June 5, 2021 • 45 mins
The war has raged for at least 100 million years. Armored warriors boil up out of the ground and surge across the battlefield. Mandibles clash. Bodies are torn asunder. As the will of one colony clashes with another, forces advance, withdrawal and sometimes whole populations perish in the Earth. Such are the wars of the ants, compared to which the wars of humanity are but a blip. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the history and tactics of ant warfare, and what humans can learn from it all. (originally published 6/18/2020)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
bringing you an episode from the vault of This is
AUNT War's Part three, originally aired June eighth. Let's release
the ants Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production
of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
(00:33):
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our
Aunt Wars episodes. Now. In the previous episodes, we've already
covered a ton of different topics, the evolution of you
social insects like ants um. We talked about the conflicts
between army, ants and and everything in their path. We
talked about theories of combat disparities and how those may
(00:56):
apply to ants and and control the ways that's Aunt
sometimes select which members of the colony go out to fight.
We talked about the bivouax, the big war rig for
the Queen made out of army ants um. It's been
it's been a great journey so far, but we have
to press on. That's right. Uh So, one thing I
want to talk about it at the very start here
is the idea of empires of the ants, because, as
(01:20):
with human civilizations, apparently it's the larger ant societies that
spread the most violence. Smaller ant societies are less likely
to engage in any kind of protracted war against other
ant species. But but here's an interesting point raised by
entomologists Shawn O'Donnell in Ant Wars for Serious Science. Some
species of highly successful invasive ants demonstrate unicolonality. Uh. They
(01:46):
develop a willingness to identify members of other colonies as
part of their own, and the result is a super colony,
a true empire of the ants. Yeah, we discussed the
super colony adaptation in our episode. It's about the multiple
species of ants known as crazy ants, and this name
comes from their rapid, almost frantic or radic looking movements
(02:09):
sometimes when you like, if you watch video of them
moving around on the ground, it almost looks like flies
buzzing around. It looks like they're flying. Yeah, it's it's
it's visually, at least to us, starkly different from the
sort of you know, linear lines were used to seeing
for ants. Yeah, but the super coloniality issue came up
in our episodes on the Mystery of Crazy ants supposedly
(02:31):
being attracted to electricity or electrical appliances. Remember that where
we're talking about all those stories people had of like
the their TV being full of crazy ants and people
didn't know why that was happening. That was, of course
the raspberry crazy ant of the genus Nylanderia, and then
we also talked about them in our episodes on Christmas Island.
Remember it was the invasive species of crazy ant known
(02:53):
as yellow crazy ants or anoplo Lepis grass sillipps that
was severely threatening the Christmas Island crabs. It was actually
colonies of those ants that were spraying formic acid into
the eyes of the crabs and into the leg joints
until they were immobilized and then the ants just eat them.
And there was an interesting project to try to introduce
(03:15):
a species of insect there to Christmas Island that would
help cut down on the populations of invasive ants. But anyway,
it's the tendency for crazy ants to form super colonies
that is considered one factor in their success as an
invasive species. Um you know, so they're super colonial, meaning
that when colonies of the same species meet one another,
(03:37):
instead of duking it out and going to battle with
one another. They just act as if they were from
the same colony. They team up instead of antagonizing one another.
UM and there are examples where people think they've detected
gigantic super colonies of these ants. One that we read
in one of those previous episodes was a New York
Times article that that quotes Edward Lebrun, who's in a
(03:59):
college US at the University of Texas at Austin UM,
and he apparently believes that there was a single super
colony in the Texas town called Iowa Colony. I know
that's confusing because we're talking about ant colonies and it's
in Texas, not Iowa, but that's a town it's called
Iowa Colony, and he believes that there was a super
colony of crazy ants occupying up to forty two hundred
(04:22):
acres in that town and spreading two hundred meters a
year in every direction. But that's by no means the
only Aunt super colony that's been found there. There are
other species and other super colonies that have been found
all over the continents. That's right. Mark W. Moten mentioned
an extremely large super colony of Argentine Aunt that ranges
(04:43):
from San Francisco to the Mexican border. Trillion strong and united.
It's a it's a super colony, and wars rage just
perpetually along its borders. He writes. Each month, millions of
Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around
San Diego. Clashes occur with three other colonies and wars
(05:03):
that may have been going on since the species arrived
in the state a century ago. And these wars, as
we've discussed in our previous episodes, are far from random
thrashings of aunt brutality. Uh. These are wars that align
with some of the same mathematics and tactics and principles
that we see a play in human military history. And
(05:24):
we have another example of this to consider, another interesting
parallel that's drawn between the wars of ants and the
wars of humans, and that is uh, the the the
this thing that we refer to as ant tournaments or
AUNT tournament sites. So for starters, you might need to
dismiss whatever sort of Mortal Kombat scenario is entering your
(05:45):
mind here at the thought of an ant tournament. Yeah,
but don't worry, because the reality is much cooler than
just like a single or double elimination tournament for ance. Uh.
So here's the here's an example that MafA Eo will
Sin and others bring up frequently, and that is honey
pot ants. Now, these ants are astonishing creatures in their
(06:05):
own right, even before you get to the tournament issue. Uh.
Their their way of storing food is something that you
must see for yourself. You you you should look up video
of them. Yeah, because their name honey pot ants. Because
what happens is the workers will the workers have the
ability to gorge themselves unto their abdomens are enormously swelled
(06:26):
and they look like little honey pots, uh, just filled
with liquid food. So instead of storing excess food within
a stash within the colony like a lot of ants do, uh,
the honey pot ants store it within themselves in these
little mobile depositories that are themselves and swollen workers that
we call repleats. And then if if you're another aunt
(06:49):
in the colony you need a little food, will you
come up to one of the repletes uh? And I
believe you, like you can touch their antenna and just
the right way and they'll regurgitate up some food for you. Right,
You you you you poke your estimate and it will
barf up your dinner. Yeah, they're like little vending machines.
Ah and I see you included a picture of this
in our in our notes here for me to look at, Joe.
(07:10):
They're wondrous, They're beautiful. They do look like little drugs.
They're so swollen they look on droplets of honey or
like extremely golden chickpeas their their back lid in this
image that I've shared with Robert, and it makes their
swollen abdomens look like bits of amber. Now, in addition
to this, there are there are other wrinkles to their
their peculiarity. So they're highly territorial. They frequently prey on
(07:34):
foraging termites, and should two different groups of honeypot ants
happen upon the same resource, a tournament begins to determine
who shall claim it. So what happens is the workers
from each colony circle around each other, standing up as
high as possible on their legs. Behavior that biot is
called stilting. So yes, what they're doing is they're trying
(07:55):
to look as imposing as possible, as large as possible.
And basically, the idea here seems to be that that
that the larger colonies of honey pot ants tend to
have larger individuals. So it's not only a show of
immediate force, like hey, look how big we are to
get away from our resources. It's also a show of
(08:16):
what kind of backup forces you have to call in.
That's interesting. So it's just like you can almost count
on the fact that if if this ant is big,
all of her buddies are big too. Yeah. It actually
reminds me a little bit of the Imperial invasion of
hot and the Empire strikes back with the deployment of
those enormous A T eighties, which I recently saw described
(08:39):
online as quote a giant impractical terror weapon. Absolutely, Why
the legs? Why make your all terrain attack vehicles so
vulnerable to a simple harpoon and tow cable? These these
tall spindle legs make no sense. Well, yeah, if you
think too hard about it. But as my my son
was recently telling me, we were watching the Own War
(09:00):
series and he said, you know, walkers are just always cool.
It doesn't matter which side they're on. They're just cool.
And it's true. But but I think also you can
look at it like, yes, it's a it's an impractical
terror weapon. It sends a message, Hey, we're the Empire
and we have resources on this scale at our disposal,
so you'd best just abandoned the ice planet to us.
(09:20):
And so that's what the weaker honeypot at force ends
up doing this whole tournament. Uh practice limits the need
for conflict and avoids the need for full scale and war.
The smaller ant army flees, but much like the rebel alliance,
they have to be darn sure that the forces there
uh they're seeding to don't follow them and trace them
(09:42):
to their primary base, because the larger honeypot force will
attempt to do this and they will not hesitate to
follow them back to their colony, decimate that colony, and
then enslave the swollen repletes as their own food stores. Now,
this is really interesting, the idea that they they make
this display and try to make a calculation about whether
(10:03):
it's worthwhile to fight. It's something that goes against the
naive version of the nature red in tooth and claw
idea that you know, animals are just always fighting and
killing each other. It's always a violent struggle for survival.
I don't know how you could quantify this, but my
gut feeling is that the vast majority of conflicts in
nature never come to violence. There are displays between animals
(10:27):
and then one side backs down. Yeah, I believe we've
talked about this before and discussing like animal weapons and
animal violence. Is that, you know, how often does one
animal outright kill another? You know it? I mean certainly
in from predation, Yeah, apart from predation. Like the idea
of two animals fighting to the death in a scenario
(10:48):
where one is not trying to eat the other is
is more of a rarity. But even so, It's like
if you have a t rex and a triceratops, Like
the t rex wants to kill the the triceratops in
this scenario EO, but it of course does not want
to be killed itself the you know, so it would
potentially fight to the death. But on the other hand,
(11:08):
they try sterotops doesn't want to eat the t rex.
It just wants to not be eaten by the t rex. Yeah,
I mean, it just brings to mind the fact that
animals they don't want to lose a conflict, but probably
even more than that, they don't want to die, and
so if if things are not looking like a like
a pretty clear wind for them, they will very often
just back down and try to get away. Now EO.
(11:31):
Wilson and biologists Burnt a Whole Dobbler have have compared
this tournament scenario to these symbolic battles and the Highlands
of New Guinea, the initial phase of of of a
battle or war in which the two sides square off
at a distance, and what they'll do. Yeah, this so
the scrap at a distance. They're not going to immediately,
you know, rush into each other like some sort of
(11:52):
brave heart scenario that's cinematic um trope that we all
have grown so used to. Instead, they're gonna throw o spears.
They're gonna fire arrows at each other, but with range
in wooden shields in place, so there's actually like a
a low possibility for fatality. And from here it might
(12:13):
give way to a heated, closer battle, but the its
aggressions might actually end right here. And this apparently is
something that one sees throughout the history of human conflict,
especially when it concerns smaller clans of fighters, because such
groups like this simply don't have the resources to enter
freely into a state of total warfare. Yeah, I think
(12:36):
that state is more common, as we were talking about earlier,
in in like larger empires, where you also have you know,
the army that arrives on the battlefield also has the
force of like a huge state behind it that will
not let it walk away. It's a you know that
that maybe the emperor back home is not going to
be pleased if you see that this battle doesn't look
(12:56):
good for you and decide it's better not to fight, Yes,
you'll find that he's not as forgiving, right. So Yeah,
I think this is obviously a smart strategy, and there's
a reason humans do this and ants do this. It
makes sense to try to avoid conflict if you can.
I also can't help but wonder if there's a comparison
to be made here. And this is just me, this
is not any of these other commentators that I've read.
(13:19):
They might have gotten into this, and maybe I just
haven't read it, But I wonder if you can make
a comparison here to the proxy wars between superpowers in
the human world. You know, human cases in which each
side certainly has immense resources, but in which case the
destructive potential of atomic weaponry essentially reduces both sides to smaller,
(13:39):
more vulnerable clans on their respective hillsides. There was something
I was trying to look up because this also made
me think of the at least epic literary tradition of
the champion warfare. That is, you know that you read
about it in the Iliad. It shows up actually in
a lot of of ancient epics and stuff where armies
(14:00):
will meet, but instead of you know, the whole armies
clashing with one another, they will each select their greatest
fighter and then those two will fight a duel that
is supposed to, at least in some cases, symbolically settle
the outcome of the fight. So I think of Hector
versus Achilles, and I was looking for example. I was like,
do aunts ever do this? So I was trying to
(14:22):
find examples of champion warfare among ants, but I couldn't
find anything. I don't know if you've come across anything
like that, But if there were an example of something
like that, that would be really interesting, that would man that. Yeah,
I didn't read anything about that in the sources I
was looking at it. I wonder how that would have
something like that would evolve. You know, it's kind of
(14:44):
hard to imagine being a real state of affairs without
I don't know, I guess symbolic thinking among I mean,
maybe that is something that would be limited. I mean,
it's even more than that. It seems like something that's
more limited to epic poetry and storytelling than than happens
in real life. Right. It kind of brings maybe it's
(15:05):
the kind of story that makes the most sense for
people that are so centered on the individual, you know,
like here is the individual in the war, the individual
that is changing the course of the battle, that sort
of thing um, and it enables you to to take
larger scenarios of battle that are more difficult to fathom
and putting them in a one on one scenario, like
(15:26):
in the last episode we were talking about the Lanchester
square law. You know, we can you know, we can
certainly imagine that in our head with forces of on
one side versus the other. But then you can also
put it in the scenario of David and Goliath, right,
and there you instantly have this very individual based story
of smaller force and larger force. Even though it tells
(15:46):
it ultimately tells the story like if we were to
take that and extrapolate it to just a smaller force
against a larger force, uh per those laws we were discussing,
that makes no sense. Like ultimately the the Goliath force
is going to win unless they is some sort of
crazy you know, outside context event, right or well, I
mean it depends on conditions, right, because not all combat
(16:07):
is equivalent. But yeah, generally, all right, on that note,
we're going to take a quick break. But when we
come back, we will get into some of these specialized
units of the ant war than all right, we're back, Robert.
When you were a kid, did you get one of
those Star Wars visual encyclopedias and just like a devour
(16:29):
all of the different types of Star Wars stormtroopers that
we never saw in the movies. Because in the movies
you see the main storm troopers. You see the ones
in the snow with like the big robes and capes.
Almost I guess that's to keep warm or something. But
then I remember reading about these other types that never
show up in the movies, like lava troopers or something.
(16:50):
I don't know. Did you never read about this? Uh No,
I've never heard of lava troopers? Um? I mean, I'm trying,
I'm only vaguely remembering, but it seemed very interesting to me.
I was like, why isn't there a movie about that?
I mean, it's it's drawing on the idea that, of course,
you would have different types of specialized units for different terrain. Yeah,
I uh, Star Wars specific I never had that book,
(17:11):
but certainly, just by virtue of being into like miniature
war games and even even you know, plenty of games
I don't play or collecting, I love to just pour
over the army list, like, Okay, here are your here
your ranking files, and okay, here your specialist. Here you're
you're fast moving troops. Here are you're heavy troops. Here
are you're infiltration units. Here you're close combat units. There's
(17:33):
there's something, um yeah, just just endlessly appealing about about
going through the rank and file of a system like that. Totally. Uh.
And of course it shouldn't come as any surprise that
many different kinds of ants have their own specialized units. Yes, absolutely,
so we're gonna discuss some of these. We're not gonna
be of course, We're not gonna be able to really
do justice to the entire rich diversity of the ant world,
(17:56):
you know, plenty of which is still being discovered and
is yet to be uh discovered by scientists. But we'll
touch on some highlights here that are known. So first
I want to talk a little bit about specialized defenses. Uh.
You know, we've talked so much about offense with ants, uh,
but but sometimes said there's this particular defensive strategy in
mind as well. Zoologist and intomologist Shaun O'Donnell points out
(18:20):
that leaf cutter ants and army ants are both dominant
ants species, and when they wage war, those wars can
wait for days. So it's a it's a classic matchup
in many respects, right, It's a you know, ravaging warriors
on one side and foraging agriculturists on the other. Right,
So you would think of the army antsw is primarily
like rating carnivores that are on the attack, and the
(18:41):
leaf cutter ants are there their cultivators of their environment. Right. Yeah,
So leaf cutter ants most very famously depend on their workers.
They have to go out, they have to cut the
leaf portions, bring the leaf portions back, and then those
leaf portions are used to grow their precious food crop,
which is a fungus I believe, right, Yeah, fungus that
is uh if I remember correctly extinct in the wild,
(19:03):
is purely domesticated by ants long before humans came on
the scene. Unbelievable. So it's mostly the work of these,
you know, these female workers. But there they do have
a cast of larger soldiers, and apparently they were something
of a mystery for a while. Researchers would look at
them and they would ask, what are these guys for.
They don't seem to be doing anything, They don't seem
to have a purpose. But by seating army and invasions
(19:27):
in leaf cutter nests, researchers were able to discover that
they seem to be specialists just for army ant invasions,
sent to the front lines by the thousands, uh to
in an attempt to defend the colony. Even though it
does seem like they tend to fail in the end.
But I mean, even in cases where they fail, it's
possible they could be, say, buying time for the rest
(19:49):
of the colony. Yeah, and it's interesting to look at that.
That's that reality in terms of how other ant species
deal with army ants, because apparently you very roughly you
kind of have. You have two extremes. On one hand,
those they just put up a fight. They're like army
answer attacking, We're going to fight them back. We're gonna
give it everything we have. But then you also have
(20:09):
some varieties of ants that evacuate everybody at the first
sign of an attack. The army answer coming, So pack
it all up, we're getting out of here. But then
they can move back in after the invaders have left
because their army answer are not gonna live there. They're
not gonna hang out in your colony and wait for
you to come back. They're they're they're here for the goods,
and if the goods are not here, they have to
keep moving. Now here's another just super interesting adaptation. UM.
(20:35):
In the last episode, I mentioned Douglas j Emlin's book
Animal Weapons, which deals with the evolution of bioweapons and
organisms as well as the development of tool based weapons
and humans. And he discusses the feodole and genus in
which individuals fall into various casts. So there, of course
the reproductive male and females. They're the small workers, they're
(20:55):
larger workers. And then there are the soldiers and the
soldiers of this genus boast quote grossly enlarged heads, jaws,
and teeth. Okay, these are these A particular ants are
also known as the big headed ants. But then he
also goes on to discuss another genus of ants. This
is Odonto Marcus, the trap jaw ants, whose lock and
(21:18):
release jaw structure functions a lot like a mantis shrimp.
You know, there's all this stored potential energy like a
crossbow that has been pulled back and locked. So when
these jaws shut on these trap jaw ants, they can
shut its speeds a one hundred and forty three miles
per hour, so they slam shut really fast. Right, And
(21:40):
here's where it gets That was a stupid restatement of
what you said. But let's keep it. Yes, very very fast,
especially on this scale too. Right. Um. But but here's
where he gets even more in raising. This is where
he gets kind of cunning because the trap jaw ants,
of course, they can release this bite at their adversaries,
but they can also unleashed this bite at the ground
(22:02):
and in doing so, launch themselves backwards through the air
twenty body lengths as a successful escape tactic. Wow. So
this reminds me of indungeons and dragons. There's this ability
that rogues have called the cunning action ability that allows
them to effectively disengage in backtrack out of battle, so
they're able to strike at an enemy and then get
(22:25):
out of there really quick, so the enemy can't smite
them back the next round. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's so
it's it's crazy to think. It's almost like they have
jet packs these ants. Yeah. I was trying to think
of what a what a human technological comparison would be.
I was thinking about, like, I guess escape pods or
ejector seats from fighter planes, or or just like maybe
(22:47):
like it's kind of like a sky hook. Maybe a
plane flies over just picks you up. Yeah. Yeah, I
don't even know if there is truly a direct because
when we're when we're talking about retreat and effectively, you know,
backing your forces out in a military scenario. I mean generally,
it's a very delicate situation with with with human military forces.
(23:09):
I can't think of anything offhand it seems like a
direct parallel to this. Now, a lot of ants boast
chemical weapons. We touched on this in the very first
episode where we talked about the basic evolution of ants,
in which early on it seems like you had more
like powerful stings that were aimed at large, for instance,
vertebrate threats to the ants. But then the the evolutionary
(23:32):
pressure becomes more focused on UH and warfare, and there
so therefore you see all these various um adaptations emerge
where it's more about waging war against ants, and sometimes
it takes place of new chemical weapons that they may use.
So a very famous one, of course would be formic acid.
The word formic coming from the word for ants formic
(23:55):
to day, yeah, and so that's what we see with
the formic acid of the form maica would ants. So
these ants can spray formic acid from the tips of
their abdomen. In fact, formic acid was first extracted in
sixteen seventy one by the English naturalist John Ray. Is
John Ray, the guy we talked about who was doing
the experiments with with ants and formic acid and was
(24:17):
comparing it to urine. I don't think it is. I
had to pull him up and granted a lot of
these individuals with portraits from from the late seventeenth early
eighteenth century, UH kind of look the same to me.
But um, I don't think we touched on him before,
could be wrong, but anyway, the formic acid of these
(24:38):
ants that this is a great example of one variety
of of reriverally in and of itself amazing chemical weapons
that have been developed by that have evolved in these
ant species. But there are even more exotic examples to
look at. And in this we're getting into the topic
of exploding ants, which this is so good. Yeah, and
this is a lot of you probably heard about about
(25:00):
examples of this before because I mean, it's just such
an amazing topic and it's certainly made the rounds in
science communication and science journalism. Uh and in fact, I
think we've probably mentioned it on the show in the past. However,
we're going to touch on some new stuff as well here,
like the new findings new species that have been discovered
just in the last year or so. So um. Well,
(25:21):
one and one example that comes up a lot is
uh campan nautists sunders of Malaysia and Brunei, whose bodies
are riddled with poison sacks and so when they attack.
When they're attacked, they constrict and rupture fatally, forcing sticky
poison out of their mouth anous and through their exoskeleton.
And again, don't think of this as of the individual
(25:42):
in this scenario, think of the group. Think of the colony,
the good of the colony. So this is a situation
where the individual is a biological weapon and they can
readily sacrifice themselves to do damage against or in some
way slow down an invading species. Yeah. I mean again,
(26:04):
think of the colony as an organism. So this is
sort of like an animal with poison skin. The ant
is sort of like the skin of the poison arrow frog, right,
And but in this case they can they can like
bear down and burst themselves like a like a like
a cooked sausage, you know, uh, like like a gusher, Yeah,
poison gush exactly. This is called autopsis, and it's involved
(26:31):
independently in a number of termite species as well. But
but you see different varieties of it. The kind of
shed light on how this seems to have evolved. So
sometimes you'll have an autopsis utilizing species. It simply defecates
on their enemies get too close, and I'm going to
poop onto you. Other times you see it more a
(26:52):
situation where they're they're bearing down, like they're pooping so
hard that they're going to rupture their abdomen. And from
this we get into sort of more exaggerated modes of
just absolute abdominal m explosion. And in fact, like IM said,
there's a there's a nice new example of this that's
come out. I was just reading in April establishments published
(27:13):
in zoo Keys via Lassity at All about another variety
of exploding at known as uh Colobopsis explodings explodons. I
love this exploding a k a. Yellow do ats, but
we're just gonna call him explodings because that's that's clearly
where the fun is. So this is a wonderfully fascinating
(27:35):
species because minor workers in the colony have this exploding ability. Uh.
They can burst themselves into this yellow chemical goo that
is kind of like a spice that you know, again
will kill or slow down or or aggravate damage an invader.
But then they also have um have these larger major
(27:56):
type workers and they're referred to as door keepers because
they have quote big plug shaped heads which they use
to block intruders in the tunnels. Pause to appreciate this
for a moment. So this is something that other species
of ant have have a version of this two specialized
members that essentially have a locked door four ahead. It's like,
(28:18):
this is a fascinating biomechanical way to raise the drawbridge
on your colony. Right, These would be ants that have dug,
you know, excavated colonies with tunnels, and the ants themselves
to become part of the defensive structure by closing the
entrances of the tunnels with their heads. Yeah, this is amazing.
I'll also point out I believe there's another variety of
ant that seals its entrances with stones, and we'll get
(28:40):
into some stone examples here in a bet, But I
want to get back to explode and stuff. So this
is a particularly elegant adaptation for defense, but it also,
at least on the surface, seems to buck the trend
we see earlier with marauder ants. For the marauders, the
majors are the big guns. They're the A, T. S.
D s that move into tear apart enemies that have
(29:02):
been bogged down amid the individually less impressive miners. For explodons,
the majors are the plug heads, so they function mostly
as barricade engines. Perhaps, you know, one could make a
loose comparison to like a mobile field generator in Star
Wars or something. And with explodings, the majors rarely leave
(29:22):
the nest. They're they're purely domestic defenses. It's the miners, however,
that packed the explosive punch that are that are self detonating, uh,
sacrificing themselves, ending their lives in an attempt to strike
out against the invaders. So these are literally suicide missions. Yeah. Yeah,
Like what apparently will happen is um like with the
(29:45):
marauder miners, the explodings miners are indeed the first wave.
So there's an attack on the nest, then they pour
into battle, they latch onto an enemy with their mandibles,
and then they hold their abdomen close to their grappled enemy.
Then they air down and they burst loosing out of
a thick spiced yellow goo that again either kills them
(30:06):
or hinders the attacker. Wow. And then again Marauder style,
the explodents majors burst in with their plug heads to
barricade the tunnels against increased invasion. And I guess one
of the interesting things to think about here is that
we're really getting into a whole specialized realm evant warfare,
defensive warfare fought within the nest um, you know, defensive
(30:28):
urban warfare. UH specialists here tunnel warfare specialists, which is
something of course we see tunnel warfare and urban warfare
in human scenarios. And it makes me think back to
the linear a Lanchester's linear loft that we discussed in
the last episode. Yeah, again as a refresher, the linear
law tends to apply more to UH conflicts that are
(30:50):
close something closer to a series of sequential duels, where
a force with larger numbers can't use the square power
of those larger numbers to easily overwhelm smaller forces. UH.
You use defenses to your advantage to try to limit
the scope of how much battle can take place at
the same time. And a classic way to do this
(31:11):
is to create choke points, to create tunnels. Yeah, and
so this species would seem a master at chuckpoints. So
you're you're pouring into their UH to their home and
you've got, you know, hundreds of of soldier ants that
their at their disposal. Like they have numbers on their side,
but they have specialists that can explode UH and a
specialists that can seal off the tunnel. Uh so, which
(31:33):
it gives seems to give them, uh you know, more
or less equal footing with the invaders. And I want
to stress again that explode Us is a newly discovered
variety of self sacrificing ant, first written about in and
so more remains to be explored about them. But also
in general, it just drives home how many aunt species
are out there in the world that we just that
(31:55):
we haven't fully documented yet, how many, how many strange
and wonderful adaptations are out there, they just simply haven't
been chronicled yet. Isn't that amazing just just to know
that there's so much more to learn that will be
things like this, Just bizarre, amazing adaptations that already exist.
It's not like they're gonna come into being in the future.
(32:18):
I mean, obviously new species will come into being. They're
already out there. We just never looked at them before,
never at least never documented them in a in a
thorough way. Absolutely all right, on that note, we're gonna
take one last break, but when we come back, we'll
discuss the Stone Age tactics of bicolor ants. Than alright,
(32:39):
we're back. So the next variety of and I want
to touch on is the Dorry Meyer mix bicolor ants.
So if you have the higher ground, you know all
you need is gravity and mass. Right, soldiers can defend
cliffs or the walls of a castle by dropping stones
on the heads of attackers. But of course you can
also go on the offense, particularly via the technologies and
(32:59):
the human in realm of bombardment, an enemy might drop
things such as stones, bodies, or explosives upon an enemy city. Yeah,
in the human realm. I mean, one way you can
think about the evolution of an air force is that
it is a It is a force evolved to give
you permanent high ground. Uh. And sometimes ants can definitely
(33:19):
take advantage of this. In particular, these dory miromix by
color ants of Arizona Um previously known as Cono Mirma
by color ants. They were discovered back in ninety nine
by Moglik and Alpert to actually use small stones to
drop um on their adversaries, basically ant tool use. Yeah. Now,
(33:45):
I mean, I guess when you think about aunt tool use,
you do have to like take a step back and
think about what ants are always doing their manipulating uh,
the soil they're manipulating little grains of sand and moving
them around, and this is just kind of a byproduct
of that. What are else are you doing with those
(34:05):
pieces of the ground. So basically, the researchers back in
seventy nine observed that workers surrounding the nest would pick
up small stones and other objects and drop them down
the nest entrances of rival nests that we're you know,
reasonably close by. Now, comparing it to bombardment might be
a bit much, but it is at the very least
(34:26):
active interference in a competitors industry. So so perhaps one
might think of it more as like industrial sabotage. I
don't know, I mean, it's it seems like that would
sort of counting me. It's using gravity and high ground
to your advantage in the attack on the enemy's infrastructure.
So in many ways, it seems a lot like bombing
or shelling. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you could
(34:48):
make an argument for it. Again, going back to our
first episode, nothing in the ant world is gonna be
one to one right with the human world. But uh,
like Moffatt said, you know, good comparisons, you know, worthy
comparisons are not going to be a direct one to once,
but there are a few other possible cases of soil
and pebble based tool used by ants um which again
(35:10):
shouldn't be really all that surprising given their intense manipulation
of the Earth. Four sixty five paper from Line at
All reported pavement ants using soil to attack bees and
the desert harvester. Ant will apparently drop bits of soil
into honey water and then carry the soil particles back
(35:30):
as a way to bring the honey water to the nest.
This was this was via a study conducting eighty four
by Philip McDonald of the New York Intomological Society, and
it seems to be related to the similar use of
of soil to cover up liquids that ants cannot just
outright remove. Okay, so the idea here is that you
(35:55):
come across a liquid food source that you want to
bring back to the nest. You obviously you can't hairy
liquid the same way you could carry like a part
of another insects body back is food, So they will
pour like soil into the liquid to create a sponge
full of sugar, and then carry that soil sponge The
sugary soil sponge back towards the queen. That seems to
(36:16):
be the case here. Now uh, it's it's possible that
this is something that more is obvious in experimental scenarios.
I'm not entirely certain on that, but it it certainly
underlines like what is possible using the properties of soil
at that scale. And again, it seems like the more
(36:36):
u uh usual activity that you see is like there's
some sort of sail poison or a chemical and the
ants don't know what to do with that. They can't
really interact with it directly, but they can put soil
on it. They can essentially bury it. They can cover
it up right, like kicking soil onto a smoldering camp
fire or something. Yeah. So yeah, I would imagine that
these studies alleging some form of ant tool use, like
(36:59):
most of the are these alleging types of tool use
and animals probably have encountered some dispute, you know, about
interpretation of the behaviors. U It seems like that always
comes up. Now here's another one that's pretty interesting. This
is an example brought up by Moffatt concerning the so
called slave maker ants. So slave making is also known
(37:20):
is duosis in the biology world. So these are cases
where you'll have ants that are brood parasites that in
some species rely on the practice absolutely, but another species
are not obligate slave makers. So basically what they do
is they invade a colony, they capture the brood of
another ant. Usually they're capturing the young, and generally it
(37:44):
is a very specific species that they're focusing on, and
then they bring those young back to their own nest
where they're made to work, while members of the slave
maker species itself just focus on rating more nests for
more workers. Now, moffat ship Ar is that while slave
making ants are generally heavily armored, heavily armed with superior
(38:05):
fighting abilities, some species use a propaganda chemical uh is
the is the term he uses to throw off the
enemy during raids. Uh So you have to think about this, right,
You may be big and strong, but it goes back
to that linear law that if you're going in to
invade a colony, if you're gonna go into the thick
of it, then great armor, great weapons, that's only gonna
(38:30):
get you so far if you're outnumbered. But if you
have some sort of chemical advantage, if you're able to
trick the others into thinking you're supposed to be there,
then do you have an enormous advantage, doesn't matter about
their superior numbers. And so in these cases, these propaganda
chemical using slave maker ants, they can often carry all
(38:52):
of this out without any fighting or killing taking place.
You know, it's not just forms of rival ants there.
It almost seems like there is a whole genre across
different types of animals that's just adaptations for the safe
infiltration of ant colonies. Yeah, Mermica phile. So the the
(39:13):
whole classification of animals that have have come to depend
upon the ants, and in many cases you use some
sort of chemical signal to trick the colony into thinking
they're supposed to be there. Now here's another example just
of of general sort of ant war um strategies that
is that has brought up off It brings this one
(39:34):
up as well. Uh, we've ants, so we've answered not
merely an army on the move, but they hold and
control territory. They spread their workers out across it and
then focus resources around key choke points. They even established
leafy barrack nests in the crowns of trees and Moffitt
points out that that we've answered therefore less rigid compared
(39:56):
to army ants quote. Weavers, in contrast, wander more freely
and are more versatile in their response to opportunities and threats.
The difference in style calls to mind the contrast between
the rigidity of Frederick the Great's armies and the flexibility
and mobility of Napoleon bonaparte troops. That's interesting. Yeah, So
so the idea is that if a weaver aunt does
(40:16):
encounter a problem in the empire, he uses a recruitment
pheromone to call in reinforcements from the immediate area, as
opposed to just having like one war gang ravaging around
the territory. So, again, these are not This is not
an attempt to create an exhaustive list of all the
amazing adaptations that ants have developed to wage wars against
(40:37):
each other defend against each other, but hopefully it helps
provide uh more of an idea of the rich diversity
out there. This is one of my favorite types of
topics that that frequently comes up on the show. It's
one of those where you feel like you've gotten just
a tiny glimpse, you know, behind through through a curtain
or through a window into a vast uh you know,
(40:59):
mansion possibilities and and and rich relationships. Uh, that that
you don't even think about most of your waking hours,
that you know that the world is just shocking. Yeah. Absolutely,
and um and I think it's really interesting to look
at the work of of you know, Wilson, Moffatt, uh
(41:20):
and others when they compare ants to the human world,
because on one hand, it helps us better understand the ants, right,
you know, that's how humans work. Like if we can
see ourselves reflected to some degree and another organism, then
we can understand that organism better, even if it's you know,
we're kind of anthropomorphizing to get there. But then on
(41:41):
the other hand, it does seem like we potentially have
a lot to learn about what we are, right, we're
getting into, you know, the sociobiology of V. O. Wilson
or can or you know, certainly Moffatt gets into this
a lot in his book The Human Swarm, where he's
he's he's not just looking at the ant world, he's
he's moving from there into the human world and trying
to make sense of what we're doing. Yeah, and of course,
(42:03):
you know, we're we're incredibly different creatures than ants, but
some of the same resource dynamics and things like that
are always going to be in play no matter what
species you're talking about. Yeah. In that E. O. Wilson documentary,
I believe he shares this quote. Uh, he says, quote
the real problem of humanity is the following. We have
paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology, and it is
(42:28):
terrifyingly dangerous and it is now approaching a point of
crisis overall. I think in many ways that's true, and
it brings to mind. You know, something that's been sort
of simmering for me throughout these episodes is that what
I would hope we could learn by by looking at
the warfare of other organized species like you social insects,
and uh comparing that to to get perspective on human
(42:52):
life is not that we learn how better to wage
war through it, but maybe how not to wage war
and how to avoid war. Yeah. Yeah, there's the sort
of the lesson that we don't need to live like ants. Um.
I mean, because ants, for all the comparisons we've made,
you know, they're they're free of these human burdens that
we mentioned, you know, they're emotionless. There, their ways, while
(43:14):
comparable to human institutions, in some way, are free of
institutional constraints. Well, Robert, while I agree with you in
a sense about that, though I would I would be
careful about the idea that they're emotionless given our well true, yes,
our our invertebrate emotions episode. But yeah, we we don't know.
We don't think that they have complex inner lives the
way that we do, even though they have these internal
(43:34):
states that you could probably recognize as being something like
fear or joy, possibly, right, Yeah, I mean, I I
think I have heard before I forget who there was
an entomology. I don't think it was Wilson Um. Maybe
it was Moffitt and an MPR piece talking about the
watching ants and feeling that some ants had almost a personality.
(43:57):
So yeah, you're you're correct. I shouldn't be too fast
to dismiss them as emotionless. Though an individual ant soldier
is well far I think, far less of an individual
than a than a human. I think we can we
can at least focus on that, um and then in
terms of like what they can do, I mean, certainly
they are a powerful force within the ecosystem. It's been
(44:18):
observed that if all humans died today, ants would proceed
just fine, But if all the ants died, the world
would be in a state of absolute chaos. All right,
we're gonna go ahead and close it out right there.
We hope you've enjoyed this three part look at ant warfare.
But obviously there's so so much in the ant world.
(44:40):
We can easily return, probably will return at some point
in the future to discuss ants once more, especially as
researchers continue to make new discoveries. Totally in the meantime,
if you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever
you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
We just asked that you rate, review, and subscribe. You
(45:00):
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
(45:23):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listening to your favorite shows. B
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
bringing you an episode from the vault of This is
AUNT War's Part three, originally aired June eighth. Let's release
the ants Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production
of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
(00:33):
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our
Aunt Wars episodes. Now. In the previous episodes, we've already
covered a ton of different topics, the evolution of you
social insects like ants um. We talked about the conflicts
between army, ants and and everything in their path. We
talked about theories of combat disparities and how those may
(00:56):
apply to ants and and control the ways that's Aunt
sometimes select which members of the colony go out to fight.
We talked about the bivouax, the big war rig for
the Queen made out of army ants um. It's been
it's been a great journey so far, but we have
to press on. That's right. Uh So, one thing I
want to talk about it at the very start here
is the idea of empires of the ants, because, as
(01:20):
with human civilizations, apparently it's the larger ant societies that
spread the most violence. Smaller ant societies are less likely
to engage in any kind of protracted war against other
ant species. But but here's an interesting point raised by
entomologists Shawn O'Donnell in Ant Wars for Serious Science. Some
species of highly successful invasive ants demonstrate unicolonality. Uh. They
(01:46):
develop a willingness to identify members of other colonies as
part of their own, and the result is a super colony,
a true empire of the ants. Yeah, we discussed the
super colony adaptation in our episode. It's about the multiple
species of ants known as crazy ants, and this name
comes from their rapid, almost frantic or radic looking movements
(02:09):
sometimes when you like, if you watch video of them
moving around on the ground, it almost looks like flies
buzzing around. It looks like they're flying. Yeah, it's it's
it's visually, at least to us, starkly different from the
sort of you know, linear lines were used to seeing
for ants. Yeah, but the super coloniality issue came up
in our episodes on the Mystery of Crazy ants supposedly
(02:31):
being attracted to electricity or electrical appliances. Remember that where
we're talking about all those stories people had of like
the their TV being full of crazy ants and people
didn't know why that was happening. That was, of course
the raspberry crazy ant of the genus Nylanderia, and then
we also talked about them in our episodes on Christmas Island.
Remember it was the invasive species of crazy ant known
(02:53):
as yellow crazy ants or anoplo Lepis grass sillipps that
was severely threatening the Christmas Island crabs. It was actually
colonies of those ants that were spraying formic acid into
the eyes of the crabs and into the leg joints
until they were immobilized and then the ants just eat them.
And there was an interesting project to try to introduce
(03:15):
a species of insect there to Christmas Island that would
help cut down on the populations of invasive ants. But anyway,
it's the tendency for crazy ants to form super colonies
that is considered one factor in their success as an
invasive species. Um you know, so they're super colonial, meaning
that when colonies of the same species meet one another,
(03:37):
instead of duking it out and going to battle with
one another. They just act as if they were from
the same colony. They team up instead of antagonizing one another.
UM and there are examples where people think they've detected
gigantic super colonies of these ants. One that we read
in one of those previous episodes was a New York
Times article that that quotes Edward Lebrun, who's in a
(03:59):
college US at the University of Texas at Austin UM,
and he apparently believes that there was a single super
colony in the Texas town called Iowa Colony. I know
that's confusing because we're talking about ant colonies and it's
in Texas, not Iowa, but that's a town it's called
Iowa Colony, and he believes that there was a super
colony of crazy ants occupying up to forty two hundred
(04:22):
acres in that town and spreading two hundred meters a
year in every direction. But that's by no means the
only Aunt super colony that's been found there. There are
other species and other super colonies that have been found
all over the continents. That's right. Mark W. Moten mentioned
an extremely large super colony of Argentine Aunt that ranges
(04:43):
from San Francisco to the Mexican border. Trillion strong and united.
It's a it's a super colony, and wars rage just
perpetually along its borders. He writes. Each month, millions of
Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around
San Diego. Clashes occur with three other colonies and wars
(05:03):
that may have been going on since the species arrived
in the state a century ago. And these wars, as
we've discussed in our previous episodes, are far from random
thrashings of aunt brutality. Uh. These are wars that align
with some of the same mathematics and tactics and principles
that we see a play in human military history. And
(05:24):
we have another example of this to consider, another interesting
parallel that's drawn between the wars of ants and the
wars of humans, and that is uh, the the the
this thing that we refer to as ant tournaments or
AUNT tournament sites. So for starters, you might need to
dismiss whatever sort of Mortal Kombat scenario is entering your
(05:45):
mind here at the thought of an ant tournament. Yeah,
but don't worry, because the reality is much cooler than
just like a single or double elimination tournament for ance. Uh.
So here's the here's an example that MafA Eo will
Sin and others bring up frequently, and that is honey
pot ants. Now, these ants are astonishing creatures in their
(06:05):
own right, even before you get to the tournament issue. Uh.
Their their way of storing food is something that you
must see for yourself. You you you should look up video
of them. Yeah, because their name honey pot ants. Because
what happens is the workers will the workers have the
ability to gorge themselves unto their abdomens are enormously swelled
(06:26):
and they look like little honey pots, uh, just filled
with liquid food. So instead of storing excess food within
a stash within the colony like a lot of ants do, uh,
the honey pot ants store it within themselves in these
little mobile depositories that are themselves and swollen workers that
we call repleats. And then if if you're another aunt
(06:49):
in the colony you need a little food, will you
come up to one of the repletes uh? And I
believe you, like you can touch their antenna and just
the right way and they'll regurgitate up some food for you. Right,
You you you you poke your estimate and it will
barf up your dinner. Yeah, they're like little vending machines.
Ah and I see you included a picture of this
in our in our notes here for me to look at, Joe.
(07:10):
They're wondrous, They're beautiful. They do look like little drugs.
They're so swollen they look on droplets of honey or
like extremely golden chickpeas their their back lid in this
image that I've shared with Robert, and it makes their
swollen abdomens look like bits of amber. Now, in addition
to this, there are there are other wrinkles to their
their peculiarity. So they're highly territorial. They frequently prey on
(07:34):
foraging termites, and should two different groups of honeypot ants
happen upon the same resource, a tournament begins to determine
who shall claim it. So what happens is the workers
from each colony circle around each other, standing up as
high as possible on their legs. Behavior that biot is
called stilting. So yes, what they're doing is they're trying
(07:55):
to look as imposing as possible, as large as possible.
And basically, the idea here seems to be that that
that the larger colonies of honey pot ants tend to
have larger individuals. So it's not only a show of
immediate force, like hey, look how big we are to
get away from our resources. It's also a show of
(08:16):
what kind of backup forces you have to call in.
That's interesting. So it's just like you can almost count
on the fact that if if this ant is big,
all of her buddies are big too. Yeah. It actually
reminds me a little bit of the Imperial invasion of
hot and the Empire strikes back with the deployment of
those enormous A T eighties, which I recently saw described
(08:39):
online as quote a giant impractical terror weapon. Absolutely, Why
the legs? Why make your all terrain attack vehicles so
vulnerable to a simple harpoon and tow cable? These these
tall spindle legs make no sense. Well, yeah, if you
think too hard about it. But as my my son
was recently telling me, we were watching the Own War
(09:00):
series and he said, you know, walkers are just always cool.
It doesn't matter which side they're on. They're just cool.
And it's true. But but I think also you can
look at it like, yes, it's a it's an impractical
terror weapon. It sends a message, Hey, we're the Empire
and we have resources on this scale at our disposal,
so you'd best just abandoned the ice planet to us.
(09:20):
And so that's what the weaker honeypot at force ends
up doing this whole tournament. Uh practice limits the need
for conflict and avoids the need for full scale and war.
The smaller ant army flees, but much like the rebel alliance,
they have to be darn sure that the forces there
uh they're seeding to don't follow them and trace them
(09:42):
to their primary base, because the larger honeypot force will
attempt to do this and they will not hesitate to
follow them back to their colony, decimate that colony, and
then enslave the swollen repletes as their own food stores. Now,
this is really interesting, the idea that they they make
this display and try to make a calculation about whether
(10:03):
it's worthwhile to fight. It's something that goes against the
naive version of the nature red in tooth and claw
idea that you know, animals are just always fighting and
killing each other. It's always a violent struggle for survival.
I don't know how you could quantify this, but my
gut feeling is that the vast majority of conflicts in
nature never come to violence. There are displays between animals
(10:27):
and then one side backs down. Yeah, I believe we've
talked about this before and discussing like animal weapons and
animal violence. Is that, you know, how often does one
animal outright kill another? You know it? I mean certainly
in from predation, Yeah, apart from predation. Like the idea
of two animals fighting to the death in a scenario
(10:48):
where one is not trying to eat the other is
is more of a rarity. But even so, It's like
if you have a t rex and a triceratops, Like
the t rex wants to kill the the triceratops in
this scenario EO, but it of course does not want
to be killed itself the you know, so it would
potentially fight to the death. But on the other hand,
(11:08):
they try sterotops doesn't want to eat the t rex.
It just wants to not be eaten by the t rex. Yeah,
I mean, it just brings to mind the fact that
animals they don't want to lose a conflict, but probably
even more than that, they don't want to die, and
so if if things are not looking like a like
a pretty clear wind for them, they will very often
just back down and try to get away. Now EO.
(11:31):
Wilson and biologists Burnt a Whole Dobbler have have compared
this tournament scenario to these symbolic battles and the Highlands
of New Guinea, the initial phase of of of a
battle or war in which the two sides square off
at a distance, and what they'll do. Yeah, this so
the scrap at a distance. They're not going to immediately,
you know, rush into each other like some sort of
(11:52):
brave heart scenario that's cinematic um trope that we all
have grown so used to. Instead, they're gonna throw o spears.
They're gonna fire arrows at each other, but with range
in wooden shields in place, so there's actually like a
a low possibility for fatality. And from here it might
(12:13):
give way to a heated, closer battle, but the its
aggressions might actually end right here. And this apparently is
something that one sees throughout the history of human conflict,
especially when it concerns smaller clans of fighters, because such
groups like this simply don't have the resources to enter
freely into a state of total warfare. Yeah, I think
(12:36):
that state is more common, as we were talking about earlier,
in in like larger empires, where you also have you know,
the army that arrives on the battlefield also has the
force of like a huge state behind it that will
not let it walk away. It's a you know that
that maybe the emperor back home is not going to
be pleased if you see that this battle doesn't look
(12:56):
good for you and decide it's better not to fight, Yes,
you'll find that he's not as forgiving, right. So Yeah,
I think this is obviously a smart strategy, and there's
a reason humans do this and ants do this. It
makes sense to try to avoid conflict if you can.
I also can't help but wonder if there's a comparison
to be made here. And this is just me, this
is not any of these other commentators that I've read.
(13:19):
They might have gotten into this, and maybe I just
haven't read it, But I wonder if you can make
a comparison here to the proxy wars between superpowers in
the human world. You know, human cases in which each
side certainly has immense resources, but in which case the
destructive potential of atomic weaponry essentially reduces both sides to smaller,
(13:39):
more vulnerable clans on their respective hillsides. There was something
I was trying to look up because this also made
me think of the at least epic literary tradition of
the champion warfare. That is, you know that you read
about it in the Iliad. It shows up actually in
a lot of of ancient epics and stuff where armies
(14:00):
will meet, but instead of you know, the whole armies
clashing with one another, they will each select their greatest
fighter and then those two will fight a duel that
is supposed to, at least in some cases, symbolically settle
the outcome of the fight. So I think of Hector
versus Achilles, and I was looking for example. I was like,
do aunts ever do this? So I was trying to
(14:22):
find examples of champion warfare among ants, but I couldn't
find anything. I don't know if you've come across anything
like that, But if there were an example of something
like that, that would be really interesting, that would man that. Yeah,
I didn't read anything about that in the sources I
was looking at it. I wonder how that would have
something like that would evolve. You know, it's kind of
(14:44):
hard to imagine being a real state of affairs without
I don't know, I guess symbolic thinking among I mean,
maybe that is something that would be limited. I mean,
it's even more than that. It seems like something that's
more limited to epic poetry and storytelling than than happens
in real life. Right. It kind of brings maybe it's
(15:05):
the kind of story that makes the most sense for
people that are so centered on the individual, you know,
like here is the individual in the war, the individual
that is changing the course of the battle, that sort
of thing um, and it enables you to to take
larger scenarios of battle that are more difficult to fathom
and putting them in a one on one scenario, like
(15:26):
in the last episode we were talking about the Lanchester
square law. You know, we can you know, we can
certainly imagine that in our head with forces of on
one side versus the other. But then you can also
put it in the scenario of David and Goliath, right,
and there you instantly have this very individual based story
of smaller force and larger force. Even though it tells
(15:46):
it ultimately tells the story like if we were to
take that and extrapolate it to just a smaller force
against a larger force, uh per those laws we were discussing,
that makes no sense. Like ultimately the the Goliath force
is going to win unless they is some sort of
crazy you know, outside context event, right or well, I
mean it depends on conditions, right, because not all combat
(16:07):
is equivalent. But yeah, generally, all right, on that note,
we're going to take a quick break. But when we
come back, we will get into some of these specialized
units of the ant war than all right, we're back, Robert.
When you were a kid, did you get one of
those Star Wars visual encyclopedias and just like a devour
(16:29):
all of the different types of Star Wars stormtroopers that
we never saw in the movies. Because in the movies
you see the main storm troopers. You see the ones
in the snow with like the big robes and capes.
Almost I guess that's to keep warm or something. But
then I remember reading about these other types that never
show up in the movies, like lava troopers or something.
(16:50):
I don't know. Did you never read about this? Uh No,
I've never heard of lava troopers? Um? I mean, I'm trying,
I'm only vaguely remembering, but it seemed very interesting to me.
I was like, why isn't there a movie about that?
I mean, it's it's drawing on the idea that, of course,
you would have different types of specialized units for different terrain. Yeah,
I uh, Star Wars specific I never had that book,
(17:11):
but certainly, just by virtue of being into like miniature
war games and even even you know, plenty of games
I don't play or collecting, I love to just pour
over the army list, like, Okay, here are your here
your ranking files, and okay, here your specialist. Here you're
you're fast moving troops. Here are you're heavy troops. Here
are you're infiltration units. Here you're close combat units. There's
(17:33):
there's something, um yeah, just just endlessly appealing about about
going through the rank and file of a system like that. Totally. Uh.
And of course it shouldn't come as any surprise that
many different kinds of ants have their own specialized units. Yes, absolutely,
so we're gonna discuss some of these. We're not gonna
be of course, We're not gonna be able to really
do justice to the entire rich diversity of the ant world,
(17:56):
you know, plenty of which is still being discovered and
is yet to be uh discovered by scientists. But we'll
touch on some highlights here that are known. So first
I want to talk a little bit about specialized defenses. Uh.
You know, we've talked so much about offense with ants, uh,
but but sometimes said there's this particular defensive strategy in
mind as well. Zoologist and intomologist Shaun O'Donnell points out
(18:20):
that leaf cutter ants and army ants are both dominant
ants species, and when they wage war, those wars can
wait for days. So it's a it's a classic matchup
in many respects, right, It's a you know, ravaging warriors
on one side and foraging agriculturists on the other. Right,
So you would think of the army antsw is primarily
like rating carnivores that are on the attack, and the
(18:41):
leaf cutter ants are there their cultivators of their environment. Right. Yeah,
So leaf cutter ants most very famously depend on their workers.
They have to go out, they have to cut the
leaf portions, bring the leaf portions back, and then those
leaf portions are used to grow their precious food crop,
which is a fungus I believe, right, Yeah, fungus that
is uh if I remember correctly extinct in the wild,
(19:03):
is purely domesticated by ants long before humans came on
the scene. Unbelievable. So it's mostly the work of these,
you know, these female workers. But there they do have
a cast of larger soldiers, and apparently they were something
of a mystery for a while. Researchers would look at
them and they would ask, what are these guys for.
They don't seem to be doing anything, They don't seem
to have a purpose. But by seating army and invasions
(19:27):
in leaf cutter nests, researchers were able to discover that
they seem to be specialists just for army ant invasions,
sent to the front lines by the thousands, uh to
in an attempt to defend the colony. Even though it
does seem like they tend to fail in the end.
But I mean, even in cases where they fail, it's
possible they could be, say, buying time for the rest
(19:49):
of the colony. Yeah, and it's interesting to look at that.
That's that reality in terms of how other ant species
deal with army ants, because apparently you very roughly you
kind of have. You have two extremes. On one hand,
those they just put up a fight. They're like army
answer attacking, We're going to fight them back. We're gonna
give it everything we have. But then you also have
(20:09):
some varieties of ants that evacuate everybody at the first
sign of an attack. The army answer coming, So pack
it all up, we're getting out of here. But then
they can move back in after the invaders have left
because their army answer are not gonna live there. They're
not gonna hang out in your colony and wait for
you to come back. They're they're they're here for the goods,
and if the goods are not here, they have to
keep moving. Now here's another just super interesting adaptation. UM.
(20:35):
In the last episode, I mentioned Douglas j Emlin's book
Animal Weapons, which deals with the evolution of bioweapons and
organisms as well as the development of tool based weapons
and humans. And he discusses the feodole and genus in
which individuals fall into various casts. So there, of course
the reproductive male and females. They're the small workers, they're
(20:55):
larger workers. And then there are the soldiers and the
soldiers of this genus boast quote grossly enlarged heads, jaws,
and teeth. Okay, these are these A particular ants are
also known as the big headed ants. But then he
also goes on to discuss another genus of ants. This
is Odonto Marcus, the trap jaw ants, whose lock and
(21:18):
release jaw structure functions a lot like a mantis shrimp.
You know, there's all this stored potential energy like a
crossbow that has been pulled back and locked. So when
these jaws shut on these trap jaw ants, they can
shut its speeds a one hundred and forty three miles
per hour, so they slam shut really fast. Right, And
(21:40):
here's where it gets That was a stupid restatement of
what you said. But let's keep it. Yes, very very fast,
especially on this scale too. Right. Um. But but here's
where he gets even more in raising. This is where
he gets kind of cunning because the trap jaw ants,
of course, they can release this bite at their adversaries,
but they can also unleashed this bite at the ground
(22:02):
and in doing so, launch themselves backwards through the air
twenty body lengths as a successful escape tactic. Wow. So
this reminds me of indungeons and dragons. There's this ability
that rogues have called the cunning action ability that allows
them to effectively disengage in backtrack out of battle, so
they're able to strike at an enemy and then get
(22:25):
out of there really quick, so the enemy can't smite
them back the next round. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's so
it's it's crazy to think. It's almost like they have
jet packs these ants. Yeah. I was trying to think
of what a what a human technological comparison would be.
I was thinking about, like, I guess escape pods or
ejector seats from fighter planes, or or just like maybe
(22:47):
like it's kind of like a sky hook. Maybe a
plane flies over just picks you up. Yeah. Yeah, I
don't even know if there is truly a direct because
when we're when we're talking about retreat and effectively, you know,
backing your forces out in a military scenario. I mean generally,
it's a very delicate situation with with with human military forces.
(23:09):
I can't think of anything offhand it seems like a
direct parallel to this. Now, a lot of ants boast
chemical weapons. We touched on this in the very first
episode where we talked about the basic evolution of ants,
in which early on it seems like you had more
like powerful stings that were aimed at large, for instance,
vertebrate threats to the ants. But then the the evolutionary
(23:32):
pressure becomes more focused on UH and warfare, and there
so therefore you see all these various um adaptations emerge
where it's more about waging war against ants, and sometimes
it takes place of new chemical weapons that they may use.
So a very famous one, of course would be formic acid.
The word formic coming from the word for ants formic
(23:55):
to day, yeah, and so that's what we see with
the formic acid of the form maica would ants. So
these ants can spray formic acid from the tips of
their abdomen. In fact, formic acid was first extracted in
sixteen seventy one by the English naturalist John Ray. Is
John Ray, the guy we talked about who was doing
the experiments with with ants and formic acid and was
(24:17):
comparing it to urine. I don't think it is. I
had to pull him up and granted a lot of
these individuals with portraits from from the late seventeenth early
eighteenth century, UH kind of look the same to me.
But um, I don't think we touched on him before,
could be wrong, but anyway, the formic acid of these
(24:38):
ants that this is a great example of one variety
of of reriverally in and of itself amazing chemical weapons
that have been developed by that have evolved in these
ant species. But there are even more exotic examples to
look at. And in this we're getting into the topic
of exploding ants, which this is so good. Yeah, and
this is a lot of you probably heard about about
(25:00):
examples of this before because I mean, it's just such
an amazing topic and it's certainly made the rounds in
science communication and science journalism. Uh and in fact, I
think we've probably mentioned it on the show in the past. However,
we're going to touch on some new stuff as well here,
like the new findings new species that have been discovered
just in the last year or so. So um. Well,
(25:21):
one and one example that comes up a lot is
uh campan nautists sunders of Malaysia and Brunei, whose bodies
are riddled with poison sacks and so when they attack.
When they're attacked, they constrict and rupture fatally, forcing sticky
poison out of their mouth anous and through their exoskeleton.
And again, don't think of this as of the individual
(25:42):
in this scenario, think of the group. Think of the colony,
the good of the colony. So this is a situation
where the individual is a biological weapon and they can
readily sacrifice themselves to do damage against or in some
way slow down an invading species. Yeah. I mean again,
(26:04):
think of the colony as an organism. So this is
sort of like an animal with poison skin. The ant
is sort of like the skin of the poison arrow frog, right,
And but in this case they can they can like
bear down and burst themselves like a like a like
a cooked sausage, you know, uh, like like a gusher, Yeah,
poison gush exactly. This is called autopsis, and it's involved
(26:31):
independently in a number of termite species as well. But
but you see different varieties of it. The kind of
shed light on how this seems to have evolved. So
sometimes you'll have an autopsis utilizing species. It simply defecates
on their enemies get too close, and I'm going to
poop onto you. Other times you see it more a
(26:52):
situation where they're they're bearing down, like they're pooping so
hard that they're going to rupture their abdomen. And from
this we get into sort of more exaggerated modes of
just absolute abdominal m explosion. And in fact, like IM said,
there's a there's a nice new example of this that's
come out. I was just reading in April establishments published
(27:13):
in zoo Keys via Lassity at All about another variety
of exploding at known as uh Colobopsis explodings explodons. I
love this exploding a k a. Yellow do ats, but
we're just gonna call him explodings because that's that's clearly
where the fun is. So this is a wonderfully fascinating
(27:35):
species because minor workers in the colony have this exploding ability. Uh.
They can burst themselves into this yellow chemical goo that
is kind of like a spice that you know, again
will kill or slow down or or aggravate damage an invader.
But then they also have um have these larger major
(27:56):
type workers and they're referred to as door keepers because
they have quote big plug shaped heads which they use
to block intruders in the tunnels. Pause to appreciate this
for a moment. So this is something that other species
of ant have have a version of this two specialized
members that essentially have a locked door four ahead. It's like,
(28:18):
this is a fascinating biomechanical way to raise the drawbridge
on your colony. Right, These would be ants that have dug,
you know, excavated colonies with tunnels, and the ants themselves
to become part of the defensive structure by closing the
entrances of the tunnels with their heads. Yeah, this is amazing.
I'll also point out I believe there's another variety of
ant that seals its entrances with stones, and we'll get
(28:40):
into some stone examples here in a bet, But I
want to get back to explode and stuff. So this
is a particularly elegant adaptation for defense, but it also,
at least on the surface, seems to buck the trend
we see earlier with marauder ants. For the marauders, the
majors are the big guns. They're the A, T. S.
D s that move into tear apart enemies that have
(29:02):
been bogged down amid the individually less impressive miners. For explodons,
the majors are the plug heads, so they function mostly
as barricade engines. Perhaps, you know, one could make a
loose comparison to like a mobile field generator in Star
Wars or something. And with explodings, the majors rarely leave
(29:22):
the nest. They're they're purely domestic defenses. It's the miners, however,
that packed the explosive punch that are that are self detonating, uh,
sacrificing themselves, ending their lives in an attempt to strike
out against the invaders. So these are literally suicide missions. Yeah. Yeah,
Like what apparently will happen is um like with the
(29:45):
marauder miners, the explodings miners are indeed the first wave.
So there's an attack on the nest, then they pour
into battle, they latch onto an enemy with their mandibles,
and then they hold their abdomen close to their grappled enemy.
Then they air down and they burst loosing out of
a thick spiced yellow goo that again either kills them
(30:06):
or hinders the attacker. Wow. And then again Marauder style,
the explodents majors burst in with their plug heads to
barricade the tunnels against increased invasion. And I guess one
of the interesting things to think about here is that
we're really getting into a whole specialized realm evant warfare,
defensive warfare fought within the nest um, you know, defensive
(30:28):
urban warfare. UH specialists here tunnel warfare specialists, which is
something of course we see tunnel warfare and urban warfare
in human scenarios. And it makes me think back to
the linear a Lanchester's linear loft that we discussed in
the last episode. Yeah, again as a refresher, the linear
law tends to apply more to UH conflicts that are
(30:50):
close something closer to a series of sequential duels, where
a force with larger numbers can't use the square power
of those larger numbers to easily overwhelm smaller forces. UH.
You use defenses to your advantage to try to limit
the scope of how much battle can take place at
the same time. And a classic way to do this
(31:11):
is to create choke points, to create tunnels. Yeah, and
so this species would seem a master at chuckpoints. So
you're you're pouring into their UH to their home and
you've got, you know, hundreds of of soldier ants that
their at their disposal. Like they have numbers on their side,
but they have specialists that can explode UH and a
specialists that can seal off the tunnel. Uh so, which
(31:33):
it gives seems to give them, uh you know, more
or less equal footing with the invaders. And I want
to stress again that explode Us is a newly discovered
variety of self sacrificing ant, first written about in and
so more remains to be explored about them. But also
in general, it just drives home how many aunt species
are out there in the world that we just that
(31:55):
we haven't fully documented yet, how many, how many strange
and wonderful adaptations are out there, they just simply haven't
been chronicled yet. Isn't that amazing just just to know
that there's so much more to learn that will be
things like this, Just bizarre, amazing adaptations that already exist.
It's not like they're gonna come into being in the future.
(32:18):
I mean, obviously new species will come into being. They're
already out there. We just never looked at them before,
never at least never documented them in a in a
thorough way. Absolutely all right, on that note, we're gonna
take one last break, but when we come back, we'll
discuss the Stone Age tactics of bicolor ants. Than alright,
(32:39):
we're back. So the next variety of and I want
to touch on is the Dorry Meyer mix bicolor ants.
So if you have the higher ground, you know all
you need is gravity and mass. Right, soldiers can defend
cliffs or the walls of a castle by dropping stones
on the heads of attackers. But of course you can
also go on the offense, particularly via the technologies and
(32:59):
the human in realm of bombardment, an enemy might drop
things such as stones, bodies, or explosives upon an enemy city. Yeah,
in the human realm. I mean, one way you can
think about the evolution of an air force is that
it is a It is a force evolved to give
you permanent high ground. Uh. And sometimes ants can definitely
(33:19):
take advantage of this. In particular, these dory miromix by
color ants of Arizona Um previously known as Cono Mirma
by color ants. They were discovered back in ninety nine
by Moglik and Alpert to actually use small stones to
drop um on their adversaries, basically ant tool use. Yeah. Now,
(33:45):
I mean, I guess when you think about aunt tool use,
you do have to like take a step back and
think about what ants are always doing their manipulating uh,
the soil they're manipulating little grains of sand and moving
them around, and this is just kind of a byproduct
of that. What are else are you doing with those
(34:05):
pieces of the ground. So basically, the researchers back in
seventy nine observed that workers surrounding the nest would pick
up small stones and other objects and drop them down
the nest entrances of rival nests that we're you know,
reasonably close by. Now, comparing it to bombardment might be
a bit much, but it is at the very least
(34:26):
active interference in a competitors industry. So so perhaps one
might think of it more as like industrial sabotage. I
don't know, I mean, it's it seems like that would
sort of counting me. It's using gravity and high ground
to your advantage in the attack on the enemy's infrastructure.
So in many ways, it seems a lot like bombing
or shelling. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you could
(34:48):
make an argument for it. Again, going back to our
first episode, nothing in the ant world is gonna be
one to one right with the human world. But uh,
like Moffatt said, you know, good comparisons, you know, worthy
comparisons are not going to be a direct one to once,
but there are a few other possible cases of soil
and pebble based tool used by ants um which again
(35:10):
shouldn't be really all that surprising given their intense manipulation
of the Earth. Four sixty five paper from Line at
All reported pavement ants using soil to attack bees and
the desert harvester. Ant will apparently drop bits of soil
into honey water and then carry the soil particles back
(35:30):
as a way to bring the honey water to the nest.
This was this was via a study conducting eighty four
by Philip McDonald of the New York Intomological Society, and
it seems to be related to the similar use of
of soil to cover up liquids that ants cannot just
outright remove. Okay, so the idea here is that you
(35:55):
come across a liquid food source that you want to
bring back to the nest. You obviously you can't hairy
liquid the same way you could carry like a part
of another insects body back is food, So they will
pour like soil into the liquid to create a sponge
full of sugar, and then carry that soil sponge The
sugary soil sponge back towards the queen. That seems to
(36:16):
be the case here. Now uh, it's it's possible that
this is something that more is obvious in experimental scenarios.
I'm not entirely certain on that, but it it certainly
underlines like what is possible using the properties of soil
at that scale. And again, it seems like the more
(36:36):
u uh usual activity that you see is like there's
some sort of sail poison or a chemical and the
ants don't know what to do with that. They can't
really interact with it directly, but they can put soil
on it. They can essentially bury it. They can cover
it up right, like kicking soil onto a smoldering camp
fire or something. Yeah. So yeah, I would imagine that
these studies alleging some form of ant tool use, like
(36:59):
most of the are these alleging types of tool use
and animals probably have encountered some dispute, you know, about
interpretation of the behaviors. U It seems like that always
comes up. Now here's another one that's pretty interesting. This
is an example brought up by Moffatt concerning the so
called slave maker ants. So slave making is also known
(37:20):
is duosis in the biology world. So these are cases
where you'll have ants that are brood parasites that in
some species rely on the practice absolutely, but another species
are not obligate slave makers. So basically what they do
is they invade a colony, they capture the brood of
another ant. Usually they're capturing the young, and generally it
(37:44):
is a very specific species that they're focusing on, and
then they bring those young back to their own nest
where they're made to work, while members of the slave
maker species itself just focus on rating more nests for
more workers. Now, moffat ship Ar is that while slave
making ants are generally heavily armored, heavily armed with superior
(38:05):
fighting abilities, some species use a propaganda chemical uh is
the is the term he uses to throw off the
enemy during raids. Uh So you have to think about this, right,
You may be big and strong, but it goes back
to that linear law that if you're going in to
invade a colony, if you're gonna go into the thick
of it, then great armor, great weapons, that's only gonna
(38:30):
get you so far if you're outnumbered. But if you
have some sort of chemical advantage, if you're able to
trick the others into thinking you're supposed to be there,
then do you have an enormous advantage, doesn't matter about
their superior numbers. And so in these cases, these propaganda
chemical using slave maker ants, they can often carry all
(38:52):
of this out without any fighting or killing taking place.
You know, it's not just forms of rival ants there.
It almost seems like there is a whole genre across
different types of animals that's just adaptations for the safe
infiltration of ant colonies. Yeah, Mermica phile. So the the
(39:13):
whole classification of animals that have have come to depend
upon the ants, and in many cases you use some
sort of chemical signal to trick the colony into thinking
they're supposed to be there. Now here's another example just
of of general sort of ant war um strategies that
is that has brought up off It brings this one
(39:34):
up as well. Uh, we've ants, so we've answered not
merely an army on the move, but they hold and
control territory. They spread their workers out across it and
then focus resources around key choke points. They even established
leafy barrack nests in the crowns of trees and Moffitt
points out that that we've answered therefore less rigid compared
(39:56):
to army ants quote. Weavers, in contrast, wander more freely
and are more versatile in their response to opportunities and threats.
The difference in style calls to mind the contrast between
the rigidity of Frederick the Great's armies and the flexibility
and mobility of Napoleon bonaparte troops. That's interesting. Yeah, So
so the idea is that if a weaver aunt does
(40:16):
encounter a problem in the empire, he uses a recruitment
pheromone to call in reinforcements from the immediate area, as
opposed to just having like one war gang ravaging around
the territory. So, again, these are not This is not
an attempt to create an exhaustive list of all the
amazing adaptations that ants have developed to wage wars against
(40:37):
each other defend against each other, but hopefully it helps
provide uh more of an idea of the rich diversity
out there. This is one of my favorite types of
topics that that frequently comes up on the show. It's
one of those where you feel like you've gotten just
a tiny glimpse, you know, behind through through a curtain
or through a window into a vast uh you know,
(40:59):
mansion possibilities and and and rich relationships. Uh, that that
you don't even think about most of your waking hours,
that you know that the world is just shocking. Yeah. Absolutely,
and um and I think it's really interesting to look
at the work of of you know, Wilson, Moffatt, uh
(41:20):
and others when they compare ants to the human world,
because on one hand, it helps us better understand the ants, right,
you know, that's how humans work. Like if we can
see ourselves reflected to some degree and another organism, then
we can understand that organism better, even if it's you know,
we're kind of anthropomorphizing to get there. But then on
(41:41):
the other hand, it does seem like we potentially have
a lot to learn about what we are, right, we're
getting into, you know, the sociobiology of V. O. Wilson
or can or you know, certainly Moffatt gets into this
a lot in his book The Human Swarm, where he's
he's he's not just looking at the ant world, he's
he's moving from there into the human world and trying
to make sense of what we're doing. Yeah, and of course,
(42:03):
you know, we're we're incredibly different creatures than ants, but
some of the same resource dynamics and things like that
are always going to be in play no matter what
species you're talking about. Yeah. In that E. O. Wilson documentary,
I believe he shares this quote. Uh, he says, quote
the real problem of humanity is the following. We have
paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology, and it is
(42:28):
terrifyingly dangerous and it is now approaching a point of
crisis overall. I think in many ways that's true, and
it brings to mind. You know, something that's been sort
of simmering for me throughout these episodes is that what
I would hope we could learn by by looking at
the warfare of other organized species like you social insects,
and uh comparing that to to get perspective on human
(42:52):
life is not that we learn how better to wage
war through it, but maybe how not to wage war
and how to avoid war. Yeah. Yeah, there's the sort
of the lesson that we don't need to live like ants. Um.
I mean, because ants, for all the comparisons we've made,
you know, they're they're free of these human burdens that
we mentioned, you know, they're emotionless. There, their ways, while
(43:14):
comparable to human institutions, in some way, are free of
institutional constraints. Well, Robert, while I agree with you in
a sense about that, though I would I would be
careful about the idea that they're emotionless given our well true, yes,
our our invertebrate emotions episode. But yeah, we we don't know.
We don't think that they have complex inner lives the
way that we do, even though they have these internal
(43:34):
states that you could probably recognize as being something like
fear or joy, possibly, right, Yeah, I mean, I I
think I have heard before I forget who there was
an entomology. I don't think it was Wilson Um. Maybe
it was Moffitt and an MPR piece talking about the
watching ants and feeling that some ants had almost a personality.
(43:57):
So yeah, you're you're correct. I shouldn't be too fast
to dismiss them as emotionless. Though an individual ant soldier
is well far I think, far less of an individual
than a than a human. I think we can we
can at least focus on that, um and then in
terms of like what they can do, I mean, certainly
they are a powerful force within the ecosystem. It's been
(44:18):
observed that if all humans died today, ants would proceed
just fine, But if all the ants died, the world
would be in a state of absolute chaos. All right,
we're gonna go ahead and close it out right there.
We hope you've enjoyed this three part look at ant warfare.
But obviously there's so so much in the ant world.
(44:40):
We can easily return, probably will return at some point
in the future to discuss ants once more, especially as
researchers continue to make new discoveries. Totally in the meantime,
if you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever
you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
We just asked that you rate, review, and subscribe. You
(45:00):
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
(45:23):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listening to your favorite shows. B
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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