Ants! Part 2!

The exciting conclusion of Ants Part 2!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, chuck here real quick with some bad news
and sad news. Uh. Sketch Fest this year in San Francisco,
which is where we were gonna have our first live
show in two years here in a couple of weeks,
has been postponed. I believe they're looking to postponed it
by a whole year and kind of rebooked the whole
festival ideally, but you know, with what's going on around

(00:22):
the country with Omicron, they didn't feel like they could
press forward, and UH, as bummed as we are, we
think it's the right move as well. So, uh, if
you have tickets, just stay tuned for an announcement. I
think you will either probably be able to well I'm
not exactly sure what's gonna happen with them, maybe a
refund maybe if you hold onto them, they're good for

(00:42):
next year because we're probably gonna look in the same theater.
But listen up for announcement soon. And again, all apologies,
we're super sad about it. We're really looking forward to
getting back out there again. But until further notice, live
shows are still on hold. All right, now here we
go with the show. Welcome to stuff you should know

(01:05):
A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and this is
stuff you should know. Part two about ants, which is
just knocking our socks off, and we we we released

(01:25):
this one on the first one on Tuesday. Chuck, my
socks are still off in its Thursday, that's right. And
you know, if you listen to part one, we tried
to throw in some amazing ant facts and I think
we I think we came through there, but most of
that was a little bit of the nuts and bolts.
I think Part two has got a little bit more
wow factor because we talk a lot about a lot

(01:47):
more even about the social structure of these amazing insects. Yeah.
So ants are great, great example of social speed, social
insect like bees, um, some wasps, but I think there's
plenty of solitary wasps too. But let's say, like bees,
they really kind of resemble bees in that sense. Um.

(02:08):
And despite you know how many ants there are and
how many bees there are, um, apparently social insects um
only make up something like two percent of all insects species.
The rest are um solitary or anti social or drifters,
that kind of thing. So um, at the heart of
any uh social insect society is the queen and usually

(02:32):
chuck the who the whole thing is so hierarchical. There's
just like one queen. Yeah, this is this is the
one part that tripped me up a little bit as
far as they're as as far as that being a
benefit for their survival, I would think, like, hey, more queens,
more eggs, like there should be you know, not all queens,

(02:53):
because obviously I get that queens need a lot of
special care. Um, I mean, I guess let's talk about it.
Because queens get get fed. One reason that makes them
the queen is that they're the only sexually reproductive female
and that's the only thing she does is mate and
lay tons and tons of eggs. Uh. An army aunt

(03:14):
queen can lay up to three hundred thousand eggs in
a in a few days. Uh. And they're they're bigger,
like they're just they basically sit around, they mate, they
lay eggs, and they get fed a really protein rich diet,
so they grow up to like, you know, three or
four times the size of all the other ants. Yeah.
And so with the queen, um, they're they're like you

(03:36):
said that One of the big differences are The difference
UM is that they're they're bigger than other um female ants,
which are worker ants. Genetically, they're basically the same, it's
just that they're much much bigger, which means UM somehow,
I think also from that protein rich diet. They're also
um they have ovaries that function as well, so they're

(03:57):
able to reproduce. But that's basically the only two differences.
And that just goes to show you that any um
worker egg can be raised into a queen, right and
we'll see, you know, cases where that might happen. Another
difference is they live a lot longer. The queen ants
of the Black Garden aunt can live up to thirty

(04:18):
years apparently, Uh, female workers live about a year. And
I guess we can talk a little bit about the males.
The poor male aunt, uh, they only live a week.
They are hatched from unfer They don't even bother to
fertilized eggs. For the males, they had from unfertilized eggs,
whereas all females had from fertilized eggs. And the males,

(04:40):
you know, they did their thing. They're there too to
impregnate the queen and then they die. There's sex. Sex
slaves is what they are. Yeah, and and David points out,
you know, Dave Russ helped us with this. He said, basically,
almost any ant that you see is probably a female ant. Yeah,
not just because, um, the workers are responsible for doing everything.

(05:00):
But like you said, the lifespan of male land is
so short, the chances of you seeing one are pretty slim,
although as we'll see, there are some some times where
they're on such full spectacular display that you actually may
have seen male lands before. Sure. Yeah, we'll get to
that weirdness in a minute. But the females are the
workers that you know. It's like, uh, where was wonder

(05:24):
woman from? Uh? Amazonia? Amazonia. It's kind of like the
society there. It's just it's all these ladies making things
happen as a big group, all in service to this queen.
And the workers do everything. They've feed and care for
the young, they feed and care for the queen. They
go out and get the food, they maintain that nest

(05:46):
in the colony, which we'll talk about. It's just remarkable
what they do. Uh. They're the police force, they're the army,
they're the custodians. They do everything. Yeah, so like everything
that has nothing to do with um eating and laying eggs.
That's that's that's the workers doing all that stuff. It's
pretty cool. And depending on the species, sometimes the workers

(06:09):
are um more specialized than another species. Sometimes they'll be
like major workers who are much larger UM than the
minor workers, so they'll be the ones that go out
and like forage and maybe defend the nest while the
minor workers, the smaller ones, are left behind to tend
to the the larva and the pup a and um

(06:31):
and basically raise the next generation. So there's there can
be like specialization of what you do as an ant
depending on your size or how you were raised. That's right,
and so uh, it's a very strict castiste and basically
um there's no like working your way up the ladder.
It seems like you kind of have your job. You're
happy to do it. Um Ants are very happy, emotional

(06:55):
little insects, right, Yeah, they really wear their hearts on
their sleeves. You can tell if an ant is having
a bad day. But the good thing about it is
you can cheer them up pretty pretty easily. To just
hold your finger out lit him climb up on your finger.
They find it so delightful and if you have a
little honeydew in your pocket, you can really turn their
day around. Uh. Now, you know we said we mentioned

(07:16):
the males just basically impregnate the queen then die, but
I didn't really quite get this part about the genetics
of the chromosomeal genetics. So basically, a male is just
an egg that has a genome from it his mother
from the queen. Usually the queen um a female is created,

(07:41):
so like that would mean that all unfertilized eggs are males,
and then the queen comes along and fertilizes some select ones.
And I think it's actually dependent on what the workers
point out. I think the workers actually decide how many
new female workers are needed compared to how many males
are are needed. And then the queen comes along and

(08:02):
fertilizes some proportion of those unfertilized male eggs, and then
those become workers female workers. And then in some cases
when there's not a queen, say a queen died or
something like that, a colony would find itself up the creek.
But apparently there's plenty of ants species where the workers

(08:23):
can actually lay unfertilized male eggs to raise a generation
of males that can mate with a queen that the
um that the workers produce as well, so the workers
can keep a colony from dying off if the queen dies. Yeah. Yeah,
After I saw that some of these queens can live
thirty years, I just became paranoid about like accidentally killing

(08:47):
a queen. But I think that probably doesn't happen because
they're never out there to be stepped on, right, No,
it's it's you pretty much won't have to invade a
nest like you're an exterminator if you're killing the queen.
Oh man, But that's what they do. I mean, that's
what they're trying to go after the queen. So yeah,
we're we have um a mole problem in my yard.

(09:11):
And I'm just like, I guess we have a mole
problem because I'm certainly not gonna let somebody come along
and drop m eight s into these mole holes and
blow them up. But luckily I found a service that
uses something called mole scram and it's just kind of
like an irritant, but it doesn't actually hurt them in
any way. They just don't want to be around it.
So I'm gonna give that one a try, because they

(09:31):
will mess up your lawn really quickly. I thought you're
gonna say, a guy comes by with a flute, I
wish leads them down to your neighbor's out. I just
did our pipe Piper episode as a select so I
heard it recently and it's really good. But the first
twenty minutes is really odd. It's like oddly like we're

(09:51):
like challenging one another and it's just really weird. And
then I don't know, we're just like showing off to
another You'll just have to listen to It's it's pretty interesting,
but it really it really um comes out on top.
It's a good episode. Interesting, that's not the stuff you
should know way, I know, That's what I'm saying. It's
it's weird. It's a weird start join episode, but usually

(10:13):
shrink in the face of competition. That's all right. We
don't challenge each other. You get very strange, all right.
I guess we need to get to the nests here. Um,
this is kind of some of the most remarkable stuff
that you're ever gonna see. I saw this one. Do
yourself a favor go to YouTube and I can't remember

(10:33):
what the search term was, but like amazing, uh aunt
colony or something like that, and it's like a three
minute video where they found uh They wanted to research
what these things look like below ground, and so they
pumped um concrete into the hole. I don't know where
this was. It took ten tons of concrete to fill

(10:56):
this thing, and then they let it sit for a
month and then they you know, excavated or whatever like
you would a fossil and dig around it and they
dug out what ended up being. It looked like about
the size of a Little League baseball in field, twenties
six ft deep, a hundred and seventy ft across, and

(11:17):
it was one of the most unbelievable things I've ever seen.
It looked like, literally like an architect had designed it.
Um they were talking about the efficiencies of you know,
every tube was like it was the shortest route to
get to the next thing. It was like it looked
like it had been purposefully designed that way. And it's
just the the DNA of these ants that know how

(11:38):
to do this stuff. So, yeah, you you mentioned something
important that the tunnels and the connections they make between
all these chambers, they do tend to be like the
shortest route between them, and ants also apparently will will
um burrow on these really kind of steep angles, but
they're at the angle of repose, which is the steepest

(11:58):
angle that's something like pile of dirt or a pile
of sand can maintain without collapsing. And somehow ants just no, like, oh,
this is the angle I need to be to be
um digging at. Yeah, I saw that one thing you sent, uh,
and I guess we can talk about the force chains here.
It's pretty interesting. But um, when they were studying these ants,
they thought maybe like maybe they're doing like a game

(12:20):
of Jinga when they're making these tunnels where they they
feel a little bit and kind of touch the block
which in this case or little individual grains of sand
or dirt or whatever, to see if it would weaken
the structure. And I think after the end of this
experiment they were like, no, they're not they're not doing that.
They are just coded to do this. Yeah, And they
were like, we have no idea how ants know what

(12:42):
little grains of sand or dirt to pull out and
what ones they shouldn't because their load bearing grains. But
they just do and they're really successful at it. And
what they what they somehow are aware of, is that
there are things called what you said, force chains, where
if you follow like a force chain of soil or
dirt underground, like in a cross section of ground, um,

(13:05):
those are the things that are holding the soil in place.
And not all of the pieces or grains of dirt
or sand are responsible for holding the soil in place.
So you could conceivably move one and leave another in place,
and that that column of sand or dirt above is
going to stay. In tech somehow ants know what grains
are load bearing and what grains aren't. And so when

(13:25):
they're doing this, they're actually removing, um the sands that
that aren't part of the force chain. And when they
do chuck, it actually reinforces the structure of the force
chain that it diverts it to the outside of the
tunnel they're digging, which just makes it that much stronger.
And there and again they're not just kind of testing

(13:46):
it like a game of jinga like that would make sense,
and I see why they thought that might be. What's
happening is like they push a little bit to see
if anything starts to give, it's again, it's just like
a hundred and thirty million years of practice. Yeah. And
because they're so good at at creating these burrows and
tunnels and chambers that that not only UM maintained, but
also actually reinforced the force chains underground. UM like an

(14:10):
ant colony, a subtraining and colony might hold up for
decades once they dig it out. I felt terrible when
I saw this thing being pumped full of concrete. I
didn't know if it was vacant or you know, there
was some pretty decent pile of dirt on top. But um,
I know you made the point with that stuff he
sent over that it's sort of like the tip of

(14:31):
the iceberg. If you see a little ant hill in
your neighborhood here in the United States, it's you know,
twelve inches across and like sixtright inches. I there's a
lot more going on under the surface. Yeah, I mean
tens of feet underground. Like you said, the size of
a little league field laid out on its side, tipped
up on its end, and buried underground. That's enormous. Yeah,

(14:53):
I mean this thing was huge. It was really really
something Okay, chuck. So we're starting to get a little
worked up. I think we need to melow out again.
Do you want to take a break, Yeah, let's do it. Okay,
we'll be right back everybody, all right, So we would

(15:27):
you with a little bit on these ant colonies in
the nest and what's going on underground. I mentioned at
the beginning of episode one, these army ants who don't
root down in a specific place. They're one of the
only nomadic species, and they go miles and miles, which
is a long long way for a little tiny ant,
up to a million at a time, and to go

(15:51):
to these places, they need to eat a lot of food,
and they basically make what are temporary encampments out of themselves,
you know, kind of like fire ants make a raft
out of themselves. These guys make a bivouac out of themselves. Yeah.
They make a big I mean, look this up again
with these pictures. It's a it looks like a big

(16:11):
ant ball, but I guess it's hollow on the inside, right, Yeah,
And then underneath you've got a bunch of different kinds
of worker ants um raising and directing where to where
to fertilize, and feeding and creating a new generation of
worker ants, and then after that generation is raised to adults,

(16:32):
they break down their bivouac and DeCamp and just keep moving. Unbelievable,
truly remarkable. They also can form super colonies. I know
that there's a um one kind of ant. It's an
Argentinian ant that they don't do this in Argentina, but
in Europe they there is one super colony that goes
up the coast from Italy to Spain for thirty seven

(16:55):
hundred miles. That is all technically one, you know, it's
like one big. It's like the Pando of ants. They
just get together with their friends and they're like, hey,
I know these people are like behind me by ten ft.
You want to meet them? And then that linked up
for thirty seven miles. Yes, all from Italy to Spain
to northwest Spain. It's just astounding. And you said something

(17:19):
really important. You said that they don't this Argentinian aunt
doesn't do that back in Argentina, and um they looked
into why, and apparently the reason why is because back
in Argentina they're very genetically diverse, so that that neighbor
ten feet away is basically an enemy because all of
these ants are trying to preserve their queen's line as

(17:40):
as best they can, So another nest is just a
totally different genetic line, so it's a it's an enemy.
But when they find land somewhere new, like say Italy
or Spain or whatever, that's a much less genetically diverse group.
So as it reproduces, they form nearby colonies that are
pretty similar to the original colony or the last colony.

(18:03):
And so you have these massive super colonies that are
super cooperative because there are basically just extensions of the
queen's genetic line. Wow. Yeah yeah. And apparently ants also
get from places like Argentina to Italy and have spread
throughout the world largely thanks to humans who use like
soil and sand as ship's ballast. And then when you

(18:25):
get to the next place, you unload the ballast and
there's all those ants you dug up from the last
place you just set sail from. Wow, I don't know
that that's how they gotten around. That's how they think
that the uh, the red imported fire ant came here.
All right, So that's pretty good. Here's another remarkable thing
about ants. Uh Ants don't fly. Generally, everyone knows that

(18:48):
ants don't have wings. But if a colony is super
successful and there are too many ants and they're out
growing their own living conditions, they will just grow wings
and fly up in the air males and females and
have a big mid air right, That's that's what it is. Yeah,

(19:10):
for sure. They grow wings and they say, all right,
we're gonna have wings now everyone. I know we don't normally,
but we're getting too big, so we're all gonna grow wings.
Then let's go up and fly in the air and
have sex. So so um, when the when the colony
gets too big, there's some sort of signal that the
workers pick up on. They're like, oh, things are getting
a little crowded here. I'm not sure what it is.
Nobody is sure what it is at the moment, but

(19:30):
there's some signal they pick up on, and so they
start raising a generation of queens, of virgin queens called princesses,
and those princesses um fly off on this Usually it's
not really actually a day, but in some places like
the UK, they celebrated as flying aunt d a kind
of like how you know when um uh cicadas come

(19:53):
up after like seventeen years here in the States. I
get the impression it's kind of like that, although it
happens every year. Um. And if it's hu it out,
if it's hot out and it rained the night before,
there's a good chance you're gonna see swarms of flying
ants having air sex. Like you were saying, um, but
what those are different virgin queens and they're going as
far away from their their nest as possible because that

(20:15):
increases the likelihood that they're going to find, um, some
of the generations of winged male drones that were raised
in other nests, and they're going to have sex, and
then they're going to go off and found their own
nests after that. Now that they've been now that they've
gotten some sperm, that's right, And they can store the
sperm for quite a long time. In some cases, the

(20:36):
queen leafcutter ant can store viable sperm for up to
twenty years and just eat it out a little one
little bit at a time. And these were dave used
and just keep fertilized in generation after generation of eggs. Uh.
And I don't think we said the name of this
air sex there. Actually it's called nuptial flights. Yeah. I
remember in the Firefly episode they had like nuptial gifts. Yeah.

(21:00):
I was like, we've talked about that somewhere. I looked
it up. It was definitely fireflies. It's pretty amazing. And
then after that, you know, the males, as always, they
die off, and then hopefully you got a bunch of
new colonies. Yeah. If so, this is like the one
time the queen is off on her own for about
two or three weeks. She's like busy founding an entirely
new colony. Um. There's nobody there to feed her. Um.

(21:23):
She's just laying a bunch of eggs and she's choosing
which or fertile, which to fertilize, which not. She's probably
fertilizing most of them because she needs a lot of
workers right then, and not very many male drones to
have sex with, so she's basically just laying in fertilizing
worker eggs, hatches them herself, and then once she successfully
has a generation or two of workers under her belt,

(21:46):
now her colonies got a pretty good chance of becoming
stable because the workers can start to take over. She
can do what she does, which is lay hundreds to
thousands or hundreds of thousands of lay eggs every day,
that's right. So if you ever see ants flying around,
you know what's going on. Yeah, and they're they're they're not.
Don't confuse them with termites. Apparently they do bear some similarities,

(22:06):
but if you look closely, you can you can tell
the difference. Like just the color alone is a dead giveaway. Yeah,
I think termites are usually kind of white. Yeah, but
the infestation in your house, it's it's probably termites, Yeah,
because the ants are flying around outside. They don't want
to be inside right now, not for their nuptial flight,
that's right. So that must be like a pretty lonely

(22:27):
and scary two or three weeks for that that new queen,
you know, I would say, So, I didn't get a
good sense of what the sort of survival rate for
that was. I didn't either. I'll bet it's all over
the place, because again, there's like ten thousand to fourteen
thousand species of ant, you know. Yeah, but it seems
like a big deal when it happens, when they finally

(22:48):
reached that they're carrying capacity or whatever, and they're like,
all right, we gotta do this thing. It seems like
it's a. It's a big deal to kind of split
up that colony. One thing I didn't see is if
you could make a bard of um winged ants like
you could a swarm of bees, because they have, would
be really impressive. Oh that just makes me itchy just

(23:09):
thinking about it. So maybe we should talk a little
bit about the leaf cutter ant. Uh. If you see
videos of the leaf cutter, you've if you've seen any
documentary on ants, they probably talked a lot about the
leaf cutter because those are the ones that you know,
literally cut the leaf with those mandibles and you see them,
you know, it looks like they gotta looks like they

(23:29):
got a carpet knife. And how cleanly they cut through
that Christmas paper. It's really neat, uh leaf and then
one bit of leaf at a time, they're marching that
stuff out of there. Yeah, and I mean they these
leaves are enormous compared to the bodyway. But again, remember
ants are super strong, and leaf cutter ants in particular
can be very strong. They we talked about how um

(23:50):
sometimes workers are divided up into different specialties. Leaf cutters
are one of those where they have majors. They're the
biggest and the strongest of all of them, so they
carry enormous leaves compared to their body um. And they
actually are basically like cutting down paths like machetes um
to to clear a path for the smaller ones. The
media and then the miniums that try the media do

(24:12):
carry a lot of the leaves. But the little miniums,
those little guys are just the farmers, uh, and they
tend to this fungus. And this is you know, it's
pretty cool enough that they take these leaves, they cut
them up, and they transport them over these distances, uh,
considering how heavy they are. But the really remarkable thing
about the leaf cutter is that they are just as

(24:35):
the other ants um kind of raise the cattle of
these little apods. These are actual farmers of a fungus
and they have the symbiotic relationship with this fungus that
they farm underground. Yeah, so when they cut these leaves,
they're they're fertilizing the fungus with these leaves to to

(24:56):
let them decompose and let the fungus basically eat the leaves.
The adults act really um drink the sap from the
leaves because it's it's sweet. But they don't actually leave
the leaves. They leave the leaves for the fungus. And
the reason that they grow fungus and like, there's really
no better word to describe what they do than farm.
They farm this fungus. They tend to it, they heal

(25:17):
it when it's sick, they know how to harvest it,
they know how to get it to grow just right. Um,
the reason that they farm this fungus is because it
produces a food that the ants harvest to feed their young,
to raise their young on. So symbiotic is right because
they definitely want this fungus to be as healthy as possible.
So the fungus really thrives in the presence of these ants,

(25:39):
and the fungus in turn provides the ants with food
for their young, but also in some cases chuck um
antibiotics like ana microbials that that the fungus produces the
ants will coat them their bodies with and it will
prevent them from being infected as well. Yeah, and not
only that, if they if they need to split off

(26:00):
they don't like growings and fly up and have arab
nuturals or whatever, they just leave. But just like you
would carry the a sour dough mother, uh to your
to your new bakery. They actually carry a big chunk
of that fungus over to start their new crop in
their new home. That's so cool. It's amazing, it really is,

(26:21):
especially if you imagine the fungus having a face and
talking right and also being really grateful for the help.
I think in the in the in the movie they did,
in the animated film they did. I think of it
as kind of like looking like have you ever seen
that movie basket Case? Have I seen what was that? No, terrible,

(26:42):
terrible b horror movie from like the late seventies, yea,
like the guy carried his brother around in a basket.
I don't think I saw that, but I think I
remember that when I worked at Vision Video in college.
So bad. It's really really bad, But it looks kind
of like a little piece of fungus that you would
carry to a new ant cole. This is what kept
flashing through my head. I wish you would get out

(27:04):
of my head. But I need to look at that
poster or that movie box because it's it's in my
brain somewhere. I just can't call it up. Let's let's
watch that movie together tonight. All right, let's do it.
I'll truf butter. Oh man, you're making me hungry. You
first you wanted a twinkie, Now you want some popcorn

(27:24):
with truffle butter. Alright, what I really want to do
is take a break and then we will finish up
all about ants at least for now, unless we said,
he come back and to this well again and we'll
talk about how they communicate via these pheromones right after this. Okay, Chuck,

(28:03):
So I think we said at the top of the
first episode that pheromones are basically they may be the
thing that ants use to to um to to carry
out just about all of their individual behavior, which collectively,
if you put millions of ants together doing the same thing,
knowing what they're supposed to do, much more complex behaviors emerged.

(28:24):
But it seems to largely come down to these pheromones,
which are kind of like since um that the ants
pick up kind of like noses using their antenna instead.
It's kind of like a language almost two. Because they're communicating.
I mean we should also say that they also uh,

(28:45):
they can like drum on their abdomen to raise an alarm.
They can make different sounds like crickets. Uh, they can
they can rub different parts of their body. They can
rub their legs against their exoskeleton, is called stridulation. They
can vibrate their mandibles. So they do sort of speak
in some ways and here in some ways, But it

(29:06):
seems like it seems almost secondary to what's going on
with this this pheromone thing. Yeah, because there's just so
many different pheromones, and they produce pheromones from a special
scent gland um and the they you I don't know
how they differentiate pheromones when they're producing them, but different

(29:26):
It seems like they have different pheromones for different things
that they're trying to signal, like there's an alarm signal. Um.
They use pheromones to recruit some ants to go do
something like if if one's maybe tending to the nest
and another one needs help tunneling, it will it will
create some pheromones signal and recruit the other aunt to
come help. It um. They mark territory with it um.

(29:48):
They will, uh, they will use it to discourage rivals,
like if somebody's trying to lay eggs or cannibalize eggs.
They can use pheromones for that kind of stuff. Basically
almost all of their communications seems to be pheromones, and
that communication is really varied and wide. Yeah. So a
great example Dave uses is if there's an intruder, if

(30:08):
like a spider comes upon an ant nest, the ants
that see the spider come in that are I guess,
you know, these soldier ants standing guard near the opening.
They will start to admit the alarm pheromone I guess,
along with beating on their abdomens uh for this alarm vibration,
and then it becomes sort of like a game of telephone.

(30:30):
The next closest ants here this stuff. Some of them might,
depending on what their job is, rush up to help
if they're like soldier ants or you know, or guard
ants that will help guard the nest. Others run back
and they admit pheromones to tell everyone else, and then
they all start emitting pheromones, and it's essentially like a
volume knob going up until everyone knows what's happening, or

(30:53):
until the emergency is over or both. Yeah, and the
emergency is signaled as over because the pheromones start to
ail off. And one of the things about pheromones that
we understand is that they're volatile organic compounds, which means
they dissipate fairly quickly because again they're volatile at room
temperature in the air. Um So as long as you
don't have a bunch of ants all pumping out this

(31:14):
warning pheromone at the same time, the volume is going
to start to dissipate and turn down, and eventually the
the emergency subsides, and so the ants respond to pheromones,
so their response to the pheromone is going to subside
as well, and everything will go back to normal because
the emergency is over right. So if you've ever uh
and this happens to me, I don't have an ant

(31:36):
problem here, but when we go to the lake sometimes, uh,
we have ant problems there because it's out in the
middle of the woods, of course. But I will, you know,
clean up really good, I think at the end of
the night, and if I leave a crumb of a
Twinkie out there, I'll come back the next morning just
infested with these long lines of ants. And I'm always like,

(31:57):
how do they know it's there? How do tell everyone
else it's there? And now I know it's pheromones. It's
the same thing as if the spider invades, some ant
sees this twinky crumb and amidst this pheromone, it's like, hey, everybody,
there's some twinkie over here. Uh, you know, come eat
and it eats a little bit and then amidst a pheromone.

(32:18):
And that what's kind of remarkable is the pheromones. Um.
It's not just a pheromone like they differ. They can
differ what the pheromone is in the intensity of it
to tell everyone, like what kind of food it is,
or how much food there is, and how many of
you should come and try to eat the crumb. Yeah,
there's no way that the ants at your lakehouse haven't
developed a special pheromone for twinkies if you're leaving them

(32:40):
out that much. No, so the and but just like
with the emergency, like the the um, those other descriptions
not just foods here, but this kind of food or
this much food that can be um that can be
described by like variations in the intensity. So if there's
a lot of food, you know, of the ants really

(33:00):
going to exclaim that there's a bunch of food with pheromones,
it's gonna attract more ants and they're going to exclaim,
and just like with that emergency alarm, the volume is
going to be turned up. And then because it's a
volatile organic compound, as the food depletes, the ants that
are coming along and grabbing the food are going to
leave a more and more muted exclamation, so that that

(33:21):
trail is going to eventually dissipate and no ants going
to follow it anymore because there's no food there anymore. Yeah,
I mean, it literally takes the place of the ant
yelling back, hey, there's a lot of food, and then
the last ant saying, hey, we pretty much ate everything.
It's parties over. Yeah. Like they can't do that, So
they use the pheromones, right, and they think that pheromones Again,

(33:42):
it's really tough to to overstate the importance of them
for for every kind of ant behavior. And there's a
there's a m I'm not quite sure what what field
that belongs to, but there's a concept called stigmer g
which basically says that UM it describes a behavior or
a trait or an action that's carried out based on

(34:05):
some sort of signal that's left there. And so ants
really respond to things like um if a litter made
or a nest made is doing something, another ant is
much more likely to do that same thing, and they
think it's because the a signal is left. Every time
and AUNT does something, it leaves a signal. Whether it's
not doing it on purpose, it's not thinking about this,
it's just part of this set of codes that ants follow,

(34:29):
which if you run into this if if you are
on a ball and there's water and you run into
the edge of that ball, you form raft Like it's
just this kind of binary set of very simple codes
that ants seem to follow. And what code or what
set of codes is triggered um depends on what pheromone
the ant is either laying down for the next ant

(34:51):
or is picking up from the last hand. Yeah, I
love lamp exactly. Uh. They also can communicate via touch.
If you've ever uh gone to your kitchen counter like
I have, and you've seen ants walking in a trail,
you've probably seen a little two way street happening where
a bunch of ants are going in one direction and

(35:11):
a bunch of ants right next to him are going
in the other direction. And if you look really really close,
if you have like a magnifying glass, maybe you might
notice the sunshine. Oh no, no, no, don't ever do that.
Uh yeah, just get down there with your eyeballs. Then, um,
they might be touching each other. That might be there
and intenta might be touching. They may be stroking each

(35:31):
other's exoskeleton, and they Scientists basically think that these are
also um communicative signals to one another again saying hey,
there's some great twinkie over there. Sometimes someone might even
have a little bit of a twinkie he'll give to
someone midway through the line and say, hey, hey, buddy,
this is what's waiting down there. Pass it down, and

(35:53):
that game of telephone happens again. Yeah, mouth to mouth
food transfer it, which is nice, but I guess it's
better than mouth ainus food transfer, like you were talking
about earlier. Depends what you're into. I saw another explanation
for why aunts do that, because if you look closely,
pretty much every ant does that to every ant that
they come across, going in the opposite direction. And I

(36:14):
find one theory right now. One theory is that they're
examining the ant to make sure it's one of their
nest mates and not an intruder from another joining in
the fun, which makes a lot of sense as well.
Every time I see ants doing that, I just go
in my head, good game, good game, good game game.
Yeah right, that's one of my favorite parts of Days

(36:36):
and Confused is just like the nostalgia. They're like any
kid who's ever played Little knows that completely forced an
enthusiastic good game line that you gotta walk down good stuff.
What else do we have here? Oh boy, chok? We
should we should um branch off into another standalone podcast

(36:57):
called aunt rant. Uh all right, let's talk a little
bit more about nesting, and I think that's kind of
all we've got. Um if you look and how they
build their nest, you know, a lot of researchers have
been looking at this. Uh. Speaking of which, this made
me want to buy an aunt farm for my daughter
for Christmas. But when I looked into him, I read

(37:18):
reviews where it seems like about a third of the
review said the ants just sat around and waited to
die in front of my daughter or my son, and
it was traumatic. I don't really agree with keeping anything enclosed,
I know, I just the whole thing felt wrong, and
so I didn't get it. Good for you, Jack, I mean,
it was a little selfish and that I didn't want

(37:39):
a bad experience to happen. But then I thought, you know,
you're also getting ants shipped through the mail. I know
there shipped at a certain temperatures so they stay alive.
And you know, also saw success stories were like, oh man,
they did great and they lived their whole lifespan. But
it just wasn't worth it at the risk. So anyone
should do is order some of his answer the mail

(38:00):
and just release them into your or just release them
onto my daughter while she's asleep and immobile and see
what happens. But researchers obviously have been studying ant nests
and colonies for a long long time, and uh, you
know all those tunnels that look like little sponges, mentioned

(38:21):
the one on YouTube where they actually filled it with concrete,
which is pretty amazing. But they decided to take this
stuff and put it into like a computer model to
see what what happened when it came out the other side.
And one of the things they learned was they have
these very basic rules that kind of governed everything they did,
one of which was each ant would pick up at

(38:42):
a very very steady rate two grains of dirt or
sand per minute and carry it. Which that seems like
a clue right there. If they're following some sort of
time scale, especially if it corresponds to our understanding of time,
that seems significant. You know, Yeah, I mean, I guess
they would do that because that's the most efficient rate
of work, like the most efficient speed of work I guess,

(39:06):
like without getting overly tired or not getting enough done,
you know what I mean. I think that's another example
though that we like we watch ants do things and
we don't understand exactly why, we just know it works
really well. Yeah, uh, what else did they see? Um?
They also saw that, um, there was a preference for
dropping that grain that they were tunneling out excavating by

(39:28):
another more another recently dropped piece of grain, which I
think is an example of that stigma g where they
there was like some yeah, they just saw like they're
just their behaviors triggered by by somebody else's behavior. Right,
And then the last thing they saw they saw these
three basic rules, was they would drop them closer to

(39:50):
the grains that were already dropped by another ant. And
they think that it's like a pheromone marker, Like hey,
I dropped this grain here, like this is where we're
building this thing, right, And so they created this. They
they followed these ants movements like they really studied and
tracked real ants, and then they created a computer model
that simulated ants just following these three rules. And apparently

(40:15):
the model created something that looked a heck of a
lot like an ant nest that you would see in
in nature, so much so that there were connections that
were developed between chambers. And these researchers were like, we
didn't tell it to create connections that just happened on
its own. It's a great example of that emergent behavior

(40:35):
um that that comes from the collective actions of a
bunch of individuals is doing their own thing. Yeah. I mean,
and they have these you know, if you look at
this concrete when they excavated it was they have these
big chambers. They have these tubes and then these big
rooms basically, and each of these rooms as a function. Uh,
they're not just like let's just make a little space here.

(40:56):
You know. They take care of their dad a lot
of times, and uh, you know, I don't think they
quite bury them, but they tend to they're dead. Uh,
it's it's remarkable. Yeah, they have aunt cemeteries that they
dump bodies on. It's pretty cool, very cool. So there
was one last thing I saw. Um there's a type
of ant that basically engages in nursing where if you

(41:19):
these ants raid termite mounds and the termites sometimes will
take a leg or two, and if you're just missing
a leg or two, you will be carried back by
basically paramedic ants to the nest and then nursed back
to health with an antibiotic that the ants produced themselves. Wow,
aunt Rant, chuck, aunt Rant, You got anything else? I

(41:43):
got nothing else? We think Joey, Joey from Tucson. Thanks Joey.
Great idea, great idea for ants. We had no idea
it was going to be a two parter in this
remarkable remarkable indeed. And if you want to be like
Joey and get in touch with us to let us
know topic you'd like to suggest, who knows, it might
even become an incredible two parter. You can reach out

(42:06):
to us via email at stuff podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you
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