Myrmecology (ANTS) Encore with Dr. Terry McGlynn

Oh hey, okay, quick, heads up, this is an encore episode because I went to visit my parents this weekend. I had a lovely time, and I just straight up needed to put up an encore because I'm still working hilariously on the ADHD episode. And you know what, we've done two hundred and fifty episodes in maybe like five or six encorees, so there's plenty to choose from. And ants, Oh, let's do it. I love this one. I love this ologist, and everyone has ants, but now you'll know the ants

Good?

Okay? So I'm writing this before looking up the etymology. I'm just gonna say I wrote this before I looked it up. I took a wild guest that it was Greek for ant. Hold on, I google it, damn it. I'm right. But it wasn't coined until nineteen o six, when naturalist William Morton Wheeler was like, dang it out, love ants. I need a title that sounds like a wizard. So he took mrima and put mycologists there. You go,

Yes, did I say it right? Mycologistsmacology? I think, well, like all these words, there's no proper way of saying it, it's just the ones that are socially acceptable among people who do.

So.

You can't say a word wrong, You just say a word different than other people say.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, how long have you been a murrmacologist?

I started working on ants in nineteen ninety four when I started grad school. So a minute, Yeah, so that's a couple decades.

Right level decades of ants, not literally under your belt, in your pants, but just in your life. Well was it about antser?

So I realized, Okay, this is the one question that I knew you're going to ask, was why did you work on answer? When I was in college, I started out as a psychology philosophy double major, and then I ended up being like pre med. Although I even interviewed at med school, took the mcat, the whole thing. I have no idea why. But then I had this epiphany when I was flying home for my first med school interview, and I'm like, this is not what I want to do.

Getting his PhD in Colorado, Terry majored in biology for undergrad at Occidental College, Obama's alma mater here in LA And when he was thinking about grad school, he was considering Europe, and he ended up interviewing with a Swiss professor who studied ants. He even flew out to interview,

It seemed really, really, really cool. And so after that I decided, Wow, I want to work on the evolution of social behavior in insects and answer you know, you know, use social insects ants that have this colonial lifestyle.

Now, let's unpack this really quick. Do you think having an interest in social science and philosophy plus a little biology interest like those were married perfectly in a social insect?

Maybe because I think my interest originally, like you know, the angsty teenager that just went to college, we're interested in, well, what makes us human? I was wondering, and I still wonder, like, how is it that we are? Wait? We are that we? You know, they think we feel, we love, we perceive, but we are just mere meat, Like we are just somehow this tissue of our brain is what we are.

That so quick as I At first I thought he was saying mer me, as in like merely myself, But I think he's saying mere meat like that we're meat, which is so much more metal. What a metal way to look at our delicate existence, I approve.

And so I think what fascinates me about ants is it if you just look at it a different level of organization, like what is a what is an organism? What is a super organism? What is an ant colony? How do you have something which is so well organized out of small pieces that are really really dumb.

So many ants right now are sipping oat milk cortados over the economist just being like wow, wow, oh really.

Right, Like ants are really stupid, but colonies often do complex tasks really well. I mean they have small little brains.

Walk me through a little bit of a colony. Because we had an episode on melotology bees and so we've covered some social insects, but what are the similarities between bees and ants? Are they all mostly women? Are they all like driven by pheromones or behavior or vision, like what's going on down there?

Yeah, So all kinds of bees are complex, just like all kinds of ants are complex. So the way that honey bees organize the division of labor and so that thing where you do one task, then you get promoted to another task and you get promoted to another task. That's called the temporal polyethism.

So that means at different times you do different things, like your chores as a kid may have gone from feeding the cat to doing the laundry to driving your siblings to school. Now, if your kids don't think you're enough of a douche, tell them that it's imperative that they engage in temporal polytheism to acquire their weekly stipend. That way they can talk about you to a therapist later in life.

However, some ants might be more inclined to perform some tasks rather than others. Some ants are more generalists, some are highly specialized.

WHOA, So there's like engineer ants and like architect ants, and ones are like you know what, guys, I'm like pretty good at finding seeds, So I'm just gonna do.

That sort of But if you were to remove some ants from the colony or add some from ants in the colony, they might change their tasks. So some ants have broad variety and body sizes. So, for instance, leaf cutter ants, you have these huge, huge ones with these big heads. They're used for chopping stems and defending the colony, for like when vertebrates attack, and you have these tiny, tiny little ants that might tend the fungal garden and

It's a little different. Yeah, Now what is your work like day to day? Do you? Here's what I picture, tell me if I'm wrong. I picture that you work in a lab and it's full of aquariums that are just big riding balls of ants, and you also have a clipboard and maybe a lab coat, and then sometimes you're in the fields with a magnifying glass. Is any of that correct? No? Okay, just checking.

So I think my average workday is probably not that different from yours, which is like I'm sitting in front of a laptop, okay, or I'm standing at my desk or whatever, and so in the lab, I have a bunch of ants, a ton of ants, but they're all dead.

Oh my god. Okay, what are they organized into like a little tiny pins or are they just in like shoe boxes?

So I have them in vials, and these vials would be packaged in racks, and these racks are on shelves, okay, and so so like if you know, visiting a museum, then there's all these ants that are you know, mounting collections in pins, and so we when we mount ants in museum collections, you glue them onto the tip of a little point and put the pin through that so you can look at them, because if you put the pin through the ant, then it messes them up.

So you yeah, that'd be like, that'd be like, oh, we just put a missile through alley, Like, yeah, it's not you can't do that to an any Yeah.

Well, even the really really big, chunky ants that you could kind of do that too, by convention, we don't, Okay, I keep most of mine just sitting in alcohol from the way I collected them, and most of the ants that I've collected our whole colonies. Oh but these whole colonies are really really tiny ones they like the they would easily fit inside a thimble, like they would occupy like a two milli liter tube with tons of space available there.

I mean a whole colony is like two hundred bros or ladies.

Uh yeah, Like, well it depends. I mean, so some colonies will just have like ten or twenty or thirty ants, and some might have hundreds. But even for these tiny little ones that I work with on the leaf litter of the rainforest floor, the ants themselves are so tiny that a colony of a couple hundred ants will still fit into a tiny little tube.

That's crazy because these.

Are unspeakably tiny.

How did you get involved with the tiniest ants? Were you like, I have great vision, ergo, I will work with the tiny ants now Uh.

Well, no, as actually, and so now I just started worrying, like the progressive lenses. Hey, So it's like, uh so when I'm out in the field with students, like they're seeing things that I literally cannot see.

Microscopic micro machine, micro machine, the micro machine pocket place that's sold simply from gloog.

The smaller they are, the better they are.

So for his dissertation, Terry worked with Wasmania oropunk tata. I don't know if I'm saying that right. So let's just call them little fire ants because that's their name unless you're from down.

Although in Australia they call it the electric ant. And these ants are like a couple millimeters long and so really really tiny and if they sting you, it feels like a little pink print, and which is amazing something that talk can actually small can hurt you. I know. Oh, most ants are really tiny. A lot of them are just that small.

I'm so little, like smaller than the ones that we see trying to eat like a watermelon rind on the countertop.

Right. Yeah, so here in La the ones that you have, I don't know if you get them in your place, but the argentine ants, people think of the that's the common invasive species found in Mediterranean climates or whatnot, the one that was taking over my kitchen last week.

Oh no, oh my god, what did you do because you're like a godfather to them? Did you commit mass anticide?

Yeah? Well, actually, uh, I've wiped off the ones off the counter.

No, how dare you?

But but then I just blocked the entrance off, so it's not like I need to kill I wasn't trying to kill them all off. I just kept them from getting in. So like I have, like you know, the cock gun ready to go, and I keep finding a new space where they So it's like the evolutionary arms race is them finding new ways to get in me calking that spot.

So now that is one thing you can do if you don't want to just like send in a poisoned cake and be like kill off your whole colony. That's a nice thing to do. So side note. As a college sophomore, I lived in my first house with friends. Everyone was pretty goth and got along, but one of my roommates was very very stony boloney like a lot, which was so endearing. And we had an ant infestation and he told me all about these things called Grant's

Like all right, okay, like if you were so hungry, right and you found like twenty pizzas and you took me to your friends and you were like shit, you guys, pizzas, this rules and everyone's like what was the best And then but the pizzas like poisoned everyone. It's like so tight.

I've never forgotten this tutorial. And I'll be honest, I have used these ant baits every time I've had an infestation, and I felt so bad about it, like I'm the villain in their action movie. But it does work for a while.

Right, Yeah, but it's also really really good. That's only going to be a short term solution anyway, because even if you get the toxic bait that they'll take and bring back, which you know, could be effective, but the thing is that's going to kill them off for a while, but eventually there's going to be some that are just moving back because you can't eliminate ants from the entire neighborhood.

No, yeah, wait a minute, Okay, So these Argentinian ants which are invasive, and they're the tiny, like not tiny, but they're the small, little black ones that invade your kitchen. Yeah, I know that they kind of have outpaced harvester ants, which are the bigger, kind of like a amborie color ones that live in the hills.

Right, Yeah, wh's people call red ants? Yeah, the harvest rants.

Yeah, but there it just kind of spans one big colony under the city for.

The most part, or occupying the whole city.

This blew my mind. If your friend moves ten miles away in LA, you will never see each other again, like burbank to who that is a forever goodbye, just move on. But for ants, they're all essentially roommates. The Argentine ants, the little ones that are invasive species but have like pretty lax dietary tastes, the lead almost anything. They have a California colony that stretches five hundred and sixty miles, which is nothing compared to one colony in

The last I know, there's one big super colony. So if we were to get ants in one part of LA and move them to another part of LA, they'll be a hey, sister, how's it going and accept them just like the members of the same colony.

Wow, that's so weird.

And so if you're to grab ants and put them in a vial and then go one hundred miles two hundred miles, either they'll get along or they don't. And if they don't, that means that you've hit a new super colony. And you can tell where the border between the super colonies is because there's like a line of dead ants on the ground where they just go to war no cool labunnas, Yeah, are you kidding me? And they're just constantly fighting. But there's one large supercolony that has taken over most of LA.

And they're all in the same family. So now even if they're the same species, they'll have a battleground. They'll be like a line of death.

Well yeah, so in general for ants, their biggest enemy is another colony of the same species.

Oh it's like humans, Yeah exactly. Is that like a lot of social animals, like they operate as such one massive super organism that like their biggest predator really is their own species.

Well, I would say their biggest predator, but their biggest competitor, yeah, right, Because the thing is, I mean, so if they're you know, because if the species has a niche and they're nesting in a particular environment, and they're consuming the same kind of food and they need the same environmental requirements, then of course if there's another colony that's just like you, that has the same environmental requirements, then they're your biggest competition.

How many species of ants are there?

I think described we might be up the twelve thousand dish. I think the estimates and people say there's probably about twenty thousand, but maybe about half of them aren't described, Like we haven't put names to them yet.

So if you want to be a meremacologist, just know that eight thousand species of ants are like notice me, please, I'm right here. They're begging you to be an ant scientist, but they probably don't know the part about putting some of their friends in jars. Even though it's to identify and save ant kind, it seems like a difficult task for ant lovers, Like I love you, I kill you. I love you, but I kill you. Do you have a favorite species of ant?

Be honest, it's hard. I mean, I guess one of my favorites are the bulldog ants in Australia. The mamisi. Yeah, what I have to say, Well, so they're really big and they have these bulging eyes, but they're one of the few ants they almost act like a vertebrate like most ants if you mess with their calling, even like the big bullet ants that I work with and whatnot, that they sort of just run around and get upset and like, oh I might sting you. Oh look I'm feerce,

So bulldog ants actually mad dog. Now, Okay, explain to me a little bit about the social behavior, because I think that's one thing that people are just like mesmerized by ants because they have this social behavior. They have these tiny little brains. How do they do it? Is it all through pheromones? Like, is it just innate, what's like, what is even happening here?

Yeah, I mean so clearly. Ants communicate with chemicals a lot. Chemicals are a huge, big part of their communication, I mean visual inputs for the most part. There are some blind ants, ones that live underground usually don't advise or don't use them or whatever. But we're still working out in detail, like which chemicals are used in what circumstances.

Even if they're kicking and screaming, being like what's up, hey, assholes, I'm fully alive, and they're like, sorry, you smell like a corpse, so you're out.

Yeah, that's totally the story. Yeah, Yo, Wilson did, Like that was the comical thing. He would paint a live ant with a chemical that says that they're a dead ant, and then the ants would be dragged living over to the dead pile.

It's so rough.

The concept is is that the way that colonies divide labor essentially that some ants will do some things, other ants will do other things. And it's and we have we're not even close to understanding the details of how

So a lot of small simple computers can make a big complex computer. And yes, of course this is being studied by the military. Imagine a million tiny robot soldiers. Or maybe don't do you get optimistic about solving future problems with maybe some themes or things we've learned from ant behavior? Or are you like, oh shit, we're gonna learn from ants and we're all gonna kill each other.

I'm terrified at the concept that we could use you know, learning, education and technology to do bad things regardless. And so I think there's if we study how social insects work, there's a lot of power and understanding how the world works. And so I think by studying insects then we can tap into lots of new knowledge and then it's up to us to use that wisely.

Can you give me some hot goss? Can you like spill the tea on some of ants crazy behaviors, like what kind of real housewives shit happens in those colonies?

Also?

Are they mostly e ladies?

Yeah? Oh yeah, so yeah, So this we mentioned before. So just like in almost all social insects except for social cockroaches for really known as termites.

Oh wait what yeah, yeah, termites are now called social cockroaches. When did that happen?

Well, it happened like ten years ago, but now people are getting their heads around this.

So another detail to get your head around. I'll say this fast because A it's unrelated to ants, and B it's disgusting. So termites eat wood, and cockroaches are copraphages, which means they're faces eaters, and scientists think that being friendly and eating each other's snacky waist could have set the stage for good gut biomes that are able to digest wood. So that's how cockroaches turned into termites. Thank you, I'm sorry. Let's get back to ants, specifically the dames,

Yeah yeah, So all workers are female, and so in pretty much almost all colonies, if you're seeing an aunt that has no wings, then it's going to be a female worker.

Do boy ants have wings?

Yeah, so almost almost all the time, the boy ants will have wings, and their job is to have sex and then die, I mean, and that's it.

So boy aunt to do list is like be born, have wings, have a nuptial flight mate, and then die. You're done and ps. The male ants, who are not called uncles but rather drones, and the queens will usually mate when it's humid out or after it rains, so that she can get laid and then rip off her own wings casually and then pump her babies into a hole in the earth, thus starting one big, happy, kind

They meaning the ants ants. Yeah, so there's I mean, sometimes they'll actually perform physical movements on one another to communicate things, but it's pretty much it's all chemical for the most part.

Are do they say things like hey, there's a fruit loop over there, or hey, watch out, there's a there's a weird ant eater lurching about? Like what kind of what are they chatting about?

Well, I mean, so there's big categories that you can put pheromones into. And so then there's recruitment pheromones, which is like, hey, the food's over there. And then there's trail pheromones saying, well, this is the trail. And so there are different kinds of trail pheromones, Like some are long term trail pheromones that will last for a long time, saying this is our big long term trail, or a couple.

WHOA, So they know is this part in this question? Is it just coming out of their butt's where is it coming from?

Uh?

So they have different glands and different parts of their bodies, okay, and so some of the glands, like for instance, the alarm pheromones are in the mandibles and mandibular glands, and so once in a long while we're still discovering new glands. But who you know, But there's a few key glands you know, in the head or in the middle part of the butt that.

Yeah, so they're like, nah, it's just a short term trail. We're not gonna hang here for too long. So they're just gonna like squirt some stuff out of their their thorax and then that evaporates. Then then wow, the alarm ones near their mandibles is really interesting.

Yeah, this means like attack what's near there? Yeah, you know. But there's also just like for instance, with like we were talking about with the r g gin ants and their super colonies. So one of the things that we find is the reason the ants will accept or reject

Oh my god. So you can almost trick them into being like no, no, no, no, no, you guys are cool because you just coated them with the same kind of perfume.

Yeah, to some extent. Yeah, But also if you were to take a colony and then split it apart and give them different kinds of feod that have different kinds of chemicals, then they'll stop getting along with one another.

So side note, I had a boyfriend years ago who ate one bowl of epically pungent garlic soup one fateful day, and I thought, maybe we're going to break up. I thought that was the end I considered it. I just did not know how to cope politely. I mean, how do you approach invasive species because clearly you marvel at ants. Are you like, ah, I'm I'm pissed off at you guys because you are maybe like outpacing native species. Or do you just say, like, let nature be nature.

So I studied invasive species for my dissertation. I'm gotten past that. I'm doing other things now. But I mean, and so, I mean, it's a problem. It's a problem because especially in ants, it seems for at least you know, fifty to one hundred years after they arrive, they really

What, Yeah, they'll eat a bird like.

The little baby birds. I think they have trouble getting into the eggs, but as soon as they hatch and they'll swarm over the nest. Oh my god, so like songage. So in ground nesting birds in the southeastern US are really at risk because of you know, this invasive species.

Why do some ants want to eat an apple core? And others are like, well.

I mean so species are different, right, And so I mean so all different kinds of bands have all different kinds of diet. But I mean some ants primarily eat other ants, like armiants.

Army ants eat other ants.

So most armiance species are specialists on other social insects. So other ant colonies and like wasp colonies and termites and yeah, oh.

I didn't know that. Yeah what are I'm okay? Because there are some there are some species of ants that have reputations fire ants, army ants, bullet ants. What is it about those species that are just like more ferocious or more threatening to people? And should we be marveling at that instead of being like hey, ants, knock it off.

Oh, I think we totally should be marblized. Yeah, ants are Are they amazing? Yeah, well, army ants aren't really a threat. I guess if you were to put a baby in a bassinet and let it sit there as Armiance went through, well then that probably would not be good news because it would get stung a lot, right, But otherwise, like armiants are great. If they come through your house, you step outside for a couple hours, you come back and they've cleaned out all the insect pests?

Have they really? They've just marched through and been like I ate a cockroach, I ate them off?

Yeah, please seriously, And so it's normal. So I think there's this notion that they're incredibly efficient. But I've got I've looked through places where Armiance had just roam through. There's still bugs in the litters. They didn't get everybody, They.

Get everything a little sloppy. And now what about bullet ants and fire ants? Why are they called those things?

Well, bullet ants just to call bullet ants because it really really hurts when they sting you.

Does it hurt so bad?

Why does it hurt so bad? Like it could be like approximate answer, which is like, well, it's because the structure of this pona a toxin. You know the alpha pon atoxin and beta our toxin causes a lot of pain, right right, But the real question is why is it they evolved to toxin which is so much more painful

This just in a kowat is a very cute, long faced raccoon looking idiot, and a peckery appears to be a spindle legged forest piggy with frothy Texas hair, and they would probably love to eat soft, squishy bullet ant babies like Swedish fish, you know.

And so because they offer such a massive nutritional reward to someone who attacks the colony, they probably have to deter vertebrates really well. And so no vertebrate in its right mind is going to mess with with a bullet ant colony, and so their colonies you could probably like dig and access them within several seconds if you had

That's a great answer. So the lesson is hide your shit or be prepared to defend it. Now, how do you feel when you see people say in like Moose science programs or YouTube that are like I put my hands in a fire ant or I let a bullet ants sting, need to see how it would feel. Are you just like shaking your damn head on the side.

Well, I mean I think with a fire that's just I don't know, that's just kind of dumb. I think, I mean, gosh, it's gonna hurt. I mean you've seen I mean people with fire ants the fire and seeing you get all these welts and you have the blisters, and it's horrible and it's painful, and so you know

What did they do? What kind of reactions happen?

Well, they just they just screamed their heads off and then use all kinds of cursing.

You are dream.

So I've worked with bullet ants. I published a few papers on them, and I've only been stung by them once and that was in the lab when I was being dumb. And so it's possible to work with them and not get stung. If you just treat them with respect and understand how they behave.

Well, Hello, what happened? What happened? Tell me everything. You were in the lab you got stung with by a bullet ant? Where? How How?

So I was in the lab and I needed to weigh this ant because I was putting we're doing experiments with microbes in their guts, and so to weigh the ant, I needed to put it in a container and weigh the ant in the container. They needs to track the weight of the container. But I realized that when I weighed the cup, it didn't have a lid on it, and I was like, oh, I need to weigh a

Off, PS, if you haven't already, now would be a good time to cover the ears of your children or my mom. You know.

It just got me right on the tip of my finger, and I was like fuck, fuck, fuck, And I flung the ant like somewhere in the balance room, and it was roaming around. Meanwhile, so I have like like this, you know, sophomore in college. I'm showing her how to do this experiment. For the rest of the summer that she sees this. It was like, oh my god, it was so bad. It was really really bad.

Did you ever find the flung ant?

Oh?

Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, they're huge. How do you not find it?

Okay? I looked these things up and they are meaty as hell. They're about as big as a wingless wasp, but with a sting. Some experts say is thirty times more painful than a bee's worse than childbirth and being burned. Ps. How do we know that? Well? One Cornell University study in the nineteen forties was trying to measure comparative pains using something that's still called a dolorimeter. Dolar, by the way, is just straight up and noun meaning great sorrow or distress.

So the way I explain it, I've seen multiple people get stung right, and so or at least see the after effects, and so it affects different people differently. So it's not to say that everyone else will have this response. But for me, it was like if you put your finger on a countertop and I were to give you a hammer and ask you hit it as hard as you can. That's what it felt like. Yeah, how long

Oh my god. Here's a question. If you could do your whole life over and you had a chance to not have that happened to you, would you erase that from your experience or are you in some way glad that you.

Know what it's like. I guess well enough people have asked me what it feels like?

What did it feel like?

That it's better to have that experience than to be like that smug dude who's like, well, I'm so careful I never get stuck, right.

I mean I have heard also, like Phil Torres, the lepidopterologist that I interviewed about butterflies. He says that entomologists have a rite of passage of like everyone kind of wants to get a bot fly larva stuck in them. Do ant research say like do ant researchers say like I kind of want to see what this is like?

You know, I don't think it's like no, I think among the ant people, I know, it's the more at least ant men. I know they would be more into I think they a butt fly would still be a bigger rite of passage than like the nobility.

Oh my god, what's the craziest thing that you've seen in the field or the craziest behavior you've ever witnessed?

Wow? I would say probably the coolest, coolest thing I've seen are kidnapper ants.

What the hell?

So? So people used to call these slave making ants, but I don't think that really describes their behavior well. And so, so what kidnapper ants are? And those and this actually I just saw I've saw seen in Arizona. So they are colonies that go on seasonal raids where they find the colonies of other ants and steal their brood and bring them back to their own nest and raise them up, and then those ants live there. So they're like, so they're kidnapping baby ants from other colony

Is that a matter of pheromones? Do they rub their pheromone on it where they're like, you think you're you can't tell that we are not your real family?

Uh? Yeah, So, I mean, so the thing is, if you're raised in that environment, then you'll basically be having the odors that come from that environment. And so we know that kidnapper ants will use pheromones to disrupt the communication of the colonies. So these ants that get raided

So does that mean that the kidnapper aunt queen is kind of like a cult leader? She like a David koresh of like jonestown, Like she's like, you belong here and you love it, keep working.

You totally can imagine that. Yeah, And now what are.

Aunt queens like? I should have asked this earlier, but what are aunt queens like? Are they just pumping out babies all the time? Like do they get killed and eaten by someone when they're ready to go.

Yeah, so so most folks. The popular conception is that queens run the colony for the most part, Like queens are not in charge. It's the workers that are running the colony. And so the queen, if anything, is the captive of the ants, because the ants, because the queen is doing the reproductive labor for the colony, and the

Ooh, that's some handmade, stale shit right there.

Yeah, totally.

And what does your research right now deal with? Like, what what's your bread and butter research?

So the way a friend of mine described what I what I do, He's like, I really like when you do that experimental natural history, And I'm like, oh, that's a good word for it. Oh I know, so I So what I do is I find you know, there's so many curious, weird phenomena that we don't understand out there, and I'm like, you know, I think I'm gonna try to do experiments to try to figure out what's going on. And so I have a few different things I'm working on.

Oh wow, that's crazy. Do you think that they'll store more water or seek higher ground or lower ground.

Or yeah, they might nest deeper, they might vorage at different times of day, or nest in deeper leaf litter. But it looks like that they're more adaptable than people thought. I mean, So that's one thing I'm working on there's this other group of vants that I'm working on that move their nests all the time. Well many ants. People think of ants as like, here's a hole in the

Why does it happen, do you think?

Well, in different it's very different for depending upon the species are looking at about what the advantage is. Like, there's some that do it because they're trying to find a sunnier patch, and so if the structure of the forest changes, so they end up in a place that's shadier, they need to move to a place that's more sunny.

Oh my god, they do this get at all?

Yeah, totally.

Now, how do you feel when you see people pouring like molten aluminum into an ant colony? So side note for a visual just imagine like a small, squat shiny metal Christmas tree that a robot might put up, or shimmering silver coral or maybe a bush doctor Seuss would

Say it as like a gorgeous work of art. I mean, so it's like I estimated on the back of an envelope the number of ants that I killed and it was like on the low end, very low end, it's like a quarter million, a half million. So I you know, so maybe there's a little wanted posters of the inside at Colin and it's you know, unlike a lot of other people who study insects, I actually work really hard

So a metal casting of the colony stays intact, but the plaster cast has to be reconstructed like a jigsaw because it breaks apart. Now, however, molten metal surprise destroys all the ants. Well, the plaster can be washed away later and the scientists can figure out which ants we're kicking it in which part of their house.

And so you can be like, oh, these ants were in this chamber, these ants were in this chamber.

Oh wow, you can't do that with metal exactly. Can you imagine if just just a wall of molten metal came out like a flash flood.

Out of nowhere.

Yeah, you're just like we Oh, oh my god, are you ready for rapid fire around?

Sure?

Okay, Patreon questions, I got like eighty questions. Okay, but we're not going to do all of them. Some people ask the same questions. We're going to run through as many as we can. Are you ready?

Okay?

Okay, but first we're gonna throw some money at a cause. So this episode first aired in twenty eighteen when we didn't have ads, because I didn't know that you can have ads but say no to ones that you don't like. So now we have ads, and I say no to ones I don't like. And then with the money, sometimes

I think so.

Well when we get there, well, we've got to fix the car first, but there's someone coming to help us. Is it the man from Geneva? Not Geneva, he's from a Viva. Oh there's a van now. For car insurance with breakdown rescue, it takes a Viva visit Aviva don a ee to say fifteen percent.

Acceptance criteria, terms and conditions apply. Minimum premium of three hundred and ten year.

Oh.

Fifteen percent discount applies to new policies bought online. See Aviva dot I E for details. Car insurance is underwritten by Aviva Insurance Arland dack A Viva Direct Arlund Limited is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Okay, your questions, let's answer, Let's answer for them. Sarah Nashaw wants to know why do bullet ants scream when they attack? Is it an intimidation tactic?

I some people think, so I think it could be. Yeah, So bullets make this when you disturb a nest, and the odor is a little garlicky when they do that, and so I must suit and so I jump back when I hear it, and so I imagine that other vertebrates do too, because that way it's a warning sign. My guess is yes, but it has been shown experimentally.

Sure if you hear that, I mean, why do you think rattle Rattlesnakes have rattles, right, They're like, don't make me use this venom exactly, so they're like, you know what's coming. It's like the ice cream truck, but like with pain and death. Todd McLaren wants to know what's the deepest ant hole recorded any idea?

So I know there are if you look at leafcutter ant colonies, they can go like maybe ten twenty meters deep. I think there are probably some that go deeper that we haven't collected, Like I know people that have tried to excavate colonies where like there are these there's these volcano ants in Australia where they make these tiny little mounds of soil that look like volcanoes and you try to dig them up and the hole just goes deep

Damn.

That's that's some spelunking right there. For reels. Jessica Chamberlain wants to know if you're mean like my husband and squish a scout ant that you see, you know, on its own in your house, will the colonies send another scout to look for it or will they just abandon their fallen comrade.

My ex So, I'm just speaking from experience. If it's in your house and you have one ant roaming around, if it's the very very first ant in theory, maybe but in practice probably not. Oh really okay, so probably send more.

All right.

So they're just like, hey, where's Heidi, And they're like, I don't know, go find her. Maybe she found good stuff.

Yeah, I think they probably forget that. I mean, it's better to do that than not if you don't want them to come back. But I think it's probably futile. I think i'd look for the gun instead, Okay, or follow her and see where she goes.

So if you keep following her and she's like on her way home, she's like doing her home commute, you can find where the entrance is.

Totally, which is about like what how I spend most of my time in the forest. If I'm like, if you want to find an ant colony, give them food, then they'll walk back to their home. So actually, if you're trying to get rid of that scouting at, what you do is feeder, then see what crack she's going to go into, then killer and cover up the crack.

That's that's really calculated. Yeah, that's like definitely premeditated first degree instead of just a crime of opportunity or passion. That's amazing. You're like, oh, do you want to crumb? And she's like, I mean I think.

You so much.

It's like this all and you're like, no, you want a bitch. Several people wanted to know how are ants so strong? How can they lift ten times their own weight. Rada Evan McKenna all wanted to know how much weight can ants carry? Why are they so strong?

So I think the answer is they can carry like maybe one hundred two hundred times their masks or something like that. And so the answer is is that ants are not particularly strong. It's just a matter of scaling for body size. So in other words, if you were to shrink your own body down to the size of an ant, then you would be as strong as an ant that size, okay, And so it's scaling. The way

They could barely do a push up and they're like, my luggage is too heavy. Well, someone put it in the overhead for me. I had no idea. I thought they got so much props. I thought they were just like mystically strong. Yeah, totally, who knew physics scaling? Cody Woppingcamp and Dave Miller both pretty much wanted to know. Someone once told me that, based on estimates, ants outnumber humans. Am I gullible? Or is that fact true? And is it true that the weight of all the ants in

Oh, there's way, way, way more ants than people. There has to be. Oh, like any back of the envelope calculation, I would say every other thing that people say about ants dates back to and off the cuff thing that EO. Wilson said twenty years ago.

So for some context, eighty nine year old American biologist and author EO. Wilson is said to be the world's foremost expert on ants, and he postulated in a nineteen ninety four book quote, when combined, all ants in the world taken together, way about as much as all human beings. Like all mirrormacologists know this quote.

And so that's the thing about the massive ants being equivalent to the mass of people. And so you know, getting more mrmacologists using more back of envelope calculations were like, yeah, that sounds fine.

Okay, So ants outnumber human beings definitely numerically and also by weight.

Yeah, or maybe about the same, but ballpark, it could be within an order of magnitude, you know the same as more or less woo.

Okay, so then that's not even flim flam that we needed to debunk. Yeah, that's some real shit. Kendall, Thorsten, Christopher Marley, and Eva all want to ask about ant farming, like do they farm aphids? You mentioned something about a fungus farm, Like, how did they get so good at farming? Like, does that make them smarter than early humans?

Well? That makes them more social? I mean so, I mean, so the question is what is smart?

Right, this is your philosophy background.

So the party line is that ants evolved agriculture sixty million years ago with fungus growing ants, oh my god. And so they you know, collected bits of like animal poop or whatnot. And so famously now leafcutter ants will cut leaves and they'll grow a big garden.

So remember there are the leaf cutter ants that take leaf pieces and grow focus on them. Well, meanwhile, me and a live human who can drive a car and skype. France has killed three cacti in the last.

Year and so they and so they carefully tend to this garden and they use the same kind of integrated pest management that we use in our crops. That's crazy, you know. And there's weeds that grow in there, and they've evolved relationships with bacteria that attack those weeds and all that, you know. And so every single day, you know, there's someone in a few labs that's discovering a new partner in this co evolved complex situation of how ants

I mean that's this is essentially just like like nectar p.

Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But also analogously, in addition to milking, cows occasionally will kill them and eat them, you know, the same thing is that the ants and the aphids. They won't you know, they might eat an aphid once in a while.

And are they managing the herd? Oh?

They carefully. Yes, they will transport them around and adaptively manage it. They sometimes, you know, they'll kill off a plant by using too many of them, but oftentimes they use ranching management techniques.

Yeah, that's so wild less, that's insane, so cowboy Okay. So Kristin McAdams and Lily Hill both want to know why do fire ants hate me? They both asked, in particular, why do fire ants hate me? So Lily and Kristen at least know it's not just you. And Mark wants to know how can they act as both a solid and a liquid? So fire ants, what's their beef about? And also are they a solid or liquid?

Yeah? So why are fire ants are just like like so mad? So ants will defend their nests and so if you take an individual fire ant pro it can walk on you and it's not going to sting you right away. But the thing is, if you disrupt a mound, then it's going to get really mad at you. And

Lessen insecurity makes us bitches.

And so the whole solid liquid thing is like and so in how they can they can float and raft when it floods, so it's cool. So fire ants evolved in these seasonal floodplains in South America, and so when it floods, the colonies can just pick up and then raft along and then land when the waters recede, and so the ants bodies will cling together. And then if you have a whole bunch of ants clinging together, then

I floated this idea by Google, and it turns out that the little hairs on their tiny lady legs trap enough hair to keep them all afloat. So congratulations, there is another reason to avoid shaving your legs today. Oh, Olivia Rus's great question says, as soon as you saw this post, it reminded me of the infection that turns ants into zombies. What is it and what's the life cycle? This is cordyceps.

Yeah, yeah, so the common name cordyceps like ofio cordyceps. A. Yeah, So the zombie ant fungus is super cool. So and there's a number of people working to figure this critter out. It takes over the brain of the animal and it tells them to perch somewhere, and then then that results in that kills the animal. Then the spore gets spread that will infect another animal.

It's super cool, and now it kind of turns them into these zombies though, Like we're ants will crawl up a plant stem, perch out on a leaf, and then wait until the cordyceps explodes from their head and infects all of their family members.

Yeah. I think that usually the explosion happens after the ant's already dead and perched. But yeah, they will go to a location that helps the dispersal of the fungal spores. And so it turns out that and there's a recent paper that came out showing that the way that ants bite onto the tissue corresponds to the environment that you're in, that they're in said to help it spread more effectively.

I mean, does this stuff ever just completely boggle you? Like, do you start thinking, do you get galaxy brain where you're like, what is anything? Is this all a simulation? Does dark matter teach ants what to do?

Like?

Do you ever get stonery about this stuff?

Uh? Yeah, I kind of used to. But the thing is, for every single thing that I read about that's weird, I know, like people have already figured out like even weirder things, and so I think it's like, wow, that's

This isn't even college roommate bong ripper philosophy. This is just the wild world of brain parasites. Speaking of peril, Kellen Freeman and Ray Kasha both want to know how the death spiral works. What is happening in an aunt death spiral?

Okay, So, so for the uninitiated, the death spiral is this thing where so armiance forage in these big raids, and so they all follow one another. If you're to take a bunch of arms ants and somehow separate them from the rest of their colony, you can trick them or they might accidentally what happen, Like would march in a big circle, right, They just follow one another, and so they basically create a single pheromonal trail, and so death prob they just keep marching and marching until they're

Terry explains how this is kind of like computer.

Code, and so if you have an army at colony that's a quarter million ants, every ant is doing following a simple program. Yeah, and when you have all these simple bits of code together, then they function. But if you were to take some of these individual ants and separate them from the other ants, then they're just kind

Oh, Peter, I wondered about your soul. Yeah, no, it's not like nineteen ninety three's Homework Bound.

You know, it's going to be like, oh, I don't know where to go, and then wander around aimlessly until it tries to find some signal about where its home might be, and then it won't and they'll just die. I'm huh, because it's a bummer, man.

So Tracy Benhimau wants to know, I have to know. Will ants added to a camping saute add a little flavor like lemon juice due to the acetic acid in their heads. Have you eaten ants?

Yeah?

Some ants? Yeah yeah, I try not to. I'm vegetarian, so I extend that to insects, but I've tried some and inadvertently. I mean, we all eat insects when we don't try. So there are some ants that tastes absolutely horrible. But for instance, in this part of the world, we have what we call citronella ants, and so they live underground to the genus Lasias, and they actually have a citronella eat order to them. And so the weaver ants in Southeast Asia and northern in the Australian wet tropics,

Lemon Ants, by the way, release this citrusy smell when attacked to warn others. And they also use formic acid as an herbicide, and that creates clearings in the forest where nothing really grows. This is called a devil's garden, which is definitely a venue that my existential metal band, Mirror Meat, would love to play.

But ants, what might add other flavors? I mean, people will eat, will roast like queens of leaf cutter ants. People once a year will collect the brood of weaver ants and collect them in large, large numbers you can get of an ethnic food stores and jars here.

Oh wow, I hear that there might be a little spicy too some ants.

Oh some of them, Yeah, have a little bit of spice.

Yeah.

Crazy, I think I've eaten ants. I can't. I think I've had ants on a cookie on purpose. But yeah, let's see. Elliott Anaya wants to know do it fart? Do ants fart?

Oh my god, I haven't gotten to that page in the book yet.

So Terry is referencing the best selling book does it Fart? Now? I don't have a copy of this book, but I do have evidence that ant man might taken from this screen Junkies interview with Paul Rudd. Paul runs suiting. He has either a very squeaky chair or problematic intestines. Ant farms, yes or no?

Ant farm? The ones that you buy out of the box, Uncle Milton and Uncle Milton, no, because they're all going to die because they don't send you a queen. They just die. And it's like so it's like the there's these onion articles about getting an ant farm is a lesson and toiling until you die, that's what that is. But if you were to build your own ant farm and collect your own ant colony, there are many amateur like enthusiasts who really know their biology and are super cool,

Oh so as long as you get the queen and you set it up right and you do it respectfully.

Yeah, exactly, that's cool. Yeah, super cool. There's a whole community of people who do that.

You know what, I can't have a dog in this apartment, but maybe I could adopt like a couple thousand ants.

You could totally have an ant colony in here yet, right, I.

Just found my summer project. A few different people like Craig Minami and Sarah Sparrow want to know if there are plants or natural remedies or other insects that you could use in your house to deter ants.

Probably not, okay. So there's a lot of you know, discussion about like chemicals could you use, could you spray powder or chalk or cayenne pepper or whatever. Pretty much those don't work.

Okay, Cinnamon no, no, just check it. Okay. So the answer is no. The answer is goet a cock gun.

The cock gun. Yeah, or I mean so a general answer would be would be to kill your lawn? What right, because I mean, I mean so, of course I've killed my lawn, and I still have trouble with ants. At least if you're in a place, a dry place like in California where you have all these argentine ants, they are fed by moisture. If it's dry, you don't have them.

Oh wow. Harvester ants just on the lookout for that quality, organic, free range, gluten free seed to eat, whereas argentine ants are munched on pizza crust under a dead possum and loving it.

Often the invasive species will be following water or following human disturbance. And so so if you get all your neighbor together and have more native landscaping than you have fewer of these invasive ants that would be taking over your house once inside. But I think the key is to keep from letting them in.

Okay, so that just gently follow them home like an absolute creep. Right, Yeah, Anna Thompson wants to know, are their loner or introvert ants who are not down with the social thing.

The only non social ants we have are colonies that produce what we call social parasites, whereas actually they're not colonies. They are non social ants, and so they only produce queens and males. And what they do is the queens will then fly off and live inside the colony of other ants and take their food and lay their own eggs and sneak them in with the rest of the colony.

So side note, the fact that ants don't have a long running reality show franchise is and artistic failing of our culture.

And then she'll just make queens and males to make new colonies. So they're so they're socially parasitic, and they evolved after ants originally evolved.

Oh wow, they're kind of like sociopaths. They's been like freeloaders.

They're total freeloaders. Yeah, all other ants are social.

Oh I didn't know that. Danny Kay wants to know. Have you ever spilled your name out in aunt pheromones alla Eo Williams.

I have not spelled my name out in aunt phaomones?

Okay, chick Zach Tarbal wants to know. I heard that ants are great at predicting weather. Is there any truth to this?

They are the One example I can think of is they are great in predicting weather is if they know if it's really going to rain. So in the for instance, in dry areas like in the southwestern US, like they reproduce after a rain storm, and so you'll often if you're going to have a lot of rain, like there's mating flights and so sometimes they'll start flying before the

And you said queens. Do some colonies have multiple queens or no?

Yeah, So many kinds of ants will have more than one queen per colony.

Okay, oh, I didn't know that. Sean and Josh Grandinetti want to know, what's the most amazing ant behavior you've seen? And do they have self awareness?

Do? I don't think they have. If we say talk about self awareness as in cognition where they recognize themselves in the mirror, I don't think so. Okay, okay, So the most amazing behavior I've seen deals with the army ants that roam across the ground and eat all the other ants that they find. There's this colony of ants, which we now call Cappadocian ants.

Okay, So I look this up, and this is a region in Turkey that's known in part for its elaborate network ready for this of underground cities, hidden tunnels that could house possibly up to twenty thousand people, the entrances of which could be conceald by boulders, like full underground cities we just discovered a few years ago. Like if you are an archaeologist working on this with any kind of hookup, please do holler. I am here by begging you. Okay, the backed hands.

So, but there are these Cappadocian ants that are really tiny, but routinely are subjected to attack by army ants outside their nest entrance. They have a little pebble sitting outside, and when in an aggressive ant comes to that ant colony and they smell them, an ant will come out

Damn. They're like, no, let me see here. You're getting in there. Yeah, that's amazing, Like in horror movies when you see someone block the door with a chair and you're like, that will keep them out. That's so smart. I love this question so much. Jade wants to know, and we asked I asked this definitely from a lot of ologists, but Jade wants to know which is more accurate scientifically, A bug's life or ants.

Bugs life?

Really, which do you do? You have a preference between both ant movies?

Gosh, well, I've only seen each of them once, okay, and I generally I just found the ants one annoying. Like when Woody Allen has a good movie is good. But otherwise it's like, you know, and then there's all these other issues of Woody Allen and so. But I think bugs life in general, the whole concept about the colony, you know, having a seasonal nature and working together and storing food. But no, I think I mean, but in general, in terms of the life history of the ants, I

Who now, when you go to your next mermorcology conference, will you guys probably talk about that and be like, hey, who did the consulting on that? Because it was a pretty good job.

Yeah, we all know the dude who's the consulting out. Oh no, last one aunt meeting I was talking to it was a yeah, the grand student who worked on it, and he did a great job. And he's like, oh, the one thing I'm really annoyed about he was telling me, was that that they didn't do the all ants being female.

Right. That was my next question, like, how do you feel when you watch The Bugs Life, and it's like protagonist does like a little male aunt, are you like, well, I don't know.

Said. The thing is, it's like, if you're going to explain why all answer female, that's not an easy discussion. I think old me and other more pedantic people would be like, oh my gosh, are you kidding? How can you let them get that wrong? That's like the most

So Terry says that there's one character named Anthony that is clearly morphologically physically a queen, but it's a male, which was noted by the consultants. But the studio was like, nah, it's fine.

Because there's all these other things they had absolutely right about, all the other ants, all these oh well, Carpenter answer like this, and they do this, and you know, and Bullet answer like this, and they had all that stuff right. Yeah, and they looked like them and they behaved like them. It was like amazing, And so I think so they made some decision at the home office, like Okay, we know the consultant told us about this, but skirt, we're just not going to do that.

I do feel like a lot of people know that that social insects tend to be primarily female. Do you know what I mean? I feel like a lot of people like you don't have to be like a super super obscure like a meer mycology group. You didn't know that, But what can you describe in a nutshell why they are female? I know you said it's obscure and complex.

Okay, But in ants, bees, and wasps, the males have a single copy of the genes. They are haploid, okay, and females have two copies of the genes, meaning they're diploid. And so that's a thing in this group. That's just the way they are. And so that means that when males are making sperm, there's no miosis, there's no sorting of genes. So in other words, all male sperm is identical. Oh wow, And so their sperm is an exact copy of them.

Oh weird.

And so that results weirdness. These asymmetries in relatedness, but for the most part, like most of the social animals that are truly social that way, have that genetic thing going on.

And then how do they know that the eggs are just going to be female?

Essentially, there's like a competition or a war or whatever in the colony where a queen will lay an egg and she can choose to make it a male or female depending on what whether or not she squirts sperm on it. Because in insects, the females have an organ called a spermatinka that store a sperm. So so males die after they have sex for the most part, but worse for females, what they do is they just don't have sex again. They just store the sperm for the rest of their life.

Oh man, you get one super lay and then you're like, I guess I'm celibate, yeah.

Or maybe a bunch, and then you have sperm for multiple males. But then that's it, okay, yeah right, And so then so then she lays an egg, she can make it a male by not putting any sperm on it, or she can make it a female by fertilizing it. Oh, which she makes a male that's one hundred percent her genes.

Right, Oh wow, Okay, that's kind of crazy.

So genetically, it's in the female's interest actually to make males because the males are more closely related to her than her daughters, who are only fifty percent related to her. So if a queen essentially is being selfish, then she's making too many males. But then the workers will get pissed off. And if the you know, because the workers want them to lay sisters because the work because the workers are more closely related to the sisters.

Oh my god, it's game of thrones.

Yeah, it's totally Game of Thrones and so and so there's all these conflicts of interest and it's a total met.

So for a long time, scientists were very firm in thinking that the relatedness caused the evolution of social behavior.

But there's a new generation of scientists that didn't live through these wars. But anyone who's my generation or older, like like we're talking as fighting words.

Really, yeah, drama, So drama in the colony, drama outside of the colony, looking at the colony.

Yeah, totally.

Who knew that aunt life was just like such a roiling soap opera. Yeah, okay, So last questions, what do you hate about your job other than getting stung by bullet ants?

Oh?

Gosh, I guess well, I guess i'd well, Oh, this is a hard thing to say because it's so awesome, But as a mermacologist, what do I hate about being a mermacologist? I guess it's because being in southern California, the ants are relatively boring compared to so many other parts of the world.

Oh, we don't have quite as much like trapdoor ants and fungus ants, and we've got like, we've got a couple of big species battling it out, right, So.

You have argentine ants, which is like, oh, snevasis species and blah blah blah blah. And then some of the native ants. Oh, they're kind of cool. But it's like once you get tropical, then you see all these amazing things, and so I see them when I go elsewhere, but not when I'm here.

So I guess it keeps you thirsty for field research, right, Yeah, exactly. Are you ever like at a picnic in la or like at someone's house and you get distracted by ants and you're like oh, I gotta go look at that.

Yeah, once in a while, and people will chortle, will be like, oh, you know, I should have like a vile in my pocket at all times, but I don't. But some people I know, they don't go anywhere without a vial.

Do you have friends who call you an ant man?

Yeah, there's a few.

And then what do you love the most about being a mirmacologist?

There's still so much mystery, like it's a whole frontier. As Korime Moro recently pointed out, there's like a few hundred people in the world that you know, have labs that are focusing on studying ants, and there's so many things that we don't know. And especially in the tropics, you know, wherever you go there are ants and they are doing things that are running the world, and so it's hard to not discover cool things if you choose to look.

And if you had to glean some self help information from ants, is there anything that ants have inspired you to do differently with your life or could inspire us to do?

Within ant colonies, there's a lot of conflict and despite the reputation for having their act together and working really hard, there's a lot of lazy ants that are waiting for other ants to do their job. And so, I mean, if I think so, I would think of ant call. If you were to look at an ant colony, most ants aren't doing anything.

Really.

For every ant that you see above ground doing something, there's ten ants like sitting on their ass doing nothing underground. Oh my god. And so I think that's a good counter example for me. Like ants like instead of being the go to the anth house sluggard, they work really hard blah blah blah. It's like no, ants like are waiting for other ants to do their job before they they can do theirs. They're they're like the opposite of being hard working, entrepreneurial or whatever. And so they're a

Does that make you work harder or chill more?

No? I think I think I should learn from them that I probably should do my own choose my own path, and do my own thing rather than just try to perform the role that I think I'm supposed to be doing. Like, for instance, if my house is messy, it's because when my wife's waiting for me to do the dishes and I'm waiting for her to do the dishes so they

Right, That's so funny to think about lazy ants like making you take initiative. Yeah, which, by the way, I have a sink full of dirty dishes and I live alone. So this is the saddest thing I was of myself. I'm my own lazy an. This was so informative. I love this. I don't think I'm ever going to look at ants the same. I mean, I already love them, but I'm definitely going to be more prone to just seeing where they're headed.

Yeah, you just watch them. I mean, so the thing is, if your kitchen is overrun with ants, you don't have to freak out and like wipe them all away, because if you wait five more minutes, it's not going to get worse. Might as well just watch them, right, and then you knew com.

Thank you so much for being here. This was dope. I loved it.

Thank you so much.

So go around and go ask some smart people some not smart questions all you want, even if they seem like small inquiries, the answers might be mighty. So now go find Tear on Twitter. He's at oormiga h O R M I g A on Twitter, which is Spanish for aunt nice. He's also at leaflitter dot org. He's so great, and we are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both, so do say hello. Thank you again to Birthday Girl Aaron Talbert

Okay, bye bye, because it's so that's some