quote
swarm into debate unquote. The slow response to identifying in
(29:14):
fullva was exactly the opposite. The trouble is that figuring
out the origin and invasive ants isn't anyone's job, at
least not in the United States. What happened was that
a few ants scientists, in their spare time from whatever
their official duties were, have occasionally offered an opinion about
these new invaders. And he goes on to summarize further
(29:36):
and said, and he says, I don't see the point
of singling out the egghead scientists for being slow to
identify Nylanderia fulva when the real trouble is bigger and structural.
Americans simply don't value basic research enough to support a
system that rapidly pinpoints emerging pest problems. If we want
to quickly identify new pests, we need to salary thousands
(29:57):
of positions for taxonomists where afpid response to emerging threats
is part of the job. I think that's a good
point to make. I mean, uh, maybe we should have
made it more clear that one of the things in
the article is that you get this idea that these
like exterminators and people have to be the ones to
step in and really push forward on identifying the species
(30:19):
because the scientists are dropping the ball. It really basically
the horror movie just writes itself again because you can
imagine the poor exterminate. Yea, the exterminator character dies in
the opening scene. Then the scientist comes in and it
is all and trying to interpret it but ultimately can't
get a handle on the monsters, and the monsters eat him.
(30:40):
But the reality is rather different. There's no crack team
of egghead scientists to show up to deal with with
with different outbreaks of ants. Yeah, and especially with the
world we live in right now. I mean we live
in a world that is number one globally connected through
commerce and travel, so things can get back and forth
between places really easy. And number two, we live in
(31:01):
an era of changing climate where it's going to be
we're always going to be altering ecosystems and changing the
types of life forms they can support. We're getting into
an invasive species. What would you call it the dead zone?
Not the dead zone, a life zone. Actually that's the opposite.
A zone that is just rife for infestations of all types. Now,
(31:22):
I want to be careful not to overly demonize invasive species,
because you can sometimes see people get into this mindset
of like, oh, this species from South America or something.
They're just these horrible pests. It's not that the animals
themselves are horrible. I mean, they didn't do anything wrong.
They're just trying to live. The problem is they're suddenly
(31:43):
living in an ecosystem that was not prepared for them,
and they're they're disrupting that ecosystem and causing rapid change
within it. Yeah, we're the ones who disrupted the balance.
So you can't. You can't getting mad at the weights
when you're the one who switched them around on the scales. Yeah.
That being said, you you can try to exterminate the
weights in this case of the ants. All Right, we're
(32:05):
gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
we'll discuss the ant on ant action, the ant war
between the fire ants and the crazy ants. Alright, we're back.
It's fire ants versus crazy ants. How does this epic
war go down? Robert, You've got to tell me. Is
there a fire ant or any kind of ant Mexican
(32:29):
wrestler or Japanese wrestler. Oh, well, there are some. There
are some sort of uh, there are some ant based
wrestlers out of believe it's with Chakara, which is a
US independent pro wrestling group, and they have a whole
slew of ants. There's like fire ant soldier AUNT and
they're all mass wrestlers. Yeah, how did I guess this?
It just it it rights itself. You would just assume
(32:50):
there would be AUNT wrestlers, and there are. I bet
they're a good tag team, right, because answer great team players,
I believe. So. I'm not a I'm not a big
Chakara viewer, but my understanding is they have uh they're
like like tag team and six man tag team specialist. Yes, well,
let's imagine that the team they're going up against is
a team of fire ants. You've got a team of
(33:12):
crazy ants, crazy ant wrestlers going up against fire ant wrestlers.
Who's gonna win this battle? Turns out the crazy ants,
the crazy ants are gonna win even though the crazy
ants they're small, Uh that they don't have this powerful
scary sting like the fire ants do. Like you get
some fire ants on you sting you. That is a
that's a bad day, and it's gonna be some bad
(33:33):
days like that. That hurts. Uh. The crazy ants, while
they can be incredibly irritating if you've got an infestation
in your home, their bite has been described as barely noticeable.
It's it's not too painful to humans. Yeah, by humans,
always important to know when we're dealing with miniscule species.
But then again, it speaks to the power of the
(33:53):
fire ant that we're all aware of what a fire
ant can do, so much so that we all know
what it means when EO. Wilson j M's his hand
into the fire ant nest and you see them just
joyfully beaming with the ant pain. But anyway, Yeah, you've
got these competitors red fire ants or Solenopsis invicta and
the crazy ants or Nylon diarya fulva. And when they
(34:15):
come together, the crazy ants apparently win. So how do
the crazy ants generally protect themselves? Well, there's a good
article by Dina Fine marin inteen called the Rise of
the Crazy Ants and Scientific American UH, and it profiles
some good research in science from by Lebron, Jones and
(34:36):
Gilbert about chemical warfare between crazy ants and fire ants,
And so one of the first things you would observe
is that if you've got equal numbers of fire ants
and crazy ants that show up, they've got equally matched
tag teams, and they show up to fight, the crazy
ants win about ninety three percent of the time. That's
a really good record. Yeah, that is that they are.
(34:58):
They are the victors by far. Does any wrestler win
of the time stone cold? Um? Well, I I don't know,
you know, some some have phenomenally high, you know, win
win records. You know. It's just it depends who's the
top character in a promotion, I guess, and that would
definitely be the crazy ant here, probably because they would
be the most popular. Fans love the crazy ant. Yeah.
(35:20):
And it's not just these in vivo matchups. Uh, there's
colony snatching. Sometimes crazy ant colonies are found inside fire
ant mounds that still have some fire ants in them alive,
meaning that these nests were not abandoned by fire ants
and then ex appropriated by crazy ants. They were actively
invaded while the fire ants were still there and the
(35:43):
crazy ants took over. So the way the crazy ants
are able to do this is that they can secrete
substances from their glands, one of which is formic acid
that was already shown to be a weapon that could
be sprayed at attackers. There's a study in Toxicon in
teen by gian Chin. It all called Defensive Chemicals of
(36:04):
Tawny crazy Ants Nyland Area Fulva. Actually it's got a
long title. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but
basically it says that Nyland Area Fulva they produce formic
acid in their poison glands and then two keytones and
alkanes in their dufes glands, all of which are used
as toxic weapons against fire ants. So they've got these
poisons they use. The DeFord Land compounds are used more
(36:27):
as contact poisons. They're more potent if you like dab
some on the enemy, whereas the formic acid has a
higher fumigation toxicity, so that's like gassing your enemy. So
they have both melee and ranged weapons at their disposal. Basically,
it is true, and in a high enough concentration, formic
acid can even be an inhalation hazard to humans, causing
(36:49):
like lung edema, you know, fluid in the lungs. But
fortunately you don't have to worry about ants producing it
in a high enough concentration that's going to hurt you,
but they could hurt other ants. I was a little
bit interested in formic acid because I was reading about
it and I found you know, okay, so it seems
like this has been known about for a while and
it's actually been used in in in some human industry. Well,
(37:12):
I found an extract of a letter about the discovery
of formic acid in ants in the seventeenth century that
was written by a guy named John Ray to the
publisher of Philosophical Transactions in sixteen seventy. It was called
concerning some uncommon observations and experiments made with acid juice
to be found in ants juice spelled ju y c e.
(37:35):
And I gotta be honest. The main reason I wanted
to explore this is because I learned a new word.
It's a note quote concerning the juice of piss myres
piss myers. What's a pismire? Well, I did not know
this word before. Piss Myers means ants, and yes, it
is pronounced piss mere, and it comes from the route
you're wondering about right now, named after the supposed smell
(37:57):
of ant hills at the time. So my is meant
ants an ant hill smell like urine. That was the idea. Huh,
I don't. I don't know that I've ever really stopped
and smelled the ant hills. Maybe I should. I'm not
enjoying life enough. Apparently, now it makes sense where the
phrase piss aunt comes from. Yeah, okay, it means piss.
Myers always ant. I always thought it was just the
(38:18):
random combination of two things, like, oh that that guy's
really a poop duck. You know, there's nothing, there's not
necessarily connection there, but you you put two things together
and it sounds like an insult. What's you know? So
I assume piss aunt was the same thing. No, but
apparently this is not vulgar phrase at all. This is
seventeenth century scientific journal stuff. There you go. But anyway,
(38:41):
A Ray considers the the author of this letter, he's
been writing about this experiment he read about where somebody
would drop chickory leaves among an ant hill and it
would cause the chickery leaves to change color, indicating some
kind of chemical reaction. And he's wondering what's going on there,
and he discovers that the juice of Pissmire's is an acid,
causing similar effects to oil of vitriol, which means sulfuric acid.
(39:06):
And in the end of his letter he writes, quote, Indeed,
it seems strange that nature should prepare and separate in
the body of this insect without and sensible heat, and
that in good quantity, considering the bulk of the animal
a liquor. The same for kind with those acid spirits
which are by art extracted out of some mimeralds, not
without great force of fire. So I like that he's marveling, Like,
(39:29):
you know, how is it that ants can produce this
powerful poison? But we can't do make anything that's powerful
without some kind of serious alchemy. But another interesting little
hidbit I came across is that formic acid is used
by humans and things. Of course, it's used as an
antibacterial preservative for things like livestock feed. But I've also
read some stories just in recent months about how formic
(39:51):
acid could be used as a liquid hydrogen carrier for
fuel cell technology. So what if the electronics of future
are powered by fuel cells containing the same defensive poisons
used by Pissmires that shored out an invade current day
electronics in the Gulf States. Oh my goodness. Yeah, you're
(40:13):
imagining a future in which the uh, the engine itself
is a is a colony of some sort of crazy ants.
I like it. It's like back to the future, except
instead of the the garbage disposal that powers the futuristic
to lorient, it's just he needs to dock has to
find another crazy ant colony to shovin there. I think
(40:34):
they really sad thing is that they're not like milking
ants to get the formic acid. I think they. I
think they make it in an industrial process, but how
how disappointing. Man, I can still dream. But who knows,
Maybe maybe we could change all that if somebody invents
a really efficient ant milking machine. Anyway, Anyway, anyway, getting
back to the role of the formic acid in the
(40:55):
ants defense. So we know they can use it as
an offensive weapon against enemies like the at the red
fire ant. But this Lebron paper from what it found
was really interesting. So they found that when crazy ants
get into battles with red fire ants, they do this
really weird series of behaviors. The crazy ant encounters red
(41:15):
fire ant, then the crazy ant rears up on its
hind and middle legs. Then it does this unbelievable body
contortion where it curls its body all the way around
to touch its mandibles to the tip of its abdomen.
Then it starts doing something that looks like self grooming,
rubbing a secretion around on its body. So what's going
(41:39):
on there? Well, researchers experimented by placing a tiny dab
of nail polish on the crazy ants glandular opening on
the abdomen, and this would block the opening and prevent
it from secreting whatever it normally secretes, and so this
was the test group. They also placed a small dab
of nail polish on the sides of the abdomen of
(42:00):
control group. This dab would not block any secretions. And
then of course you've got ant fight, right, crazy ants
versus fire ants. So in the control group that just
had the just had the nail polish on the sides
and they could still secrete from the abdomen. The control
group survived fire ant attacks almost a hundred percent of
the time the crazy ants were just killing it. But
(42:21):
in the experimental group, roughly half of the crazy ants
were killed by fire ants, and among the ones that
survived it may have been because the nail polish didn't
completely cover the opening, so some secretions got through. So
apparently the formic acid is not just a weapon, it
is a defensive body shield as well, protecting the ant
from the venomous attacks of its competitors. And so also
(42:45):
from the labrun study, the researchers tested whether the formic
acid would protect another ant species from the venom of
the fire ant, and they found yep. Among a third
ant species, those given a placebo were killed by fire
ants about eighty percent of the time, while those treated
with the crazy ants formic acid secretions almost all of
them survived. So how does the formic acid produce this
(43:08):
sort of body shield that protects the ant. We don't
really know yet the secrets of ant warfare. There's always
more to discover, you know. It makes me think about, um,
how two different kinds of animals they live in a
in a different arena of competition. And now, obviously fighting
(43:29):
between ants will involve some kind of like mechanical action
and shearing, pressure and pushing and all the kind of
stuff we imagine when we're fighting. But when we imagine
big mammals fighting, it's all like force. You're delivering energy
to one another. You're biting and twisting and cutting and stuff,
and and that's how animals like us fight And because
(43:49):
of that, I think a lot of our fighting perception
is based on things like movement and distance. You know,
we're trying to see like how far something is from
us and how asked it's moving. And when you're on
the scale of an ant, the theater of perception and
conflict is so much more chemical. It's all about what
chemicals are present in the immediate area, what pheromones are
(44:13):
telling you about what's going on around you, what pheromones
you can put out that will do, you know and like?
And because you're so small and the conflict itself is
so largely venomous and chemical in nature. Yeah, But then
on the other hand, you are they. You know, we
want to think about the individual ant, but you have
such a use social organization here with an aunt colony
(44:36):
that it's uh, it's far from a one from one
for one you you'd have to think of yourself as
the colony really, I think to get anywhere close to
imagining what it is to be ant, Yeah, that's a
good point to remind us. It's like it might actually,
if you could understand the mind of an ant, to
whatever extent there is such a thing as the mind
of an ant, it might not make sense to be
(44:57):
the mind of an individual aunt. It might maybe there
really is no such thing as an individual aunt. I mean,
of course, there is the object of a single aunt body,
but that doesn't really that's not really a biological unit
as much as the colony is the unit. Yeah, Like,
we fall into traps two of our our language I've
(45:18):
I've read before regarding bees. Another famous youth social insect,
of course, is that we we we know the Queen
Bee is not an actual queen, and yet just by
referring to her as such, by approaching bees with with
human models in our mind, we think of her as
being some sort of an authority figure. We can't. It's
(45:38):
so easy to fall into that trap when really she
is another cog in the machine. Yeah, I propose we
replaced the phrase queen be with gene b. It's the
b who's the vehicle for genes for the next generation. Yeah,
I like that we should push through that gene b
gene b. But not like not like the name is gene.
(46:00):
Well maybe it's j E A and it's you know,
the feminine gene that will work. That'll work all right,
So there you have it. Uh As always, head on
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(46:23):
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(46:45):
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blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For
(47:07):
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how stuff works. Dot Com, the biggest U
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, are you welcome to stuff to
blow your mind? My name is Robert Land and Joe McCormick. Robert,
Let's have a reading from our holy book The Daily Mail. Shelly, Yes,
let's do headline June crazy ants that feast on electronics
(00:27):
and are invading the US cannot be killed with normal insecticide.
Oh wow, I love I love everything about that headline
because it just implies that these ants are coming to
eat your precious xbox and there's nothing you can do
to penetrate its exo skeleton. It's just gonna laugh at you.
They feast on electronics, They're crazy, cannot be killed, cannot
(00:49):
as capitalized. Um, they've got the little subheads here. Since
it was first spotted in Houston in two thousand two,
it's spread to some twenty one counties in Texas, twenty
counties in Florida, and a few locations in Mississippi and Louisiana.
The omnivorous and attacks and kills other species, as well
as monopolizing food sources to the detriment of the entire ecosystem.
(01:10):
It also attacks electrical wiring causing millions of dollars worth
of damage. So it's just an unstoppable force. It's like
an invasion. I'm imagining those ants from Indiana Jones and
The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Did you watch there?
You didn't watch it? No, you know that the buzz
wasn't all that great, so I just never got around
(01:31):
to it. Robert, I get mad when people haven't watched
the same bad movies I have. You've got to go
subject yourself to this. Have you heard about the gopher? No,
there's a gopher like in Caddyshack Gopher. Yeah, this is
like a c g I gopher in it. And there's
also c g I ants marching through the forest and
attacking people. M I should probably check it out at
(01:54):
some point. No, don't waste your time. It's the best
part of it is Cape Blanchet, who's the best part
of everything she does. But there are crazy ants. They're
essentially crazy ants or their giant crazy ants. Is that
what you're saying. No, I think it's actually not a
very good point of comparison once we get into the
details on crazy ants. But man, so I I put
this up here because I hate the Daily Mail. That's
(02:16):
I shouldn't say I hate things, but uh, yeah, I
I kind of hate the way their their headlines work.
But I also can't resist that they just go for it.
They say, cannot be killed and feast on electronics. But
of course we are talking about a real organism here, Yeah,
one that's not quite as outlandish as this. Uh, these
(02:38):
headlines and subheads make it sound. No, And while the
idea of feasting on electronics is not quite exactly right,
it's not as far off as you might imagine based
on I don't know, you know, whatever you found out
when you clicked on that Daily Mail article about the
Longness monster washing up on the beach, you know. And
I also have to point out that I have I
(02:59):
have heard versions of this where people think that the
crazy ants eat electricity, which is also not true. Yeah,
like their RoboCop they need to charge up at not right, Yeah,
they're seeking out your electronics so that they can they
can they just jagg onto that that that precious juice.
Did you ever see that mid career West Craven movie Shocker? No,
(03:20):
but this is one that that you've been telling me
about for years. Yeah, it's so it's West Craven at
at the height of his I don't care, and he
makes a movie with the Oh what's a Mitch Pelegie,
the boss from the X Files. Yeah, he plays like
a murderer who gets sent to the electric chair, and
then he turns into an electricity killer who like can
(03:41):
fly through TVs, and he can go through power lines,
and he when he gets hurt, he can heal himself
by sticking his fingers in an electrical He's basically the
electricity gremlin from Gremlins to the New Batch. You know,
I've never seen Grimlin's too. How many people hate me? Now?
Uh no, So let's explain. Are a little bit more
anecdotes about what the deal with this crazy aunt is
(04:04):
and why people say it feasts on electricity, even if
that's not exactly true. So there is a New York
Times story on crazy ants by the writer John Muallam,
and it tells stories of people with crazy ant nightmares
in their homes, specifically with the ants attacking their electronics.
So there's one story about a man named Mike who
had his house infested to an unbelievable degree. Quote one day,
(04:28):
his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from
the vents in his living room floor, so he powered
up his shop back to clear them. By the time
he was done, he had sucked out five gallons of ants.
Soon he and his wife were waking up to find
vast frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor
in all directions. When the picture on their fifty inch
(04:50):
box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel
and found the guts throbbing with ants. Oh that's that's lovely.
I mean that just sounds like like Tales from the
Dark Side episode. Yeah, you can't, well there, what's in
the Tales from the Crypt movie? There's a guy who
gets flooded with It's not ants. I think it's cockroaches,
isn't it? Oh, are you thinking about Stephen King's creep show?
(05:14):
Not Tales from the Crypt creep show? But you know
the Tales from the Crypt. I'm sure it has an
insect horror episode that I'm forgetting. Yeah. Another story from
that New York Times article, there's a man named strom Duke.
The story of strom Duke quote, one evening his iron
stopped working, Then sparks shot from the appliance, and a
tide of crazy ants came rushing out. Other Dukes lived
(05:38):
in neighboring houses, and they all had similar stories. The
ants had caused six dollars of electrical damage to one
woman's car, infiltrated the glass break detector of one house's
alarm system, causing the alarm to blare, and just the
previous night, shut off the water at Strom's brother Melvin's
house by disabling the pressure switch on his well. It
(06:01):
really sounds like it could be a horror movie. I
can imagine all these essentially the movie Squirm, except instead
of screaming earthworms, you have ants just streaming out of
telephones in various household gadgets. Yeah, and if you don't
dig too deep, if somebody just says it, it sounds
like it could be plausible. Right. The answer eating electricity.
You keep finding them inside the TV, inside the iron,
(06:22):
inside the sensor, the air conditioner, compressor, the gas pump.
They're everywhere the wires are, So why why wouldn't we
assume they're eating electricity? Yeah? I mean, the mere idea
of ants being drowned electricity isn't that crazy? I mean
eating electronics? Yes, that's nuts. But organisms are inherently bioelectric,
even in the know the mighty electric eel. It's nothing
(06:45):
compared to lightning or the lethal volts coiled inside your
household electric outlets, but it's there. It's it's really not
that grandiose to think of it as as a sparkle
of life. Even so. Yeah, just the mere connection between
electricity organisms, uh, you know, one can easily buy into that. Yeah,
you can easily imagine they're trying to power up right,
(07:08):
or at least that Yeah, there's maybe some kind of
electromagnetic field being omitted, and that field tends to draw
in insects of a certain sort. It makes me think of, um, Robert,
did you ever see that ants circling the iPhone viral video?
I don't think I ever did, know, Well, allow me
to show you something. Oh wow, So it's just a
(07:32):
phone looks like it's receiving a call, and ants are
just circling around it like uh, like they're they're intending
to invade it where they was sieging it, corralling it
even yea. As I look at this video now, it's
got almost five million views. It obviously was a viral
hit and It was published by something on YouTube called
Viral Video Lab. I'm pretty sure it's fake. I looked
(07:56):
at the Snopes thing on it. The Snopes article is like, well,
you know, we haven't proven it's real. It's hard to
prove a video like that is fake. But a lot
of the people who have been analyzing it, you know,
their Reddit threads on it and stuff, and people are like,
you know, if you look at certain parts of it,
it really looks like the ants are blurry kind of
animations that have been edited into the to the picture.
(08:18):
But yet again, it doesn't seem impossible that a phone
which puts out an electromagnetic field could cause something like
ants to circle around it. I mean, we know that
certain animals like birds use a certain amount of magnetic
kind of path finding to orient themselves for migration. We
know that there are electromagnetically sensitive animals that live in
(08:41):
the water. Sharks and rays have a certain amount of
electromagnetic sensitivity. So you kind of might assume, even though
this video turns out to be fake, that there could
be things like that there's some kind of field being
put out that sucks in all the insects around it.
But with crazy ants. Uh, that does not appear to
be the case. But the answer, that answer is still
(09:01):
quite fascinating, right it is. So there is more than
one kind of crazy ant. Actually, the kind we're talking
about is Nylandria Fulva, commonly known as the Raspberry crazy
aunt Raspberry without a P because it's named after a
guy named Raspberry r A S B E r r Y,
or also known as the Tawny crazy ant. Maybe we
(09:21):
can mostly call it Nylanderia Fulva or something, because who
wants to say raspberry or tawny when you're talking about ants?
They sound delicious, though, Yeah, this is it a flavor
of ants? Yeah? I think so. It's kind of I'm
imagining ice cream cone crawling and crazy ants. Well, I'm
sure there are ice cream cones like that. Another point
of comparison I should make is that when reading about
how these ants pile up, you know they're these massive
(09:44):
volumes of ants. The guy talked about sucking five gallons
of ants out of his air conditioner with a vacuum cleaner.
The people who have really bad infestations of Nyland Area
Fulva in Texas and stuff say that the ants will
sort of like pile up head against the sides of
their house like snow drifts, and if you don't know
(10:04):
what you're looking at, it can look like huge piles
of coffee grounds or something, suggesting there could be a flavor.
It sounds like the zombies and war Zy right where
they're just kind of piling up against the wall. Well,
that's a that's a kind of interesting thing, the way
that ants can behave a little bit like the zombies
in the World War Z movie if you haven't seen
the movie, zombies are getting over a barrier by just
(10:28):
like piling their bodies up against it and eventually forming
a staircase made out of other zombies to get to
the top of the wall. Yeah, they're really just playing
ant like behavior in that in that in that film,
because I'm instantly reminded of cases that we've talked about
in the past of uh, you know, I believe the
fire ants in particular forming a raft, Yes, exactly. Yeah,
(10:49):
they'll they'll make a raft for themselves when it floods,
a raft made out of ants for ants to survive
a flood. I want to see zombies do that. Maybe
the zombies have done that in a in a film
or a TV show I just haven't seen it. It's
kind of a reminder of the bizarre, deep, almost kind
of group intelligence that you see in use social insects
like ants and bees. But anyway, as we were saying,
(11:11):
there's more than one kind of crazy ant. Crazy ants
are native to South America, specifically northern Argentina and southern Brazil,
so picture kind of middle Middle region in South America.
And they were first discovered in Texas by an exterminator
named Tom Raspberry in two thousand two, and since then
they've been spreading throughout the Gulf Coast. They're now in
(11:32):
Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi. And people thought in those
regions that the red fire ant was pretty bad. They
thought it was a troubling invasive species. But the crazy
ant has actually been replacing the red fire ant for
many years there Now it's also displacing other arthropods like
spiders and centipedes, which can destabilize the food chain because
(11:54):
larger predators like birds need to be able to eat
things like spiders and centipedes. They're not so keen on
a crazy ants. All right, hold that thought. We're gonna
take a quick break and when we come back, we
will jump back into the swarm of crazy ants. Than alright,
we're back. So we mentioned that the crazy ants are
of the genus Nyland area. Um, you might wonder how
(12:16):
do they get the name crazy ants? Is it because
they're crazy because they want to get into your TV?
That doesn't really seem like how a name would come about.
Apparently they get this name from just descriptions of their
foraging behavior. And if you've never seen what this looks like,
you should go to YouTube and you should look up
videos of crazy ants foraging because it's it's kind of
(12:37):
hard to describe. It's this frantic, erratic, extremely fast movement.
Uh to me, crazy ants moving around in a swarm.
It almost looks like a swarm of gnats zipping around
in the air, except the movement is confined to a
flat surface on the ground. Yeah, if you're used to
sing and you know ants embarking on journeys generally like
(13:01):
a path from one place to another, you look at
this and it just looks like they're just a scramble.
They're just a mess. Yeah, it's just a mindless swarm. Well,
you think it's a different kind of foraging strategy based
on different mathematics. Right, when you've got a single line
between two things, you're maximizing efficiency there, Like the ants
are not expending any more energy than they need to
to get from one place to another in order to
(13:23):
transport goods and seek out new stuff and all that.
But when you see these these ants moving around, you
get a very different idea. It's almost as if they're
going for a different type of investment bet payoff matrix,
Like they're betting more on random movement leading to possible
discoveries of things leading to potential payoffs in in a
(13:44):
kind of like cloud type movement. Yeah, they're just scouring
the terrain to see what they can find. Now, I
listened to an interview with a U. T. Austin researcher
named Dr Edward Lebrun, who is an expert on crazy
antswer who studies invasive ants in general and um, one
of the things you're saying is that they're very successful
invasive species because they share traits with other successful invasive ants,
(14:07):
one of which is that the crazy ants are what
he calls super colonial, meaning you've got no divisions between
colonies of the same species. So some other ants might
set up a colony here and then a colony over
in the neighbor's yard. And if the ants of those
two colonies come into contact with another, they're going to
fight it out right, like rival kingdoms exactly. They're in
(14:28):
competition for the same resources. It's like, you know, you
and your neighbor fighting over I don't know what you
would fight over with your neighbor. You found treasure, yeah,
buried treasure right on the property line, and you say,
I'm getting my sword, that's my treasure. But the crazy
ants don't necessarily behave that way. Crazy ants from different
colonies apparently treat one another with deference in respect. They
(14:50):
come across members of another colony, and they treat them
basically as if they were members of the same colony. So,
con specifics, members of the same crazy aunt species don't
tend to antagonize one another. They team up. And from
that New York Times article I mentioned earlier by Mullum Lebroun,
the researchers says that he believes there's a single super
colony of crazy ants that occupies quote as many as
(15:13):
four thousand, two hundred acres in Iowa Colony, which is
a place in Texas strangely enough, uh, and is spreading
two hundred meters a year in all directions. It's basically
just this one giant organism because in many ways a
colony of ants or a colony of any youth social
insects kind of does behave like a single organism split
(15:34):
across multiple bodies. Wow. So yeah, this is they're essentially
the the the Tyrannids from Warhammer forty thousand. There just
this invading superorganism. Well you've mentioned the Tyrannids before, but
you've got to tell me a little more about him, Robert. Basically,
it's an army of xenomorph inspired sort of biohr is
also very inspired by the the alien antagonists from Starship Troopers,
(15:56):
so that kind of adversary and the ideas that they
just come and they just lay waste two entire planets.
You know, it's funny you should mention Starship Troopers because
we were just talking about the World War Z kinda
and aunt. What what World War Z zombies and ants
have in common is that they'll make mega structures out
of their own bodies to climb over things and stuff.
The bugs in Starship Troopers do the same thing. Yeah, Yeah,
(16:19):
that's right. They did in the film version. Yeah. Oh,
I don't know if they do in the book. Yeah, yeah,
I've I've read the book, but I don't I don't recall. Well,
I think it's time we've got to address this question.
Why do the crazy ants keep invading electronics? Why do
you find them in the TV and the iron in
the detector and the all that stuff. Well, part of
the answer, of course, is based on the way they
(16:41):
hunt for food and resources. They are simply going to
come across electronics, right, I mean, they are going to
find them because that's they're They're just scouring everywhere. They're
gonna scour your home and they're going to run across
your various electronic gadgets. Yeah, you're exactly right. I Mean
one of the things that comes through in the stories
about crazy and infestations is that that they they become
(17:05):
so pervasive in everywhere. You know, if you've got an
infestation in your house, they're gonna be all over the place,
and so they will be scouting out all kinds of things.
And this actually leads to one thing that Edward Lebrun
said that I thought was pretty interesting. He didn't use
these words, but he said essentially that there's got to
be some selection bias in the characterization of them, mainly
(17:26):
invading electronics. And his exact quote was quote, when your
power goes out, you want to know why you find
a bunch of ants. That's a good reason to get
your video camera. Which is a very good point about
the way that we tend to notice things, right, We
tend to notice something when it's an unusual problem. You're
much less likely to get the camera out if it's
(17:48):
you know, not turning off something that you might be
trying to use. That's right. And then of course the
reason that that that they wind up in your electronics,
the reason why it becomes a problem has a lot
to do with not so much the certainly not the
electronic components there, but just the case itself. Like if
if they end up in your computer tower for your
(18:09):
your PC, it's not because there's a you know, there's
an active battery in there or anything, right, it's the
it's it's the tower itself is an ideal container for
the ants exactly. So crazy ants are different than many
other types of ants. If you've got a group of
red fire ants, Solenopsis invicta, which they've got a great
Latin name, Solenopsis in victa. They're gonna build a colony, right,
(18:32):
They're gonna dig, and they're gonna build a mound, and
they're gonna dig tunnels in the mound. Their their ecosystem engineers, right,
like we were talking about in the City Evolution episode.
They build their own ecosystem and then they guard it
to the death. Crazy ants are different. They don't dig
very much. They dig a little bit and not much.
They prefer to nest in existing cavities they come across
(18:53):
in the environment. So the insides of boxes containing electronics
tend to be an eye deal type of enclosed protected
space that's perfect for them to climb into and form
a nest inside. Yeah, enclosed spaces with with space in
there and a limited numbers of of entrances and exits, right,
(19:15):
and very small entrances and exits, so predators, it's gonna
be hard for them to get in there. When was
the last time an ant eater got inside your TV? Rightly,
it's it's true, it's it's it's it's pretty safe from
less than five times. It's got to be. But also
Lebron and other experts have pointed out another reason why
you might tend to find tons of ants and the
guts of your TV, or tons of crazy ants pouring
(19:38):
out of a compressor box or something. Lebron says that
when the crazy ants get agitated, they released something known
as an alarm pheromone. Now we know that a lot
of the communication between ants who share a colony is
pheromone base. They release chemical signals that are distributed through
the air that can essentially smell messages from one another,
(19:58):
and the alarm pheromone is a chemical that has a
smell that alerts conspecific ants to danger or trouble. Now
you can imagine that this could work several different ways
in the wild. Right, one way an animal might use
an alarm pheromone would be to say, Hey, I'm in danger.
There's something dangerous here, you better stay away. But not
so with the crazy ants. You know, I feel like
(20:19):
this sort of pheromone based behavior you often see this
pop up in monster movies, is a way to outsmart
or defeat the adversary. Blade too comes to mind. There's
the end up like mimicking the pheromones of the reaper
vampires and you know, directing where they swarm. But I
feel like it's rarely explored as that the prime motivator.
(20:40):
Is there a monster movie out there where the whole
crazy interspecies conflict comes down to a misunderstanding over alarm pheromone?
May be interesting. I've never heard of that, but you
could easily see how, especially given what I'm about to say,
that that things could get mixed up and go bad.
So another what Lebron says is, actually, it's not the
(21:01):
way that I just mentioned. It's not that they put
out an alarm pheromone that says I'm in danger, stay away.
When you put crazy ants in a vial, he says,
they get very agitated, and they get mad, they release
their alarm pheromone. And if you take a vial of
these really angry agitated ants and you put it next
to a trail of other crazy ants, instead of avoiding
(21:22):
the vial, the ants are going to swarm all over it.
They're actually attracted to the alarm pheromone. And this kind
of makes sense for ants because being used social insects,
this is how they defend nests. Like if you've got
a nest and something's in the nest. Attacking the nest,
what you want to do is bring all of your
family members in to fight the attacker off. So basically
(21:43):
they're there. Their whole way about doing things is if
you mess with one crazy ant, you're messing with all
the crazy ants, right, I mean, one crazy ant doesn't
stand much of a chance right there. They're they're very small.
Crazy antswer tiny, especially compared to some other AUNT competitors
of theirs, which are bigger and have powerful venom glands
and stingers and stuff. Crazy an'ts are little things. But
(22:04):
of course the problem here is someone with an invaded xbox.
They're they're not intentionally messing with the crazy ants. They're
not trying to eat crazy ants. They're not They're not
they're not trying to do the uh, the colony's harm.
But what happens if, if, if a if a single
crazy ant comes to harm within your xbox. That's exactly
(22:24):
the problem. So it has been hypothesized by Lebron and
others that what may be going on here is you've
got an electronic device, or an electrical power box or
something crazy ant comes in, maybe multiple crazy ants come in,
either one ant or a group of ants touching one
another create a short circuit. They touched the wrong contact points,
(22:45):
they close a circuit and get electrocuted or burned because
they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how
circuits work. No, they're like Indiana Jones's buddy wandering through
the temple. They don't know there are traps here. They
don't know to stay out of the light, so that
so they they just get burned or get electrocuted. And
then when there's trauma, they release the alarm pheromone, and
(23:06):
of course this draws in more ants, and maybe more
ants get electrocuted or burned or something like that, and
they release more alarm pheromone, and it draws in even
more ants, until you've just got a TV sagging with ants.
And this again, this could work wonderfully. And say a
zombie movie, what if the whole reason the zombies are
attacking the the house all odd night of the Living
(23:27):
Dead is because one zombie happened to, uh, you know,
burn up in a toaster. I feel like there's got
to be a good monster movie that already has a
treatment of this. It must exist. I can't call anything
to mind right now. Yeah, like I say, it seems
like you see the pheromone angle used as a as
a brilliant scientific, you know, tactic against the monsters, but
(23:48):
it's rarely the uh, the the actual cause of the
of the encounter. Now, if you don't already live within
range of Nylondaria fulva, I'm sure you're wondering when can
I get them in my EXAs well. The fortunate thing
is that they don't tend to travel very far on
their own because they don't have wing dispersal, so they
don't you know, fly off new queens to set up
(24:11):
new colonies far away. They move very slowly. I've seen
it characterized as on average about two hundred meters per
year is about as far as they go unless somebody
moves them. And you can imagine how somebody might move
them by accident if they tend to inhabit cavities. So
say one of these things gets inside your car or
(24:32):
gets inside your TV and you move houses, or gets
inside something else, and that is how these things can
be transported to new places. Now, there are some questions
that haven't been fully answered yet about what's the up
upwards northern end of their possible range. How how far
north could they go before, for example, of freezes hard
(24:53):
freezes in the winter would prevent them from surviving. And
we don't fully know the answers tell those questions yet.
But once we answer those questions, then of course who
knows if climate change is gonna affect that over the
coming decades anyway, So right, there's gonna that's changing the
playing field for so many different organisms. Yeah, so what
ultimately is at steak here with the crazy ants? I mean,
(25:13):
it truly goes beyond just the the average, the the
the odds shorted out xbox right right. Well, the the
damage is mainly not too human electronics. It's mainly going
to be too ecosystems. Because they can out compete native insects.
They can destroy beehives and other ant colonies. Um, I've
read that they can even sometimes they're so thick, they swarm,
(25:37):
so thick that they can smother and suffocate ground dwelling birds.
It's horrible to picture, but yeah, they just get into
the nasal cavities of chickens and other ground dwelling birds
and asphyxiate them. U they can get in the eyes
of live stock. It's really gross as far as damage goes,
I actually have read that there was at least one
(25:58):
time when they shut down a chemical plant by getting
into electronics. So we've been saying, okay, here are these
these more reasonable explanations. Is not that they eat electricity,
it's that there's this pheromone and here's what happens to
get them inside your electronics. I should note that in
that New York Times story I mentioned earlier, Dr David Oi,
an entomologist with the U. S Department of Agriculture. He
(26:20):
according to him, he said, you know, we can't rule
out the possibility that the ants are in some way
actually attracted to electromagnetic fields and get in there. For
that reason, that just hasn't been you know, we haven't
demonstrated that, but you can't rule it out as an
influencing factor. So who knows. Maybe they are, maybe they
are shocker material. But anyway, as as far as their
effect on humans goes, I mean, I think a lot
(26:42):
of it is actually more psychological than material damage. When
you read about people who live in the places where
they're dealing with infestations of these ants, they they they
hate them, They're they are freaking out. I mean, I'm
sure not everybody is like that, but there there are
some people who are really distressed. I can't at a
(27:03):
voluminous the antsw are I can't imagine anyone not freaking
out like we. We don't really want our homes to
be um habitats for anything besides ourselves and our sanctioned pets. Nobody,
nobody wants to see ants in their house. That is
always a problem. You know that John Muellam article in
The Times, It takes a dark turn when he quotes uh.
(27:26):
He quotes the American psychologist James Hillman and says that
Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception
of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your
individual consciousness to a merely numerical or statistical level. Well,
I can't say that's exactly how I think about it.
When I encounter ants in the house. Usually I'm I
(27:49):
think more, Oh, well, we left something out, the ants
came in and are trying to eat it, and now
I've got to set out some of these grotesque traps
to try and kill them. Everyone loses, the ants lose,
I lose. Nobody wants this situation. You know, I I
don't like killing bugs and wildlife, but when I've had
aunt infestations in my house, I've noticed that, like I
(28:09):
just turned into a cold hearted murderer. I'm just like, yeah,
I'm gonna kill you all it. It does something to
my brain. Well, they're they're just they're out of place.
They're not supposed to be here. That's not what the
house is for. I feel like I should learn to
be a better person. It's it's easy to do that
when you were out and about and encounter the ants
(28:29):
in the yard, But it's just in the house that
changes everything. Now, one of the things that a lot
of the conversation on crazy ants has centered on has
actually been like bureaucratic, scientific and government response to them.
Like a lot of that New York Times article I mentioned.
While it's got some great anecdotes and stuff in it,
a lot of the article is actually focused on the
scientific community and the government's alleged slowness to identify the
(28:52):
species and respond to its spread in a way that
might not be fair. Right. Yeah. I found an interesting
response to this particular New York Times article by a
research scientist, Alex Wilde and he offered this critique. He said, quote,
this is not accurate. Scientists did not, in fact, quote
swarm into debate unquote. The slow response to identifying in
(29:14):
fullva was exactly the opposite. The trouble is that figuring
out the origin and invasive ants isn't anyone's job, at
least not in the United States. What happened was that
a few ants scientists, in their spare time from whatever
their official duties were, have occasionally offered an opinion about
these new invaders. And he goes on to summarize further
(29:36):
and said, and he says, I don't see the point
of singling out the egghead scientists for being slow to
identify Nylanderia fulva when the real trouble is bigger and structural.
Americans simply don't value basic research enough to support a
system that rapidly pinpoints emerging pest problems. If we want
to quickly identify new pests, we need to salary thousands
(29:57):
of positions for taxonomists where afpid response to emerging threats
is part of the job. I think that's a good
point to make. I mean, uh, maybe we should have
made it more clear that one of the things in
the article is that you get this idea that these
like exterminators and people have to be the ones to
step in and really push forward on identifying the species
(30:19):
because the scientists are dropping the ball. It really basically
the horror movie just writes itself again because you can
imagine the poor exterminate. Yea, the exterminator character dies in
the opening scene. Then the scientist comes in and it
is all and trying to interpret it but ultimately can't
get a handle on the monsters, and the monsters eat him.
(30:40):
But the reality is rather different. There's no crack team
of egghead scientists to show up to deal with with
with different outbreaks of ants. Yeah, and especially with the
world we live in right now. I mean we live
in a world that is number one globally connected through
commerce and travel, so things can get back and forth
between places really easy. And number two, we live in
(31:01):
an era of changing climate where it's going to be
we're always going to be altering ecosystems and changing the
types of life forms they can support. We're getting into
an invasive species. What would you call it the dead zone?
Not the dead zone, a life zone. Actually that's the opposite.
A zone that is just rife for infestations of all types. Now,
(31:22):
I want to be careful not to overly demonize invasive species,
because you can sometimes see people get into this mindset
of like, oh, this species from South America or something.
They're just these horrible pests. It's not that the animals
themselves are horrible. I mean, they didn't do anything wrong.
They're just trying to live. The problem is they're suddenly
(31:43):
living in an ecosystem that was not prepared for them,
and they're they're disrupting that ecosystem and causing rapid change
within it. Yeah, we're the ones who disrupted the balance.
So you can't. You can't getting mad at the weights
when you're the one who switched them around on the scales. Yeah.
That being said, you you can try to exterminate the
weights in this case of the ants. All Right, we're
(32:05):
gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
we'll discuss the ant on ant action, the ant war
between the fire ants and the crazy ants. Alright, we're back.
It's fire ants versus crazy ants. How does this epic
war go down? Robert, You've got to tell me. Is
there a fire ant or any kind of ant Mexican
(32:29):
wrestler or Japanese wrestler. Oh, well, there are some. There
are some sort of uh, there are some ant based
wrestlers out of believe it's with Chakara, which is a
US independent pro wrestling group, and they have a whole
slew of ants. There's like fire ant soldier AUNT and
they're all mass wrestlers. Yeah, how did I guess this?
It just it it rights itself. You would just assume
(32:50):
there would be AUNT wrestlers, and there are. I bet
they're a good tag team, right, because answer great team players,
I believe. So. I'm not a I'm not a big
Chakara viewer, but my understanding is they have uh they're
like like tag team and six man tag team specialist. Yes, well,
let's imagine that the team they're going up against is
a team of fire ants. You've got a team of
(33:12):
crazy ants, crazy ant wrestlers going up against fire ant wrestlers.
Who's gonna win this battle? Turns out the crazy ants,
the crazy ants are gonna win even though the crazy
ants they're small, Uh that they don't have this powerful
scary sting like the fire ants do. Like you get
some fire ants on you sting you. That is a
that's a bad day, and it's gonna be some bad
(33:33):
days like that. That hurts. Uh. The crazy ants, while
they can be incredibly irritating if you've got an infestation
in your home, their bite has been described as barely noticeable.
It's it's not too painful to humans. Yeah, by humans,
always important to know when we're dealing with miniscule species.
But then again, it speaks to the power of the
(33:53):
fire ant that we're all aware of what a fire
ant can do, so much so that we all know
what it means when EO. Wilson j M's his hand
into the fire ant nest and you see them just
joyfully beaming with the ant pain. But anyway, Yeah, you've
got these competitors red fire ants or Solenopsis invicta and
the crazy ants or Nylon diarya fulva. And when they
(34:15):
come together, the crazy ants apparently win. So how do
the crazy ants generally protect themselves? Well, there's a good
article by Dina Fine marin inteen called the Rise of
the Crazy Ants and Scientific American UH, and it profiles
some good research in science from by Lebron, Jones and
(34:36):
Gilbert about chemical warfare between crazy ants and fire ants,
And so one of the first things you would observe
is that if you've got equal numbers of fire ants
and crazy ants that show up, they've got equally matched
tag teams, and they show up to fight, the crazy
ants win about ninety three percent of the time. That's
a really good record. Yeah, that is that they are.
(34:58):
They are the victors by far. Does any wrestler win
of the time stone cold? Um? Well, I I don't know,
you know, some some have phenomenally high, you know, win
win records. You know. It's just it depends who's the
top character in a promotion, I guess, and that would
definitely be the crazy ant here, probably because they would
be the most popular. Fans love the crazy ant. Yeah.
(35:20):
And it's not just these in vivo matchups. Uh, there's
colony snatching. Sometimes crazy ant colonies are found inside fire
ant mounds that still have some fire ants in them alive,
meaning that these nests were not abandoned by fire ants
and then ex appropriated by crazy ants. They were actively
invaded while the fire ants were still there and the
(35:43):
crazy ants took over. So the way the crazy ants
are able to do this is that they can secrete
substances from their glands, one of which is formic acid
that was already shown to be a weapon that could
be sprayed at attackers. There's a study in Toxicon in
teen by gian Chin. It all called Defensive Chemicals of
(36:04):
Tawny crazy Ants Nyland Area Fulva. Actually it's got a
long title. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but
basically it says that Nyland Area Fulva they produce formic
acid in their poison glands and then two keytones and
alkanes in their dufes glands, all of which are used
as toxic weapons against fire ants. So they've got these
poisons they use. The DeFord Land compounds are used more
(36:27):
as contact poisons. They're more potent if you like dab
some on the enemy, whereas the formic acid has a
higher fumigation toxicity, so that's like gassing your enemy. So
they have both melee and ranged weapons at their disposal. Basically,
it is true, and in a high enough concentration, formic
acid can even be an inhalation hazard to humans, causing
(36:49):
like lung edema, you know, fluid in the lungs. But
fortunately you don't have to worry about ants producing it
in a high enough concentration that's going to hurt you,
but they could hurt other ants. I was a little
bit interested in formic acid because I was reading about
it and I found you know, okay, so it seems
like this has been known about for a while and
it's actually been used in in in some human industry. Well,
(37:12):
I found an extract of a letter about the discovery
of formic acid in ants in the seventeenth century that
was written by a guy named John Ray to the
publisher of Philosophical Transactions in sixteen seventy. It was called
concerning some uncommon observations and experiments made with acid juice
to be found in ants juice spelled ju y c e.
(37:35):
And I gotta be honest. The main reason I wanted
to explore this is because I learned a new word.
It's a note quote concerning the juice of piss myres
piss myers. What's a pismire? Well, I did not know
this word before. Piss Myers means ants, and yes, it
is pronounced piss mere, and it comes from the route
you're wondering about right now, named after the supposed smell
(37:57):
of ant hills at the time. So my is meant
ants an ant hill smell like urine. That was the idea. Huh,
I don't. I don't know that I've ever really stopped
and smelled the ant hills. Maybe I should. I'm not
enjoying life enough. Apparently, now it makes sense where the
phrase piss aunt comes from. Yeah, okay, it means piss.
Myers always ant. I always thought it was just the
(38:18):
random combination of two things, like, oh that that guy's
really a poop duck. You know, there's nothing, there's not
necessarily connection there, but you you put two things together
and it sounds like an insult. What's you know? So
I assume piss aunt was the same thing. No, but
apparently this is not vulgar phrase at all. This is
seventeenth century scientific journal stuff. There you go. But anyway,
(38:41):
A Ray considers the the author of this letter, he's
been writing about this experiment he read about where somebody
would drop chickory leaves among an ant hill and it
would cause the chickery leaves to change color, indicating some
kind of chemical reaction. And he's wondering what's going on there,
and he discovers that the juice of Pissmire's is an acid,
causing similar effects to oil of vitriol, which means sulfuric acid.
(39:06):
And in the end of his letter he writes, quote, Indeed,
it seems strange that nature should prepare and separate in
the body of this insect without and sensible heat, and
that in good quantity, considering the bulk of the animal
a liquor. The same for kind with those acid spirits
which are by art extracted out of some mimeralds, not
without great force of fire. So I like that he's marveling, Like,
(39:29):
you know, how is it that ants can produce this
powerful poison? But we can't do make anything that's powerful
without some kind of serious alchemy. But another interesting little
hidbit I came across is that formic acid is used
by humans and things. Of course, it's used as an
antibacterial preservative for things like livestock feed. But I've also
read some stories just in recent months about how formic
(39:51):
acid could be used as a liquid hydrogen carrier for
fuel cell technology. So what if the electronics of future
are powered by fuel cells containing the same defensive poisons
used by Pissmires that shored out an invade current day
electronics in the Gulf States. Oh my goodness. Yeah, you're
(40:13):
imagining a future in which the uh, the engine itself
is a is a colony of some sort of crazy ants.
I like it. It's like back to the future, except
instead of the the garbage disposal that powers the futuristic
to lorient, it's just he needs to dock has to
find another crazy ant colony to shovin there. I think
(40:34):
they really sad thing is that they're not like milking
ants to get the formic acid. I think they. I
think they make it in an industrial process, but how
how disappointing. Man, I can still dream. But who knows,
Maybe maybe we could change all that if somebody invents
a really efficient ant milking machine. Anyway, Anyway, anyway, getting
back to the role of the formic acid in the
(40:55):
ants defense. So we know they can use it as
an offensive weapon against enemies like the at the red
fire ant. But this Lebron paper from what it found
was really interesting. So they found that when crazy ants
get into battles with red fire ants, they do this
really weird series of behaviors. The crazy ant encounters red
(41:15):
fire ant, then the crazy ant rears up on its
hind and middle legs. Then it does this unbelievable body
contortion where it curls its body all the way around
to touch its mandibles to the tip of its abdomen.
Then it starts doing something that looks like self grooming,
rubbing a secretion around on its body. So what's going
(41:39):
on there? Well, researchers experimented by placing a tiny dab
of nail polish on the crazy ants glandular opening on
the abdomen, and this would block the opening and prevent
it from secreting whatever it normally secretes, and so this
was the test group. They also placed a small dab
of nail polish on the sides of the abdomen of
(42:00):
control group. This dab would not block any secretions. And
then of course you've got ant fight, right, crazy ants
versus fire ants. So in the control group that just
had the just had the nail polish on the sides
and they could still secrete from the abdomen. The control
group survived fire ant attacks almost a hundred percent of
the time the crazy ants were just killing it. But
(42:21):
in the experimental group, roughly half of the crazy ants
were killed by fire ants, and among the ones that
survived it may have been because the nail polish didn't
completely cover the opening, so some secretions got through. So
apparently the formic acid is not just a weapon, it
is a defensive body shield as well, protecting the ant
from the venomous attacks of its competitors. And so also
(42:45):
from the labrun study, the researchers tested whether the formic
acid would protect another ant species from the venom of
the fire ant, and they found yep. Among a third
ant species, those given a placebo were killed by fire
ants about eighty percent of the time, while those treated
with the crazy ants formic acid secretions almost all of
them survived. So how does the formic acid produce this
(43:08):
sort of body shield that protects the ant. We don't
really know yet the secrets of ant warfare. There's always
more to discover, you know. It makes me think about, um,
how two different kinds of animals they live in a
in a different arena of competition. And now, obviously fighting
(43:29):
between ants will involve some kind of like mechanical action
and shearing, pressure and pushing and all the kind of
stuff we imagine when we're fighting. But when we imagine
big mammals fighting, it's all like force. You're delivering energy
to one another. You're biting and twisting and cutting and stuff,
and and that's how animals like us fight And because
(43:49):
of that, I think a lot of our fighting perception
is based on things like movement and distance. You know,
we're trying to see like how far something is from
us and how asked it's moving. And when you're on
the scale of an ant, the theater of perception and
conflict is so much more chemical. It's all about what
chemicals are present in the immediate area, what pheromones are
(44:13):
telling you about what's going on around you, what pheromones
you can put out that will do, you know and like?
And because you're so small and the conflict itself is
so largely venomous and chemical in nature. Yeah, But then
on the other hand, you are they. You know, we
want to think about the individual ant, but you have
such a use social organization here with an aunt colony
(44:36):
that it's uh, it's far from a one from one
for one you you'd have to think of yourself as
the colony really, I think to get anywhere close to
imagining what it is to be ant, Yeah, that's a
good point to remind us. It's like it might actually,
if you could understand the mind of an ant, to
whatever extent there is such a thing as the mind
of an ant, it might not make sense to be
(44:57):
the mind of an individual aunt. It might maybe there
really is no such thing as an individual aunt. I mean,
of course, there is the object of a single aunt body,
but that doesn't really that's not really a biological unit
as much as the colony is the unit. Yeah, Like,
we fall into traps two of our our language I've
(45:18):
I've read before regarding bees. Another famous youth social insect,
of course, is that we we we know the Queen
Bee is not an actual queen, and yet just by
referring to her as such, by approaching bees with with
human models in our mind, we think of her as
being some sort of an authority figure. We can't. It's
(45:38):
so easy to fall into that trap when really she
is another cog in the machine. Yeah, I propose we
replaced the phrase queen be with gene b. It's the
b who's the vehicle for genes for the next generation. Yeah,
I like that we should push through that gene b
gene b. But not like not like the name is gene.
(46:00):
Well maybe it's j E A and it's you know,
the feminine gene that will work. That'll work all right,
So there you have it. Uh As always, head on
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