Ants ... to the Future

I was not present for. I think, I think, actually were you present for any of them? But they're not an insect, that's true, they're creepy crawley. Yeah, for a while, every time you were out of the office, Jonathan, Lauren and I would record a podcast about some insect. And to be fair, you chose this topic when it looked like I wasn't going to be in the office. Yes, uh, And then for Chin smiled upon me, and it turns out I am here to talk about ants. Yes, the

future of ants? Why, I mean, come on, guys, can we talk about like, I don't know the future of of of slow slow lorries or or the future the future of Koalas or I'll do that episode. Well, I guess we gotta get through this one. For next time, we'll do a sloth tech. I'm a big fan of sloths. I love slots. They are adorable, they're pretty creepy. My favorite sloth is Extinct, the one that's like big bear. Yeah. Yeah, terror comes for you slowly and just set creeping up. No,

we're gonna talk about ants. Ants are actually fascinating and they may inspire some really interesting technologies of the future. So first, let's just talk about ants in general. So did you guys know that there are more than ten thousand ant species already identified by us the human beings, as in, there might be plenty more out there. Sure, there could be species that we have had limited or

no contact with that we have yet to identify. In fact, there's one ant we're gonna be talking about later in this podcast that for a long time had been misidentified and as a result, um the handling of that ant never really went into action. But I'm getting ahead of myself anyway. Yeah, there are a lot of different types of ants out there, and in fact, they can be found just about everywhere on Earth. There are a few

exceptions where there are no native species of ants. Antarctica, for example, you don't get any snow ants up there, or ice ants ants in Antarctica, And I know it's it's anti Antarctica. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, Antarctica, ironically is the is one of the places where you're not gonna really old places, so near the North Pole you probably don't. Yeah, Greenland, Iceland, they don't have native species of ants. Uh. Parts of Polynesia do not have any

native species of ants. And there are a few remote islands in say the Indian Ocean or that don't have them either. But otherwise you can pretty much find them everywhere. They're really prevalent in tropical regions and can make up more than half of all the insects within a tropical forest. For example, where where to ants fit in the sort of the family tree of insects, They belong to the same order as wasps and bees, so uh, they're very similar.

If you, by the way, are ever wondering if perhaps a little insect you have encountered is either an ant or a termite, look to see if they have a very thin waste. Essentially is what you're you're looking between the thorax and the abdomen. If they don't, it's a termite. If they do, it's nand simple rule of thumb there. Uh. Most pecs of ant live in permanent colonies that they

establish in some location. It might be tunnels under the ground, it might be a mound that's on top of the ground, could be in trees or would carpenter ants are famous for being really destructive around houses. Most ants do live in these colonies, these permanent colonies, but there are some exceptions. Army ants, for example, do not have a permanent nest. They migrate, so their colony actually will move from place to place, and you will get these massive army ant

migrations which are the stuff of nightmares. Uh. Then you also have the fact that ant colonies are centered around a queen ant. So this sounds very familiar to anyone who's studied bees, I mean queen bee ideas very similar. Um, the queen ant lays eggs. Those eggs will develop into either female ants, which are the worker ants. They do all the hard work, including building the colonies, gathering food, all that kind of stuff, taking care of the lar Yeah.

Then you know the male ants whose job it is. Yeah, their their job is to knock up the queen. That's all they do. That's it. And most, not most, but in several ant species, lots of them. Uh. The males will die after meeting with the queen. And that's pretty much the you know, fairly standard, that's pretty much it. Yeah, it's not not being terribly Uh, you're not really exaggerating there, Joe. So normally, you know, ants communicate chemically with each other

through pheromones. Yeah, and a little bit by touch, I believe. Yeah. Yeah, mainly it's through chemicals. Like most ant species, if they are traveling someplace, they laid down a pheromone trail, So this tells other ants that this is the pathway that was taken to get to some location, usually like food. This is actually interesting. You can disrupt the pheromone trail with your finger. If you ever see ants moving along the line, uh, and you just drag your finger across

the line of ants. Watch what happens. It totally breaks their their concentration. The ones in in behind that are about to move across where you've just dragged your finger, they start acting confused. Where do I go? Yeah, yeah, there's a several visual gags in a bug's life that kind of play on that, except of course it's not a pheromone trail. They do it where it's just like a a sudden obstacle moves in the way and that disrupts everything, which is a little simplification, but hey, it's

a Pixar movie and it's adorable. Uh. Then there are specific the specific type of ant that we wanted to refer to that are just kind of interesting that relate to technology but not in a good way. No. Well, so you've heard about the fire ant invasion of the United States again, which are scary and painful and terrible. Yeah, we got a new one now. Yeah, crazy ants, specifically tawny crazy ants or raspberry crazy ants. Raspberry named after the the UH fruit. No, not the fruit A lot

of people think that. No, it's actually named after the UH exterminator who discovered these ants living in Texas. So in two thousand and two, there was this this guy who UH encountered these particular types of ants that people were really kind of um getting perturbed over because one the ants, the reason why they're called crazy ants is when they are running around like on your kitchen floor or something. They seem to be going every which way.

There's no apparent rhyme or reason to it. It's not that ants go marching one by one kind of thing. It's like they're just going all over the place. And yeah, and their pathway is not like a straight line to wherever they're going. They're going left, right everywhere. Also, they seemed to be infesting electronics. Yeah. Really, the there was a theory for a while that perhaps the ants were attracted to either electric fields or magnetic fields. Science does

not seem to bear that out. Experiments have not beared that out. What they what the current hypothesis is is that they just love to find places to nest and they will go anywhere that's kind of an enclosure to nest in them. And if an ant, one of these crazy ants, encounters something that harms it, like say electricity, it gives off a pheromone that's an alarm pheromone, which is essentially a signal to say, hey, I need some help over here, and then other crazy ants will zoom

in and go straight to try and help them. Now, in the case of electronics, those ants may in turn get hurt and then they give off these pheromones and then more and more ants come. So what you end up with is a device that shorts out because the ants short circuiting. Yeah. Yeah, that the ant bodies are

literally disrupting the circuit and frying themselves. Yeah. And so you'll have stories about their stories about things like there was a story about a guy who is using an iron, the iron shorts out, uh sparks fly out and then ants just pour out of the iron. Or someone is watching television and the television ends up flickering and then going out, and so they go and look at and they remove the backpedal of the television and it's just

ants everywhere. And we're talking thousands upon thousands of these ants. Now, when I told you earlier about the misidentification of ants, this is the species I was talking about when scientists were first looking at these ants. See See Raspberry was trying to tell people, we need to figure out a strategy to handle this now because this is a thing.

This is a thing that's happening, and it's going to get worse before he gets better, because if we don't address it, we're going to have a full on infestation of like a plague level event here. And meanwhile you had the government saying, well, you don't know anything about these ants, so we can't We're not gonna give you any money. And the science they're saying, well, without any money, we can't learn anything about these ants, and it begin

this catch Twain too. Meanwhile, the scientists also misidentified, or at least one entomologist um misidentified the ant as being the same species as one that had become entrenched in Florida in the nineteen fifties. But Raspberry said, hey, I don't think so, because those ants in Florida we have never heard of any problems like the ones we're experiencing in Texas. And ultimately he ended up doing a lot of research on his own, which there's a great article

about his research where its about crazy ants. It reveals it reveals that he hates reading, he didn't go to college. Um, he's not big on research, but he was obsessed with

this idea and so he really looked into it. And then eventually they were able to identify the ant as actually belonging to a species native to Brazil and Argentina, not to Florida, and they suspect that bringing in soil or perhaps building materials were what introduced the ants to Texas and the cell eastern United States the Gulf States essentially, so these things do end up clogging up a lot

of electronics. There were there were lots of reports. I remember when this first started happening, when people started talking about it, where everyone said, oh, they actually crave electricity, But that's not what happening. Although they're they're interesting in other ways as well. They're basically the xenomorphs of the ant world. Yeah. So fire ants are also an invasive species in the United States, specifically in the areas that crazy ants tend to be found in, like Texas. Yeah,

and here in Georgia as well. Crazy ants are also in Georgia. Guys, I don't know if you knew that fire ants have a pretty nasty sting. They clamp onto you with their jaws and then stab repeatedly with their stinger, and it has a tough venom. Yeah. I react poorly to fire ants stings. Um I get. I get nasty little bumps everywhere where there was a sting, and I used to encounter them quite a bit when I was mowing my lawn. I now have someone else doing that

for me. But at any rate, you know, normally, fire ants, as big of a nuisance as they are, don't cause the kind of problems that crazy ants do. They don't. They aren't as invasive into the human home as crazy ants are. However, crazy ants have a couple of abilities that really make them formidable opponents of the fire ant. One is that they can coat themselves with chemicals that counteract fire ant venom, which means they can fight longer

against the fire end. They also, instead of a stinger, have a little appendage that allows them to spray acid against other ants. Yeah, so xeno morph was pretty accurate.

They are able to spew acid on their opponents. And I read a report where that said something along the lines of in UH encounters between fire ants and crazy ants, crazy ants when something like nine of the time, and that even in an experiment where scientists covered up the the the glands essentially that the ants were using to cover themselves in the anti venom UH, they won fifty three percent of the time. So wow, even when your chief defense has been removed, you're still winning more. Who's

been arranging these scientific bug fights? There's there's an ant thunderdome in Texas, UM, where they do these experiments. And yeah, so the crazy ants are the master and the blaster in this thunderdome world. So very interesting creatures. Um. Obviously when we want we wanted to talk about specifically because of their relationship with electronics and the misunderstanding that they

crave electricity. Also they're they're just really cool. But but right, so so let us transition here by saying that ants do more than just really mess up electronics. As it turns out, they might inspire new electronics in the future. Yeah, specifically things like computer algorithms and artificial intelligence algorithms. Uh. So we wanted to talk about navigation specifically this idea.

You know, ants exhibit some interesting behaviors, including with certain species, the ability to range out really far, like two meters away from their nest, which when you're only like three point five millimeters long, is not that that's a quite a great distance. Uh. What's really interesting is not only are they able to do that, but they can visit

various locations while foraging for food. When they find a place that has food and they're ready to return to the nest, they don't retrace their steps right, they don't. Let's say they go to three different points and it's not in a straight line. So they venture out from the nest. They go to point one, then they maybe take a left turn and go forward for a while, and they visit point too, and they make another left turn,

and they visit point three. Well, once they found point three and they said this is the place we want to go, I need to go back to the nest. They don't retrace their steps back two points two and one and then go back home. They plot a course that essentially goes in a straight line back to the nest, as much of a straight line as they possibly can manage, which raises the question, how do they do that thing?

That's odd? So when it comes down to navigation, scientists have pretty much identified there being some combination of elements going into effect here. One is path integration, one is visual piloting or you know, seeing landmarks, and one is called systematic search. And so here's how this breaks down. First, you've got path integration. Now, this is that idea that was just talking about the ability to visit multiple locations

and then find your way back home. So, as an example I gave for the humans, because I think this is helpful. If you're having trouble visualizing this, Imagine that you have errands to run and you have to go to multiple places to run these errands. And so you leave your house. You have to go to the store to pick up some non perishable stuff that you've just gotta thrown into the car. So you go and you store and you pick that up. Then you gotta go and you gotta pick up some dry cleaning that you

had over at a totally different locations. So you drive from the store to the dry cleaning pace. Then you decide, oh, wait that I've also got my copy of the two thousand six version of wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage uh, and I need to return that to Video Drome, which is in a totally different location from the dry cleaners. Video Drome is a video store here in Atlanta. It's

a pretty fabulous one. It's pretty amazing. So anyway, you go to video, You got to Video Drome and you return the wicker Man um and they say thank you. But at that point you're ready to go home. Now you would not if you you know your way around, you would not drive from Video Drome back to the dry cleaners, and from the dry cleaners back to the store, and from the store to your home. You would go from video drume to your home. Same sort of thing with animals, but they don't have the kind of of

pro sessing power that we have. Aunt brains are like a milligram. I mean, we're talking super small. So how can a creature this tiny, this with with this limited number of neurological resources, be able to do something so seemingly complex as plot a straight line path from a distant destination rather than retracing steps to get back to the starting point. And Uh, there's some disagreement or at least some debate on what's going on. A lot of it is just based upon the fact that we don't

definitively know um. But there's a specific type of desert ant that really displays this behavior that's been under a lot of scrutiny for years. In fact, if you look up path integration and ants, you're going to see multiple scientific papers written on the subject. So one of the hypotheses about this is that it's all based on an egocentric methodology rather than g e centric. Okay, so the ant is sort of relating itself to its previous self

rather than itself to its surroundings. Yeah. Yeah, Essentially, it's it's remembers its own position rather than having to look and see where it is. Right, it's not making like a mental map of its surroundings. It's thinking of where it is in relation to its nest. But it's not it's not mapping things out, thinking, oh, to the east of me is a puddle and to the west of you know, it's not like that. It's very very u

egocentrics centered upon the ant itself. It would be almost like if you ran your errands by remembering how exactly how far you drove and at what degree angles you turned at each leg of the trip. That's part of it. Actually, there's so ants have an odometer. It is not a little dial tells it how far it went. Essentially, this is information that relates to the distance and grade that the ant has traveled. So whether it's a down slope, up slope, whether it was to the left the right,

that kind of thing, how far it went. Generally speaking, bees contract the same kind of information, and we talked about that at length during our b episode. Right, So this is all part of path integration, Right, you're being able to integrate that information, but you integrate it with something else, and in this case it's with polarized light, which bees do as well. Yeah, so the ants are

able to sense polarized light. They use it as a compass essentially, which is really nifty because the light of the sun is polarized in such a way that that if you can detect that polarization, you can navigate by the sun even when it's cloudy. Right, Yeah, you just through the polarization of the light itself. So essentially you're saying, oh, the light is polarized in this way when I'm going in this direction, so when I'm coming from this other direction,

it should look this other way. So that's part of it. Then you've got the landmark navigation, which is just what it sounds like that the ants identify specific geographic landmarks and are able to relate that as a point along their travels. It seems to be the major way that I think humans navigate. Yeah, that's well, there's that in Google maps. But yes, um so this in a I would relate back to image processing being able to not just uh detect an image, but to be able to

recognize it, particularly being able to recognize it from different angles. So, uh, we talked about this a lot. Image processing is huge. You know. It's not just that you're able to show it a picture of let's say a coffee cup, and then you show it a picture of that same coffee cup in the same position and it says that's the same thing. Well, what if you take the picture from the opposite side, so that the handle is on the opposite side of the coffee cup. Can it's still uh,

Can it's still identify that? What if you're closer so the coffee cup is larger. These are all things that have to be taken into account with artificial intelligence and being able to build a system that's able to recognize an object and understand or iritation distance, that kind of thing. Then there's just systematic search. This is just that idea of being able to go through an area and uh and figure out where you are in relation to some other point that you know, which is obviously useful for

artificial intelligence in lots of ways. Obviously, Yes, Uh, It's it's also useful when searching for something to forage. So if ant is looking for food sources, this would be an appropriate method. But also sometimes ants will lose their way when they're trying to come back, like they'll uh. Some experiments have shown that ants can tend to underestimate how far they have traveled, and so that can cause

some issues when they are coming back. They don't always have like a comp I hate to use bline of the term. They don't always they don't always have a completely accurate return home. And sometimes they get to the general area of where their nest is and they have to do a systematic search in order to nail down Oh, this is specifically the way I need to go. So yeah, pretty cool stuff. Now, if you were to incorporate these sort of strategies in AI, you could easily see the

benefits specifically for something like a robot. Right, you would have this ability to have robots have a centralized headquarter type location. They could travel outward from that explore, go to multiple other locations, and then return back to headquarters without retracing their steps and wasting energy. Yeah, you can already see some of these types of search strategies that we see in animals showing up in robots that are very simple like maybe the room BA Sure if you

just think about the way a room BA navigates the room. Okay, so it tries to vacuum all the different parts of the floor in the room. How does it do that? Well, it has to have a system. Uh, of course, that's a very simple application, right. Think about a robot that needs to navigate an area in a much more complex way, like it needs to reach different nodes in a different order, or do it with a different time frame or something

like that. In the ease cases, studying the way ants and other swarming insects move can be really important in coming up with the most efficient ways to tell a robot how to navigate its surroundings, especially with limited computational power like these insects have. Sure. Sure, the limited computational power is important because that means that you need less energy to operate the robot, and they can be smaller, right, so these you know, less energy is good, especially if

you're talking about sending robots to really distant places like Mars. Yeah. So in this case, we're looking more at ant colonies than than individual ants. Yeah right, Well sorry, yeah, I may have made the jump there. We were just talking about an individual ant. But what about the swarm as a whole. Sure, if you take this same sort of approach, where you have the individual robot going out and doing this kind of work, you can already see how that

would be beneficial in applications like establishing a colony. You know, Mars one talks about having robots sent up to establish all the hard work that would be required for the colonists to be able to just sort of land on Mars and then move in. This is the kind of stuff that would be necessary for the robot to be able to to go around an entire area autonomously, because controlling a robot live is impossible. I mean, you're talking about at least ten or twelve minute delay at the

best of times between Mars and Earth. So you would want something that's at least semi autonomous. But then if you add in the idea of an entire group of robots, a swarm of robots, all using the sort of behavior and all interconnected, you really see how a colony works, and you see how it could be really beneficial for AI. Of course, studying how ant colonies work might be good for more than just actual movement. Sure, yeah, so specifically, when you look at how ant colonies operate, and you

see how ants go out and forage for food. Ants may go out, individual ants may go out in various directions. You've got lots of different potential sources of food and

potential paths to get there exactly. And so then you have ants returning to the nest and they may be laying down a pheromone trail to say, this is the pathway we need to take because food is back behind me, and other ants when they encounter the pheromone trail no to follow that trail, and then they will eventually get to whatever the The first the exploratory aunt has found well with the way these pheromone trails work, the longer ones, they they evaporate over time, so the longer ones will

evaporate faster than the shorter ones. Like if it's long enough, it might evaporate before another aunt is able to go the entire length of it. And like you were saying, Joe, when you get to the end of that pheromone trail and there's nothing left, the ant doesn't know where else to go, so essentially turns around and goes back. Shorter pheromone trails are more likely to be followed by ants, they tend to be established and made more permanent, and

so the ants really focus on the short path. Now, short path for ants means less time and energy spent trying to get food from a distant location back to the nest. Now take all that that's very useful for ants in the physical real world and turn that into an abstraction. Just think about the abstract version of trying to find something. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a thing in a place. It could be a solution to

a problem. Sure, you could have a problem that could have multiple potential solutions, like a mathematical problem for example, and using an algorithm that is in effect aping the behavior of an ant colony, you could end up having a similar behavior where the algorithm directs the focus of

the computer. It's I'm using very vague terms here to to kind of explain the point on whichever solution is revealing itself first, so that way it does not waste time and energy pursuing other potential solutions that are further off, you know, in a figurative sense. So it is a way of increasing efficiency, reducing the amount of energy consumption.

All these are obviously really important, uh, concepts. No matter you're whether you're talking about like the distant Martian exploration I was just mentioning, or you're talking about an application here on Earth. Obviously, limiting the amount of energy that you have to expend to get to an outcome is a positive thing. So yeah, it's really kind of a cool idea of adapting this behavior we find in nature to a more abstract application within the computer world. Share. Okay,

but I want to talk about fire ants again. All right. See Lauren has a jar here and Jonathan she wants you to close your eyes. I'm already look we you know, you guys got me with the blood episode when you made me do that, so I'm not doing it again. For ants. Forget it. We're just kidding. We would never cover Jonathan and ants, especially not fire ants. No, thank you. I appreciate maybe crazy ants, because that would be Cray would be a little crazy. All right, Well what about

fire ants? Did you want to know? I mean, they they're nasty, they bite, they staying, They're amazing at biting and stinging, the very effective editiring the future of biting. Alright, but no, they also do a lot of other really interesting things. Their swarming behavior might teach us all kinds of lessons that could be potentially applied to technology. One of the things we want to talk about here is some research about fire ant tunneling, yeahavior, and how that

might apply to technology. So, uh, fire ants when they make their tunnels, they make these underground tunnels, they do so in such a way where they are not going to to fall down the tunnel. That would obviously be a bad, uh, a bad way for them to evolve. So they're really effective at making tunnels that allow them to travel at full speed underground with very little chance

of them falling. And it's interesting because their tunnels are actually built to a size that's essentially the width of the tunnel is about the same as the length of the ant It's also really interesting it does not matter what kind of soil they're going through, whether it's really finely powdered soil or large grains of soil, it's still

that same ratio, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. And they texture their tunnels to provide natural footholds, so so in case of emergency, they can use their entire bodies basically antenna included, to stop themselves from falling yeah. The antenna revelation was one that really surprised the researchers because it was an adaptive use of antenna that they had

not expected. They just figured that the antenna was going to be used to help sense the environment and communicate, but not to actually help in the case of an ant losing it's it's footing. They shook these ants like crazy. By the way, it reminded me of yeah, yeah, sorry, we should say the research is being done out of the fire ant lab, so to speak, at Georgia Tech. They've got a lot of interesting fire ant research going on.

They have robots and fire ants. I am terrified. Also, I went to I went to the rival school to Georgia Tech, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before robot fire ants chase me down. It's pretty likely. I think they forgive and forget, unlike you. So, so this research was published in It was called Climbing, falling

and jamming during ant look emotion in confined environments. And the reason that it's being done at Georgia Tech is that they're really hoping that it will transfer into research about how to how to get robots to tunnel around and maybe do search and rescue. Yeah, that would be a big one. Like imagine, imagine a disaster, like a

mining disaster. We've seen lots of building, Yeah, anything anything where people could potentially be trapped underground, and you need to have the ability to quickly respond in a safe way that's not going to compromise the area and also will allow your responding team to be able to concentrate on the areas they need to as quickly as possible. Sure, I could also see just for exploration in general, for having this kind of robot would would be very useful.

But in fourteen they published another paper out of the same labs I believe, called fire ants actively control spacing and orientation within self assemblages. Okay, so I love this. Fire Ants it turns out can make things like rafts and bridges out of what miss out of themselves as incredible swarms of fire ants actually exhibit many of the properties we imagine in future self assembling and self healing

robots and materials. Uh. You have a really great quote in here from from one David who who is one of the researchers he's working on this. Yeah, he's a Georgia Tech researcher. He There are several great quotes I've lifted from videos of him talking about his aunt research. One of the things he says about fire ances you

can consider them as both a fluid and a solid. Yeah, okay, so so like if you take this big old ball of fire ants like they do, if you compress it, it can bounce back to its original shape like an elastic solid. But if you say, toss a stick through the middle of this ball of ants, they'll flow around it like a liquid. It's fascinating. They have to be stopped, No, they don't know. They must be encouraged. Have you ever stepped a pile of fire ants? I think this is amazing.

Another thing that David who said in a video about his fire ant research was that answer opaque, you can't see through them. That's accurate that he said. No, okay, that makes it sound like he's crazy. No. The reason he said that was he was explaining why you might need to use something like computerized tomography scanning to understand what's happening when these ants linked together and form these sort of fluid or solid structures out of many of

their bodies. Why would you why would you even do that. Why would you analyze ants with CT scanning. Oh well, because we were hoping to figure out how exactly they form these structures that are so interesting that can react like a like a fluid or a solid. Yea. So imagine you've got a kiddie pool getting there, and on top of the water are ants, but not individual ants and not sinking. Instead, you have a grafted together, floating

buoy of ants. This raft of ants is sort of an arc of ants made by ants for ants out of ants. You just never want me to stop screaming. Nope, okay, uh no, this is amazing. And so what these researchers at Georgie Tech we're looking into was how these ants linked together. And what who said was that we might have expected the ants to fall together sort of and parallel. The thing he compares that to his like grains of rice. But what did they do know? They did not link

together in parallel. Yeah, they linked together perpendicularly in these these T junctions, which is a lot stronger of a configuration. Um and and it's a lot of junctions in in this one experiment, he flash froze and ant raft okay, and scanned it with with this microscale computerized tomography or CT scanner and observed that on average, each ant was connected to four point eight of its neighbors, using an average of fourteen connection points and up to twenty one

connection points in the case of bigger ants. This was including their the claws on the edges of their legs and also their mandibles. And he observed that of the four hundred and forty ants that were scanned in within this raft, of them had all of their legs connected to their neighbors, so they were doing this really efficiently, and and most of them, furthermore, had their legs outstretched in order to increase the distance between each other ant

and thus improve the rafts buoyancy. Furthermore, smaller ants tended to surround each larger ant to help kind of fill in the gaps so that there wouldn't be too many holes where water could get in. Uh So, in other words, they're really good at doing this. They're like creepy, awesome

good at making this go. And furthermore, when they're you know, like alive and not frozen, they're continually reacting to changes in their environment and the reactions of their neighbors to the environment that's moving around in the mass and forming and reforming their little anti connections. Why would they Why did we allow this to happen? Why what possible purpose?

Does it? Actually does provide a survival advantage? Yeah, yeah, and in most of their native environments there's pretty frequent flooding, and so you know, also individual at my drown yeah yeah. And and furthermore, you know, when they're on the move, they they're or don't need to find ways around obstacles, and they can survive heavy rainfalls and get to safe ground over a period of months if they have to, by forming these little ant rafts. Yeah, months on the

ant months on the ant raft Yeah. Made out of ants, by ants for ants. Yeah. Um. So so it's pretty cool, um and not only really gross, but could lead to maybe like self healing structures. Sure, yeah, they've talked about that sort of like that if you imagine the tiny robotics of the future, robotics that are so tiny there they become sort of the constituents of a changeable piece

of matter. Yeah, a material that is self healing in order to create infrastructure, which we've talked about before, or even regular structures, you know, like like a self healing car would be pretty cool. Yeah, for example, um or you know, just for creating modular robots that are able to to join up Vultron style without how to to be you know, perfectly formed together, you know, less like Tetris blocks and more like that. And then I can

easily see that being really important. Uh, you know, going back to the Mars example, it's a it's an easy one to make because that's an environment that we ourselves are incapable of exploring right now for various reasons. And if we were able to send a hive, like a colony essentially of robots that had this sort of capability and they were essentially traveling in a swarm, they would be able to encounter multiple types of environments and be able to adapt to whatever the needs were at the

time to be able to overcome them. So they came up to like a small ledge, they might be able to build a ladder out of themselves, and then enough of them climb the ladder and then pull the rest back up behind them, and then you've continue on. So these ants actually do things like that. I mean they not only build rafts out of themselves, they build bridges out of themselves, so you can easily see that as

being an important thing for robotics as well. Oh yeah, yeah, or you know, if they fall off of a ledge, being able to recover from that kind of damage. I still do not approve of this in ants, but I do approve of it in robots. So I'm just making a stand. What if they're biting stinging robots, Well, would you create that show? I wouldn't create it. I'm loking at this, this ball villain across the table. I'm the one doesn't want to get eaten by ants. There's nothing villainous.

I'm saying, you'd create the ants to use against other people. I totally do that, that's true. I mean I could also see myself with a magnifying glass and these ants are saying, no, Mr Aunt, I expect you to die. But I would never do that. You know. I almost made a pun when I was describing this episode about how we're going to take a magnifying glass to the

subject of ant futures. But that's just too cruel. I I honestly, as much as I've been grousing about ants, I do find this kind of behavior to be absolutely fascinating. It is a little unnerving to watch videos of it. It's a little it just looks weird. I didn't watch any of these videos on purpose because I was terrifically creeped out by the concept. It's it's a little creepy when they're they're pretty amazing to watch these ants building physical structures out of their own bodies so that the

colony can continue on whatever course. It's on my favorite. I don't think that you guys could probably hear it, but I was just shaking my head really vigorously. We're done. We're going to watch the video where they've got the ant raft. They got the fire raft floating in the water, and you just see a researcher poking it with four steps, just dipping it under the water. They dip the raft and it just bobs right back up to the top.

It has some hydrophobic qualities to the raft, which is that it's actually repelling water off the surface of it, which is pretty phenomenal. So, yeah, this there's not only is it a fascinating behavior from a biological standpoint, but like we said, it does in fact a service inspiration, as so many elements of nature have served before for people who are working in the field of robotics and

other fields as well in the world of technology. So in the future we may very well have much more technology that's based upon this this ant behavior and be able to take advantage of it in ways we can't even anticipate. Right now, this podcast has basically turned into about a quarter of it is the bio mimicry Show. Yeah, biomree is great. Animals are fascinating, and robots are pretty cool.

So so my plan is next time, when I'm not feeling well and you guys have planned yet another episode about some form of creepy crawley, I will continue to stay out until you have recorded it. Um No, I I really as much as I'm putting on an act here, I really do think it's pretty pretty awesome. I still don't like fire ants, but that's for because I get stung by them and I don't like that. But um yeah,

neat stuff. If you guys out there have any suggestions for topics that we can tackles or anything, or about anything else, yes, if you have anything mostly about insects, you have any cute cuddly animals that you want us to talk about, let us know, or insects, or anything else about the future you are curious about. Let us know. You can send us I'm fine with snakes. You can send us a message with going to Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus or handle at all. Three is FW thinking.

We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear from us again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places