For years, the Trailhead nest had been protected by a ten thousand member force of its adult members or soldiers. A soldier's exoskeleton, twice the size of that of an ordinary worker, is literally heavy armor, thick, tough, and pitted in places for resilience and strength. A pair of spines project backward from the mid section of the body to protect the waist. Spikes protect the neck, and the rear margin of the head is curved forward, forming a helmet.
When attacked, the soldier can pull in her legs and antenna and tighten up the segments of her body, turning her entire surface into a shield. The ordinary Trailhead workers, while built for labor, were also available for combat. They served as the light infantry, using the swiftness and the agility of their supple bodies to dart in and out of enemy lines, seizing any leg or antenna available and holding onto it until their nest mates could close in
and grab another body part. When the adversary was finally pinned and spread eagled, others piled on to bite, sting, or spray her with poison. Welcome to stot to blow your mind. Production of My Heart Radio Hey you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick in today It's Aunts, folks. That's right, this is going to be Ant Wars Episode one. Uh,
the Ampire strikes Back. Perhaps I'm not sure. I haven't worked out that the full title yet, but yeah, we're gonna be taking a couple of episodes to look at the wars of the Ants, and it seemed ideal that we kick off with a cold reading from the novel ant Hill, a novel by EO. Wilson which came out in so we were talking about this novel before we
got started. It actually got some surprisingly good reviews. I was thinking about picking up a copy and reading it until I discovered that a significant portion of this novel is about human characters. And I was hoping with EO. Wilson, you know, especially in the past, we've talked about that video where he like plunges his hand into a nest of fire ants and beams with the most the most
radiant joy as the ants all biden sting him. At the same time, I was hoping it would be all about ants, because if anybody could do ants as compelling central characters. I would think it would be EO. Wilson. Yeah, I think I was looking at one review of it that was glowing that said that they're about seventy pages in the novel that only EO. Wilson could have written. Um and uh, and I think this gives everyone a little taste of that. And when we say, you know, surprisingly,
you know, great reviews, you know it's obviously EO. Wilson is a is a tremendous author, but generally he was he was associated with with nonfiction, uh, conveying oftentimes conveying science very effectively, um to a general audience. But of course fiction is a slightly different scenario. So you might expect even a very talented nonfiction writer, uh, you know, to to to perhaps stumble a bit in trying to create a work of fiction like this. Oh totally, that's
what I mean. I didn't mean like EO. Wilson's a dummy. I just meant that usually when somebody who's not primarily a fiction writer is like, yeah, I'll do a novel, it's it's not always great. Well, you know, the main the main example that always comes to my mind is or would be the the tech Wars novels that were attributed to William Shatner that although I understand it was more of a ghost writing scenario, it was in place
and there was some some spiritual composition in there. But but I have to say it was not the tech Wars that inspired inspired me to to seek this topic out this week, but rather the Clone Wars um and
and also the miniature board gaming in general. So my son and I recently ordered a copy of Fantasy Flights Star Wars Legion miniature game, which is a miniature um war game in the tradition of things like say Warhammer Warhammer forty thousand, and then the older um the the older like Napoleonic um war games of old, the kind of thing that has been the past time of people such as H. G. Wells, who wrote a essentially a rule book for such miniature gaming, and then was also
a favorite pastime of Peter Cushing. Right, you recently shared this video with me where Cushing is painting his little figurines. I guess it's Napoleonic Wars or some similar temporal event where all these little uniformed figures he's like posing them around barns and stuff that he's gotten on his floor. I think it was a video from the from the nineteen fifties that was done. Yeah, it was, it was nineteen fifties, And yeah, he's really getting into has a
whole whole hobby set up. And yeah, then he's laying them out on the floor, getting them into into position. Um. You know, a very very historical based for sure. But yeah, just thinking about this sort of thing, thinking about miniature gaming in general, and thinking about the clone wars where you have on one side a bunch of um, you know, genetically um identical warriors going up against you know, armored robotic hords. I couldn't help but think of the ants,
the wars of the ants. You know, it's amazing how much hymen opteran conflict we can miss because you're just going about your business. Maybe you're doing something in your yard, you're hanging out out in the sun or in the hammock or something, and you don't even realize that there is literally a battle raging just a couple of feet from you around the blades of grass. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. They the ants are are waging their wars, they're defending
their territories. Um, and and we're talking about against other ants and not even talking about their their various struggles against other species, and it's everywhere. We did not even think about our aunts unless they actually invade our homes, and then then we get hot and bothered about it.
But I imagine the most crucial question we have to consider before we proceed is can we really consider the conflict we see between ant species between different ant colonies as warfare more or less in the human sense of the word. Well, I mean, in one sense you could say maybe pedantically and obviously no, because it would necessarily fail to capture like the full range of human value and culture and passion that a company's conflict between humans.
But on the other hand, I think you could absolutely probably like see some parallels in terms of like pure resource dynamics. Yeah, I was thinking about this a little bit. Uh. Sometimes you see war defined as a declared armed hostile conflict, and of course the idea of ants actually declaring war on another group of ants is ridiculous because you've been getting into declarations of war. That's a human political reality, and as doctor Brundle would probably remind us, insects are
rather short on politics. I mean, I think that that that fails to capture even a lot of actual war in the human context, where a lot of wars are not cold wars by the people carrying them out right. Another issue, too, is if we're talking about an armed hostile conflict, well, ants don't actually take up arms in the human sense, and of course they don't have to, because aunts have a number of biological weapons and chemical weapons at their disposal that make make such tool use unnecessary.
And of course we'll be running through some examples of of these bio weapons as we proceed through these episodes. However, we do tend to discuss these conflicts between ant colonies between aunt species as being a form of war, something that we can think of as war. As bologist and entomologist Sean O'Donnell pointed out on Serious Science, ants engage in quote direct aggressive interaction between ants of different colonies.
They also engage in such conflict over resources, and as a noted ant expert author of the Human Swarm tropical biologists Mark W. Moffatt has put it, war is quote the concentrated engagement of group against group in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. So it's easy to look at other animals perhaps and say, well, cats don't wage war, dogs don't wage war. It would be, for instance, kind of ridiculous to say that um lions are waging war
against say an antelope. Right, Yeah, I think that the the analogy would really fall short there. But for the ant, however, it gets a little, a little little different. So Moffatt contends that the case for ant warfare is fairly convincing. It's not simply a matter of applying the lens of
human civilization to the behavior of animals. What what they are doing and we humans have done for thousands of years are both endeavors that entail quote, an astonishing array of tactical choices about methods of attack and strategic decisions about when and where to wage war. Now, the parallel there gets especially interesting because while humans would have to make tactical and strategic choices in in organized conflict consciously, you know, they have to like use their brains, look
at what's going on and try to judge. I think, uh, I think we would have to say that the ant carries out its campaigns almost entirely on instinct. Like it the ant doesn't have strategic theories except what it naturally does by instinctive behavior. That's right. Yeah, they they more or less simply do. And we'll get into some of
the details of that here in a second. I want to throw in that Douglas j Emlin, who wrote an excellent book several years ago titled Animal Weapons uh he he uh, weighs in on this and says that, Okay, the most part, animals do not fight battles or wars, um, And you know it, basically, he says, most of the animal conflict that we see in the wild, it's ultimately more of a duel, you know, especially as far as interest species contests go, you know, like male fighting a
male over a potential mate. But ants and termites are are certainly examples of something that could be a standout, you know, in which we do see this kind of large scale war with high stakes for both sides. Um. You know. I was thinking a bit about this too, that you know, even these other scenarios lions versus antelopes and all like, at best, we could maybe think of that as a skirmish, right, but certainly not a war.
Not certainly not a war of of eradication. Yeah, I would say that the conflicts between most animals you see in nature are much more individual, they're less group oriented,
that they're less organized. Though at the same time that brings up an interesting question about what what really counts as an individual when you're talking about some thing like a colony of ants, because unlike say mammals or birds or something, answer a situation where within the colony, it gets harder to make the case that the individual ant's body is a is a like independent, autonomous agent, and it might be better thought of as like one organ
of the the actual individual, which is the overall colony. Yeah. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that they are so I mean, they're used social insects, and they're so connected that there there is this sense of civilization to them. You know, they are you know, they're managing resources in some cases, such with the leaf
counter ant, they're engaging in agriculture. You know, they there's this this whole system that is there that that makes the argument for ant warfare a lot more convincing than saying, well, this invasive species is waging a war on the native species. Yeah, I mean it is out competing it for some resource, but it is not like this tight knit unit. It is not like a full blown colony. Now, obviously nothing humans do is going to be comparable to something in
the ant world, but the similarities are pretty startling. I want to read a quote from a wonderful two thousand and eleven Scientific American article titled Ants and the Art of War, and this is also by Mark W. Moffatt. Quote. Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants and termites form tight knit societies with members numbering in the millions,
and that these insects engage in complex behaviors. Such practices include traffic control, public health efforts, crop domestication, and, perhaps most intriguingly, warfare, the concentrated engagement of group against group in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these respects and others, we modern humans more closely resemble ants than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in
far smaller societies. So the main similarity between us and the ants is that we organize ourselves more so than almost any other non insect animal. Right now, Biologically, of course, we're much larger vertebrates. We have impressive brains that have enabled us to achieve unequal technological accomplishments, including but not limited to, the production of nineteen fifty four Is Them and Birdeye Gordon's nineteen seventy seven film Empire of the Ants.
You don't see the ants themselves making films this good. That's true, Aunt cinema is rather lacking, though, I don't know if I've seen this bird Eye Gordon movie or not. Of course, birt Eye Gordon has come up on the show several times. He's sort of Mr. A k A, Mr Big. He's the king of the force perspective effect, where you know, you take like a lizard and then you shoot it up close against the background and make it say that it's a dinosaur. Yeah. I have to
say I haven't seen Empire of the Ants either. I mainly know it because it's referenced in a Warren Zevon song. But it's a nineteen seventy seven release. That's that's pretty late into in the Birdeye Gordon Giant Animal Rampaging world. I would think last time I checked, Bert Eye Gordon was still alive. I think he is, oh well, still going at Yes, he's ninety seven years old, all right,
so obviously ants can't actually top that. You know, they don't have language, they don't have civilization in the sense that we do. Ants. However, they have a different way of going about things. So for instance, they produce While we're like a fifty fifty male female species, ants only produce males to serve as short lived reproductive drones to fertile queens. That's right, I mean ants are females basically. Yeah, the vast majority of the colony consists of sterile females.
And while the queen terminology, you know, if we talk about the queen ant and it brings with it the legacy of human centralized power structures, Ultimately, ants function without a power hierarchy or a permanent leader. They are entirely decentralized. So, like you said earlier, combat decisions, they're not made by commanders. You know, if if this was a miniature war game, you wouldn't have the command or piece that's essential for all of this to take place. No, it's rather a
case of swarm intelligence. That is one of the hardest things to keep in mind because there there's this natural tendency we have to assume that something called the queen is in charge. But Yeah, when you're thinking about aunts, you have to remember that basically ants are always at war and the queen is never in command. The queen doesn't tell the ants what to do. They are highly
motivated to protect the queen. But that's kind of in the same way that like you are highly motivated to protect the most vulnerable parts of your body from injury, right, like you'd protect your face and stuff. Like, the queen is their reproductive chances, and that's why she is protected, right, and she's she is very important. There's some passages in EO.
Wilson's novel where where the the tragedy of the fall of their their queen is discussed and how this is a you know, part of the peril that this key group of ants finds themselves in. But ultimately, the wars of ants in the wars of humans, they're often fought for the same reasons territory, food, ideal dwelling spaces, and
even labor. So some ant species do in fact employ something that we might think of as slave labor, and we'll come back to that as we go, But also ants deploy various tactics depending on what is at stake, So, like, you know, not every war is equal to the ant colony. There is um, there's a fluctuation in you know, the amount of effort that is put into it, how much
ant power is h is put on the line, etcetera. However, in his book The Human Swarm, Moffatt speaks a little bit more about this, about the basic comparison between human and ant warfare, and he does he does write that quote, if nothing else, remember this, Comparing identical things is deadly boring. Making comparisons is most fruitful when parallels are noticed between
ideas or things or actions ordinarily treated as distinct. Uh. And he discusses this at length in that book, if, if if any wants to to pick that up and explore more. But I think this is also something that's important to keep in mind. Yeah, it's it's not a one to one, but if it were a one to one, we probably wouldn't be doing a podcast about it. Right, all right, we need to take a quick break, but when we come back, we will talk about aunt warriors
in classic literature. Thank alright, we're back. So we spent the whole first portion of this episode talking about the idea of comparing ant warfare to human warfare and uh and to what, to what extent it's fair, what extent it makes sense? And ultimately it's irrelevant because we still do it, and we've been doing it for a very
long time. We've been making that connection between human warfare and ant warfare, perhaps for as long as warriors have had a chance, uh, you know, to pause on the battlefield and look down between their human feet and see a smaller version of their campaigns playing out in the dirt beneath them. For instance, if we look back to the Iliad, uh, specialized warriors who serve the mighty Akellyes are known as the Myrmidons. The aunt people is the
the literal translation of that. Now, I know, according to some mythological sources, the Mermanons who fight with Achilles actually were ants at some point. Isn't that right? They were like transformed into human warriors from their aunt origins. Yeah. The tradition that we see in Ovid's metamorphosis, for example, is that is that the gods transformed the ants into humans. Uh. And that's why they have these these ant like uh
uh tendencies. They have this ant like tenacity because they are essentially ants that were made human, but of course that was not the actual reality. These were These were human troops, and we have to make some sort of
sense of it. Uh I was reading a two thousand tin paper published in the Classical World by Matthew Sears titled Warrior Ants Elite Troops in the Iliad, and he points out that masked fighting was probably the norm in the days of Homer, but that in this we get into scholarly conflict over the idea of the hop Light revolution and the prin pre hop light and Hoplight warfare.
Now this refers to the Greek use of spears and shields and the phalanx formation, so this is kind of like an ant level um of of of cooperation that stands in contrast to mass fighting and the dramatic single
combat episodes of the Iliad. So the basic idea here is that the Myrmidons as well as you know opposing soldiers under Ajax, might be understood as specialized warriors, professional soldiers who use UH this type of tight formation with the shields providing you know, absolute support for the unit and UH and the offensive spears used in a very deliberate manner, as opposed to just a bunch of warriors
running out and going at it. So definitely keep the phalanx in mind, because we'll come back to it and discuss it more when we get into anti tactics a bit.
But basically, on both sides of the conflict described in the Iliad, the ideas that you would have had a mix of such professional, highly trained fighters alongside more generalized, generalized troops, and of course this would remain a reality in warfare for a long time, the professional soldiers fighting alongside the uh you know, basically common commoners, common men who have just been given arms or have taken up
arms in the conquest. Now in this series goes and of course into a great deal more detail because it is primarily concerned with the ancient world, but he actually poses the question of whether ancient people's without special lenses would have been able to mark the similarities between human and ant organized conflict, and based on the work of others, he says, yeah, you know, we look at the traditions in Africa, Australia and New Guinea, uh, in cases where
you have people who are know, who have not used specialized gear to analyze ants, and they have long made these comparisons. Quote the warlike characteristics of ants would have been just as apparent to the eyes of the ancient Greeks as they were to throw and McCook. In short, the description of achilles men as aunt people maybe due to their resemblance in terms of ferocity, uh, tactical ingenuity, unit cohesion, and general belicocity to these insects as as
as observed by the ancients. Okay, so what makes them like ants? It's that they are fierce, that they execute tactics effectively, that they stick together and don't break up into individuals, and that they're very aggressive. Yeah they're not. Just yeah, I think the sticking together and like working as a as a unit is keyty Here, it's not the warfare of sort of you know, random battle. It's not the warfare of like the one hero fighting the
other hero at the at the at the walls of Troy. No, it is about tactics and in uniform performance exactly, and that is the advantage of the phalanx. Alright, So the next question folks might wonder is how long have aunt's waged these wars or maybe you haven't, maybe you're not asking that question, but let me go and tell you it's an interesting question with an interesting answer. Tell us the answer, Robert, All right, well, well, first of all,
let's let's consider the big picture. First, we have to really stop and realize that we live in the world of the ant. Because today the world is home to an estimated twenty two thousand species of a ant. And of those, only I've seen two different numbers for this, uh, twelve thousand, five hundred or perhaps thirteen thousand have been
classified or described. So we're still talking thousands of ant species out there that we just you know, don't have a good handle on, maybe don't even have names for um now. According to ted Our Shooltz in a n paper on ant ancestors, ants probably account for fifteen to
of the terrestrial animal biomass today. So that means if you take all of the animals that live on land, and of course this doesn't include plants and stuff like that, but all the animals that live on land, you weigh them all together, this estimate would say fifteen of that
is just ants. Yeah, and apparently in areas where they're especially prominent, you could maybe be looking at they because they and they thrive everywhere, Like certainly they're they're you know, around the you know, the the equatorial belt, they're going to be especially active. But they thrive everywhere except Antarctica and UH, as well as the occasional far flung and
inhospitable island. Otherwise, the ants just have it all locked down. Now, that's an amazing estimate, and I do want to be fair. I've been reading around and I think there are some disputes about exactly how much biomass ants account for. The Different people have different estimates UM. But one other estimate I came across that was very interesting. It was quoted in a in a BBC article I was reading about
aunt biomass. It quotes Francis Ratniqus, who is a professor of apriculture at the University of Sussex, and Ratnius was trying to address the question of what ways more all the ants or all the humans UH. And there have been different answers to this question. Ratnix thinks that well, now, probably if you weigh up all the humans, the humans way more than the ants UM. But that hasn't always
been the case. Definitely, Ratnie says, if you went back a few thousand years, ants would have far outweighed the humans. But as human populations have grown exponentially, especially in recent centuries, that changed. Ratnius thinks it was probably right around the late seventeen hundreds or maybe a little bit before that, that the total weight of humans on Earth suddenly became larger than the total weight of ants. So around the time of American independence, the humans overtook the ants. Wow,
here's another figure. And again these are all estimates, so you know, don't you know, have any particular um factor like tattoo in your body regarding this. But the Field Museum has a wonderful ant page uh ants section of their website, and they they point they make the claim that in the tropics, ant biomass outweighs all vertebrate life two to one. Yeah, and that that emphasizes that, like the percentage of ants as biomass is going to be
heavily dependent on environment. Right, so around the equatorial regions, where they're even more abundant, they might they might massively outweigh humans. I mean, the take home is that that basically, no matter how often we fail to notice ants in our environment, they are an extremely successful species by you know, by some accounts, they are the most successful insect on the planet, which really puts them, uh, you know, in
consideration for the most successful animal on the planet. Oh yeah, I mean, insects dominate the animal world and especially especially the terrestrial animal world, and if ants dominate the insects, I mean, I think you could absolutely make a good case there. But the funny thing is you have to imagine, like all other organisms or families of organisms on Earth, there was a time when ants were newcomers on the evolutionary scene. And they can't always have had this this
uh you know, occupied this elevated station. That's right. They were not an overnight success. Uh. Ants evolved and estimated one forty two one hundred and sixty eight million years ago, so they are ultimately a product of the Jurassic But but yeah, they were not an instant hit. Uh. I was reading that. You know, scientists consider that they're probably like a modest success. At first, you know, um ants were doing their thing, but they weren't just blowing up.
But then something changed, flowering and fruiting plants evolved and estimated one hundred million years ago. And what this did is it transformed the energy economy. Insects suddenly had in it were not suddenly, but insects progressively had an entirely new food source to adapt to a whole slew of new food sources, and so they did. And ants, which were again probably just a modestly successful life form at best earlier, suddenly exploded filling out these these various niches
in the in the ecosystem. They adapted to a host of evolutionary niches and then spread across the two supercontinents of Eurasia and Gondwana. I'm trying to imagine the scene of the first time some ants discovered a fallen fruit. What a small moment that would have been. Almost it's
almost like an ant garden of Eden's story. Yeah, and and it's like it's just basically like all levels of this new fruit flower economy, Like the ants are there to figure out how to make it work, and you know, and and of course steadily evolve into these various species that um that take advantage of it in various ways. Now, as Schiltz points out, we don't have much evidence of ants from the first half of their existence. Not until the mid Cretaceous do we see their fossil remains. But
the evidence we have is pretty incredible. In nineteen six e O. Wilson and others identified the fossil remains of a cretaceous ant species that was trapped in amber from ninety two million years ago. But then there there there have been some more recent exciting findings. Ancient Burmese amber from Myanmar gives us even older evidence. I was reading about a two thousand sixteen study from Rutgers that was at the time of that study dated to nine million
years ago. And according to Philip Bardon of the Insect and Evolution Lab and Jessica l Where of the Department of Biological Sciences at Rutgers University, Newark, what what the contents of this chunk of amber show us? Is a frozen act of ant warfare. Oh, I see it. They're in a tangle. Yeah, it's it's two ants battling it out, duking it out, trapped forever in this, uh, this droplet
of amber. Well, I'm imagining a scene where the scientists from Jurassic Park drill into this amber and they use it to clone dangerous Jurassic fruit, right, they get the stomach content. I don't know if that joke connected. Okay, whatever, Um no, no, I give it to your your cooking. There. So the researchers, though that they do not go in
that direction. What the What they say is that the ants trapped here belonged to early Aunt lineages that are ultimately distinct from modern ants, so they're not really direct ancestors of modern ants. But in their study they present evidence that that these ancient ants were social and and they were you know, engaging in this kind of uh
you know, collective conflict. Another bit of amber they point out, contains some twenty one worker ants, and this is from a time period in which again Aunt fossil evidence is super rare, so they say, to get twenty one in one blow suggested they were already you know, very social, working together. So we're looking at a good one million years of ant warfare based on this, you know, at least memo or less, lining up with the advent of flowering and fruiting plants, with true dominance of the ants
being reached some sixty million years ago. Now, other things, of course evolved as well, uh, including some of their various features. Uh uh. Interestingly enough, some of the ancient ants were rather brutal, looking even more brutal looking than they look today. For instance, there were the hell ants uh so named because they feature many characteristics that some
might you know, consider unusual or hellish. Um. Yeah, I found out because because you linked it to this one called lingua Irmax Vladdie, And I was looking at that name for a second thinking, wait, Vladdie, that that can't be Is it? Is it vlad? Is it vladium Paler? It is named for vladium paler because it has this um unique head structure where it has um um Uh. It's kind of difficult to describe because it's it has like this paddle like projection on it and uh and
X ray uh. Imaging reveals that it was most probably filled with sequestered metals to make it like you know, fortified uh, and that it would have worked in tandem with scithelike mandibles to in and potentially puncture soft bodied prey. So it was you know, there's this real you know, bear trap of a head on this thing. I'm looking at images of it now. It is a brutal spike coming out of the head. Yeah. Now this isn't to say there aren't some really gnarly ant heads around today.
We'll get back to some of those later on. But one of the important tacoms from all of this, and this is something that Sean O'Donnell points out in that that serious science article on ant wars. He points out that there's an important shift in the weaponry of ants across time. So long ago, vertebrates were probably the biggest threat to ants, so they were more equipped to deal with them via things like a powerful sting. But as time passed and they spread her across the world, they
become more and more successful. Pressure on each other becomes more prevalent. In other words, the endless ant wars become more important for shaping their evolution than the dinosaurs, the birds, in the various mammals that preyed on them. So they used to be they used to have to be more worried about and eaters and armadillos getting in there and and vacuum them up with the snout. But over time their real adversaries become the rival i'm an opter in
colonies exactly. So ultimately some aunt lineages end up keeping their sting. For example, the bullet ant whose bite ranks as a four that's the maximum score on Schmidt's sting pain index UM there I was reading a description is by Justin Oschmidt, the entomologist who came up with this system of measuring uh the stings. He described it as quote pure intense, brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoil with a three inch nail embedded in your heel. Yeah.
I've read descriptions of this one as well. The only other thing that I recall being compared to this level of pain with the sting was the tarantula hawk, which is a type of stinging wasp. But apparently it is just like unimaginable in terms of an insect thing. So that's an example of of ants that have kept their impressive bioweapon um, but others lost it entirely, and in some cases, UH these systems adapted into chemical weapons systems to be used against other ants, and we'll discuss those
later on in this UH. This look at ant warfare because the end of it is up taking a different form because ultimately you're trying to solve different problems at different scales with different enemies. Okay, it looks like it's time for us to take a break, but we'll be right back with more than all right, we're back so we've now come to the portion of our our episodes here where we're going to really get into the endless wars of ant kind and the sorts of tactics they
employ on the battlefield. And we're probably not going to be able to to to make it all the way through the this next section without having to stop the episode and come back in part two. But if everything goes according to and you're only gonna have to wait like a day for the ant wars to continue. Now, the most important fact to drive home first is that naturally there are so many species of ants to consider,
and that will you know, a specific species. Tactics are then also going to change depending on circumstances, and this is just going to be the nature of war. Moffett rights that some ants succeed in battle by being on constant offensive, and he draws an interest in comparison here to a sixth century BC Chinese military general Son Zoo, who also noted that quote rapidity is the essence of war. Right, I mean, so much depends on your ability to not
give your opponent time to react effectively. Right, And so like the key a variety of ant to draw a comparison here to uh, he says, would be the army ants that inhabit a warm regions around the world, as well as AGAs marauder ants as prime examples here. Uh. For these ant legions, hundreds or even millions of these warriors will advance in a tight phalanx against their aunt adversaries. Now, I guess we should try to examine what that would
mean for ants as opposed to human warriors. So, if you're like an ancient Greek phalanx, this would involve, say, staying together in a tight formation with a wall of shields out in front that's sort of like prevents the enemy from reaching you, and that you would have trained to be able to move forward and thrust with spears in an organized fashion, all altogether minimizing the chances for the enemy to to break into you while you're pushing
into them. Yeah. Like basically the difference between like just two hordes like just slamming into each other and having something more and more in keeping with really what we've seen in their tradition of tabletop war gaming. Uh. For anyone out here there is actually played any of these games, you can certainly relate. But even if you've looked at one. You get the sense of order, and I think that's
what draws players into it. Right. You have all these these unit these little individual soul jeers that are part of different units, and these units are working together. You're having to employ a strategy to deploy them and then move them around and counter the movements of your adversary. And again, for a human this is done by you know, either the godlike figure that looms over the gaming table or it's it is the domain of a commander. But for the ants it is it is just that pure
swarm intelligence that allows it to take place. Now, Moffett points out for that for for human forces just advancing in a phalanx, part of the issue here is you need to know where you're going, right, which is obvious. Your your your your your PHALONX needs to have a target or goal or purpose, like cutting its way through the defenses in order to get to the gates of Troy, that sort of thing. But some hands ants, however, just kind of stick to this roving PHALONX tactic, just a
roving decimating horde that this brings to mind. Oh, I'd say, like the Tira the Tyrant are I mean from forty Warhammer forty thou Ide an example of this, you know, or various sort of alien bio adversaries in science fiction where it's just it's just this massive hord that's working in unity and uh, it's difficult to stop. Right. However, human forces you know, tend not to go this route.
They tend to depend on scouts as well to determine where to apply that offensive pressure, where to send your phalanx. And some ants do this as well. Some species will send out a small team of workers to serve as scouts. But this too is risky. Is this risky strategy for ants because a team of scouts they have to report back to the colony in order for a larger force too, then return to obtain that food source that they just scouted.
And this is true of human scouts as well. In a military scenario, we might well consider the case of imperial probe droids for example, right, and empire strikes back. You send out these droids, and yet one may discover a revel based on hoth, but it actually needs to survive have and then it's and then get word back to the empire so they can deploy their their a
t eighties, you know, their their massive army. Likewise, the Empire would find this to be a better method send out the probe droids, because we can't send the A. T. Eighties to every world just in case there's a rebel base there. So basically for the for the Empire, for the ants as well, it basically means that you can depend on you can send out fewer ants and cover a larger area in order to scout out potential targets.
In the case of the ants, potential food. Now I can imagine though, there are a lot of considerations that must be built into ant behavior based on not wasting resources on like you know, on you know, going somewhere where there's no longer anything useful to be done, right, Yeah, because there's always the risk that the enemy will move before a larger force can arrive, or that that food source that was scouted out it's just not going to be there when your your aunt troops roll in and uh.
In all of this for the for the ants, pheromones are key for their communication. Here. The scouts use this to tag the food source for the larger force to find. So so the pheromones of the ants here would be the Imperial probe droids a day about kind of message that it sends out. Yeah, basically like the pheromones end up serving as communication lines mofit rights that uh quote, the workers of the army ants or marauder ants can immediately summon any help they require because a slew of
assistance are marching directly behind them. The result is maximal shock and awe. So much like in more large scale conflicts, you would have to you'd have to in some way ensure that communication lines are able to remain open for forces to be effective exactly. And again here you know, the for the ants that is is largely this realm of of touch and smell. It's the pheromonal information that's
so key. So really I feel like this at this point in the podcast, I think we do have a pretty broad view of like what's going on with on with the ant war effort, about how how troops are distributed, how communication is taking place, and then how offensive pressure can be applied to different areas depending on the need. Oh, but there is so much more ant battle to talk about. Yes,
indeed there is. Uh yeah, we we were only able to get through like the first half of our material here because there's a lot more about well just about like the at the individual level, there's a lot more about like the how like aunt jaws work, the power of ant bioweapons, it's etcetera. But then also when you get into the Marauder ants specifically, there's been a lot of wonderful work regarding just how they carry out their campaigns and to what extent we can compare uh these
these acts of ant conquests to actual human battles. Well, I can't wait to come back next time and fight on with the Myrmidons. Yeah, more ants, more allusions to UH star Wars and various tabletop gaming scenarios. It's gonna be gonna be a lot of fun. In the meantime, If you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, you know where to find us, and that is wherever you get your podcast, wherever that happens to be, what strange service you depend on for
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