Ant Wars: Episode II - The Antmire Strikes Back

James translation of the Bible. It's from the Book of Proverbs, chapter six. Uh. And I was looking right before we started. I was like, oh, let me check my scholarly Oxford Annotated edition to the Bible to see if it's got any insights on how the author of this passage knew that all of the worker ants in the colony were female. And no, it just says this passage appeals to the natural world. That yeah, because I had questions about this one.

I was not familiar with this passage. We just kind of we're looking for for fun things to read at the at the top of our our second ant War episode, and I was like, oh, I wonder what the what what the old King James version had to say about ants? And here we are a verse that at once seems to to get the gender of the vast majority of an aunt colony correct and also, uh, doesn't get hung up on the idea of a central ruler like in In a couple of ways, this is a very um

accurate reading of ant civilization. You know, I didn't even think about it, but I'm sure that means this is one of those verses that's been employed by a Christian apologist to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because it But but I gotta say this versus is pretty dead on right. Uh. There is no guide overseer or ruler. It's just the swarm intelligence that emerges from the ants evolved instinct. And uh, and it's true the ants are not lazy, like I think that's the point of the passage.

It's like, look, the ant doesn't wait around trying, you know, wait around to be told what to do. It just knows what to do and does it right. And uh. Of course, then there's this bit about the gathering of food and the storing of food, which, depending on which species you're looking at is also really accurate. Of course, as we continue to look at examples of of ant civilization and ant warfare, we're gonna get into some examples that they are a bit more barbaric and uh ravaging.

I guess yeah. For a biblical parallels, some of these ants stories are going to be closer to the Conquest of Canaan than the Wisdom of Proverbs. But this is funny because it also brings up the idea of you know, in the last episode we were talking about obviously, ancient people had been looking at ants and trying to understand their behavior long before there was a unified scientific study.

You know, a field known as entomology and the comparison to military forces and armies has been there since ancient times. But I think this is definitely not the only case where people read spiritual significance into ant behavior. No, yeah, I was. I was reading about this, and ants have a sacred role in a number of different religions. In some African traditions, they are considered messengers of the gods, and throughout India you'll find various customs that involve protecting

antlines and ant hills. Even uh leaving out food for the ant hills, or decorating them in some slight fashion, like you know, the sprinkling of of you know, some sort of colored or that sort of thing. And uh, and likewise it's considered heinous to disturb an ant hill especially. I was reading about all this in a book titled The Sacred Animals of India by Nandita Krishna, which is an excellent little book from Penguin Press. You can pick

it up most most places. I think I picked it up at a yoga studio once while I was waiting waiting for my wife to get her shoes on, and I'm like, oh, what's this a book about animals? I started leaving through it, and it's just animal by animal, uh, you know, some some some fascinating facts about how it

ties into Hindu traditions. But then also sometimes there's a little science as well, so like there's a bit about the ant and they also touch on some of the basic facts about ants and their role in ecology that we've been discussing here. But but in this book, the author describes a couple of cool details. First of all, a tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace.

So Vishnu comes to him and points out a line of ants in the dirt and tells him that each and every one of them is an indra that rose to the highest level of existence and then fell down again via pride. So there's a, you know, this recurring idea that ants, like all these other animals, are part of the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that of al Niki, the author of the Ramayana, emerged from an ant hill or a valmika after ten years of meditation.

So in this case, the the author um of the Hindu epic ends up taking on the name of the

ant hill as part of their new emerged identity. That's interesting and counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as a place that would be appropriate for meditation, solitude, you know, like quiet contemplation, Whereas when I think of an ant hill, I would think of the exact opposite, something that is certainly organized from from the ant's own genetic point of view, but us looking down at it, it's so chaotic and frenzied.

It seems like it would be impossible to focus. Yeah, but then I guess you could also look at it as a place of just pure order or two to really get into I guess some more of a you know, a topic that's important in Hindu epics, A place of pure duty, like there's just there's you know, absolute duty, UH youth, social duty to the colony, and there's no there's no room for aunt despair or aunt ambition. You know, you're not going to be pulled in either of those directions.

It's just pure absolute duty. So really it's it's an ideal place to fall um if you, you know, you achieve some demigotic state of pride and UH and then have to you know, fall back down to a lower life form and then work your way back up an it's a good place to start, kind of a form of contrapostito, right, like the idea that the divine punishment or not necessarily punishment either, but the the divine justice somehow fits the UH fits the original offense that brought

it on. Yeah, so if you're joining us in this episode, you've probably figured out that we're talking about aunts and UH. And this is indeed the second in our Aunt Wars UH series. So if you didn't listen to the last episode, we would recommend you go back and give it a listen. We discussed the empire, the ants, and and very broadly the endless wars that form the boundaries of their individual kingdoms.

I want to go back again to the writings of Mark W. Moffatt Uh, and this is from that Scientific American article that I previously mentioned that's also hosted on his website at dor bugs dot com. He writes, quote, in Ghana, I witnessed aceeeving carpet of workers of the army ants species dorilyss Nigricans searching together across an area

hundred feet wide. These African army ants, which in species such as de Nigricans that move and broad swaths, are called driver ants, slice the flesh off their enemy or quarry with blade like jaws, and can make short work of victims thousands of times their size, although vertebrate creatures can usually outrun ants. In Gabon, I once saw an antelope caught in a snare, eaten alive by a colony of driver ants. That highlights something that I was planning

on talking about in just a little bit. When we get to one particular or species of army end that I was finding really fascinating. But uh, but I guess we can address it now. So, you know the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull vision, which goes back to earlier movies and stuff where the the army ants essentially are terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the You've got the Hollywood acid that that strips the human to the bone in in seconds. You've got the Hollywood piranha that

stripped the human to the bone in seconds. I don't know if either of those are really very accurately reflective of stuff that happens in the real world. And then the ants are the next thing, the Hollywood army ants that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't seem

to be something that happens in reality. Certainly not. I would say with a with a large animal that can move, a lot of army ants are are going to be absolutely apocalyptic in their implications for smaller animals, for insects, arachnids, centipedes, and even small vertebrates like little frogs and snakes and stuff. But larger animals they don't actually represent a threat like that,

like you can ease only get away from them. The only case I would imagine where army ants might represent a real threat to larger animals would be if you are totally immobilized, right, so if you're caught in a snare, buried up to your neck in the sand, that sort of thing. Right, And even then I don't know if they would necessarily kill you, because they're they're looking for their main prey species, which are going to be all

kinds of invertebrates. Yeah, they're probably going after something like termites or other ants. Uh. Heads sticking out of the ground not really on the menu usually, But but I wouldn't want to try it. I'm not saying necessarily safe. That could be the next big Hollywood magician act though, right David Blaine Bury's I mean, I'd be surprised if he hasn't done it already. Well, no, it's the next big confidence game, you know. So they got to walk

across the hot coals. That's like the confidence building exercise. But but the next stage is the bury yourself up to the neck and let the army ants come. Well, another a little piece of health cleaning from the last episode I want to throw in here. In the last episode, I briefly mentioned pheromones as being essential to aunt communication. And I don't want to gloss over this too much because I imagine many of you have have seen videos

of pheromonal demonstrations, uh, you know, the the the ant Overlord. EO. Wilson himself does this at times in which a pheromone is painted like a paintbrush or a qutap or something across the surface and then ants follow it and is informative as well as a demonstration like this can be. It don't take it to mean that there's just there's a real blunt simplicity to it. As as Wilson himself stresses,

there is a pheromonal language for ants. Uh. Any given ant species uses a whole palide of pheromones and chemical signals to communicate. Yeah, it can be very complex, though there are also very simple ways to see it in action and like creating the pheromone trails that are like. EO. Wilson was involved in research that discovered one of the main glands in the ants gaster that deposits of pheromone

that creates the trail leading to food. And generally if you deposit this pheromone, as you will see, you know, humans can extract it and put it in the bottle, like you're saying. To these demonstrations where you just put a line of it down on a table and suddenly the ants form up and follow the line. Those can be striking direct demonstrations, even though the full web of

pheromonal interactions can be much more complex. And you can also easily do this yourself, even without um the extraction of that kind of pheromone, simply by if you've ever tried dragging your finger across an ant trail where like you know, if you can smudge the chemicals away and maybe disrupt it with some of the oils from your own finger, suddenly the movement of the ants becomes chaotic. It's all confused because the deposition of chemicals that has

created this trail has been broken. I've been I've been noticing these ant trail ant trails a lot more on

my walks recently. Uh, my family and I will go out to some various nature walking by trails in the area that they're not that populated it and some of them have lee you know, slabs of concrete, and they'll be these little essentially a little trenches that stretch across them where one slab meets the other, and invariably those are the trenches through which the ants moved, not over the top where they're going to potentially get smashed by

a by bicycle tires are stepped on more easily. No, they're in the trenches, moving across from one side to the other. It almost makes me wonder if we've unintentionally created little bridges or tunnels for the ants, the same way that on Christmas Island they have to create these crab bridges and tunnels for crabs to let their migration get across the roads. Yeah, it does seem like that,

like accidental um pro ant design. Uh. Now, now, speaking of the Oh Wilson, I want to point out to everybody we've talked about Io Wilson on the show before, an EO. Wilson has of course authored a number of books, uh, many of which are are ideal for a general audience. But if you want to watch a documentary about them, there is a wonderful PBO documentary that came out several years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and NN. You can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I

know that at least here in the United States. You can get it on Prime. It's really good. Yeah, it's so I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I watched the first half and it's just a delight. There's a great moment where so EO. Wilson, you know, one of the world authorities on ants, revolutionary biologist for the world of youth social insects, and he says at one point, he says, the question people want to know the answer to most often about ants is what do I do

about the ones in my kitchen? And then he says, uh, and here's what I tell them. You get a little piece of a cookie and you put it down near

the ants, and then you watch what they do. I love that answer because, on one hand, it feels like maybe he's trying to teach us something like, Oh, he's trying to teach me a lesson about why the answer there to begin with, you know, I need to watch I need to make sure my kitchen is clean, and I mean to make sure there's no there's no food product, or I need to think about why they've invaded my kitchen.

But on the other hand, it seems just as likely that he's saying, you're not going to do anything about these ants. You're going to enjoy them. You're going to you're going to feed them and watch how they work. There there's a beautiful stoicism and enjoy in the way that he observes ants even as they are, you know, doing things that most people would regard as an offense

or an irritation. You know, we talked several times now about like the scene where he's just letting all the fire ants sting his hand and he's watching it with with such fascination and talking about what's going on is they're all attacking his skin at the same time, and uh and then yeah, and this is basically the same attitude with the kitchen instead of your hand. It's like, no, don't get upset, just take pleasure in watching nature work. Oh and by the way, Wilson has a new book

on ants coming out this fall. I noticed called Tails from the Ant World. All right, on that note, we're gonna take one quick break, but we'll be right back and we'll return to the world of the ants and

the wars that they rage. Alright, we're back. One of the other sources that I was using in reading about ants for these episodes is the excellent book Animal Weapons by Douglas j Emlin, and in it the author has has a whole bit where he's describing basically, the whole book has to do with with bioweapons and the evolution of bioweapons and organisms and then comparing them to human warfare.

But there's a whole bit where he's talking about the quote giant jaws and thick distended heads of the army, ants that allow them in mass to topple so many opponents, And he shares a fun bit of experience that really underlies just how you know, powerful the design is on these little guys, uh, little gals rather um. Basically, he was out doing field of some field experiments in Belize and he accidentally sliced his thumb with a machete, and without anything else to stitch at the wound, this is

what they did. First of all, they did have some rum on them, so they stailized the wound with rum. But then they suitured the wound with ants. They simply placed the ants live ants allow along the line of the cut while someone held the cut together and allowed

their little jaws to snap into place. And then they tore the body away from the head and the heads, of which they only required five or six, kept their jaws latch tight and this held the wound together and allowed them to eventually get proper medical attention for the cut. I would say, uh, if I just heard this story in isolation, I would be inclined to doubt it. It seems so hard to believe that. I mean, obviously I

don't think Emland's lying about this, But that's just that's amazing. Yeah, it's I mean, this is it's also a great illustration of like of a scientist, you know, thinking about about the how to solve a problem. I would never have thought, oh, I'm cut. I really need to let's get some ants attached to this wound. But but it's it's also just a wonderful um uh, you know the description of just how powerful these little jaws are. Now army and marauder

ants wage their war for food, uh and resources. They they will battle other forces for control of food resources and will also invade other ants societies in order to claim their larva and their pupa as food. Yeah. And these are some of the most striking types of ants that we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with the ant warfare that we've discussed before, say between uh different types of fire ants, even here in the in

the southern United States. But seeing ants that forage on the scale and with the tenacity of army answer marauder ants is is a different kind of thing. This might be a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel of this one species of army ant that I've been reading into a lot. Uh. And this is the species

known as eston Bercelli i. UH. There are a lot of actually different species event that are commonly referred to as army ants, but seton Bricellii is I think the one species that people are most often talking about with that general title. They're very charismatic, well observed and distributed species. They live in the humid equatorial regions of Central and South America, especially in the Amazon rainforest, but with the range extending up through Mexico and down south of Brazil

into Argentina. Uh. But they're primarily in the equatorial rainforests, and these ants will form colonies of several hundred thousand adults at a time with this rapacious foraging behavior, satisfying the energy needs of the colony with raids that cover hundreds of meters according to one estimate. I believe this was cited by Carl and Marion rhetten Meyer, who'll I'll mention again in a moment their aunt experts. But the figure is that on average, each colony of Seton Bricelli

i kills and eats about thirty thousands small animals every day. Wow, thirty every single day. Uh. And so they have this carnivorous diet, this enormous carnivorous diet that is especially important because they're trying to supply the developing larvae of their colony with a high fat diet that the larvae need in order to grow, so that the babies need animal fat and the adults go out rating. So there's another really interesting thing about this species to me, which is

that they do not make permanent nests. Seton Brichelli I do not make permanent nests. We often think of ant colonies as defined by their nests, right the ant hills answer environmental engineers. But due to the energy needs of this species, they can't be tied down to one place for too long. Imagine them trying to form a permanent nest while their larvae are growing and they have these huge require months for animal fat, you know, other insects

to bring in and all that. Within a day or two they probably would have cleared out all of the food sources within I don't know, maybe a few hundred square meters of wherever they are. So instead, Esseton Bricelli I builds a mobile fortress known as a bivouac. This is a moving fortress that protects the queen and the developing larvae. But the fortress is made not out of structures or materials from the environment. It is made out

of ants. Do you see Do you understand? It is a war rig four ants made out of the interlocked bodies of living ants, like a cage of millions of legs, antennae, and mandibles. I want to quote from Peter Tyson, writing for Nova in an article about these things, quote this elliptical mass talking about the bivouac. This elliptical mass maybe three feet across and hold up to seven hundred thousand ants. When they need to move to a new site where they bivouac on the surface, rather than build a nest,

eber Chellii workers go first ferrying food and larvae. Only after nightfall does the queen follow escorted by a massive soldier ants that completely surround her and will defend her with their lives. So the bivouac again, is this moving fortress. The queen is inside and the cage cannot be breached.

Uh this this was just so captivating to me. And so if you're looking for these things in the forest, the bivouac can sometimes be found inside a hollow log or just on the forest floor, but also sometimes it can be found hanging suspended from tree limbs. Imagine that like a dangling fortress for ants made out of ants, and it falls in line with a more general tendency of some ant species, including this one, toward body based

engineering projects. These army ants are also known to say, assist the mobility of their horses by filling in potholes along the foraging route with plugs made out of live ants, so you just smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants, or also for building bridges out of themselves to allow the rest of the army to cross gaps. And apparently these BiVO wax also uh emit an other worldly stinch, this amazing smell that allows you to locate them by

smell alone. Within the rainforest. I would love to know what this smells like. You Now, all of this is a wonderful example two of the super organism aspects of ants. How with other creatures we we we we talk about the individual, you know, and in terms of understanding the species. But but with ants, you look at behaviors like this and you see there's such cohesion, there's there's there's such use social um perfection that you can't look at an

individual ant to understand them. You have to look at what the pliny itself is doing. But there's another thing I was thinking about with this model of ant life, the fact that these ants create no permanent nests. It sort of reminds me of the idea of the strategic advantage of offense. You know, the old saying that the best defense is a good offense. This is actually considered true in some cases in military theory, because the reasoning

goes that when you're on the attack, you have freedom. Basically, you like, as you're on the attack, you are creating options for yourself, versus when you're defending, you have constraints, you have limited options. This is often true just for example in chess. Uh you know the chess players talk about the initiative that you gain when you're on the attack. You're constantly limiting the options for your opponents next move if they have to defend their pieces against an attack

that you just set up. And this is obviously true across multiple context It's known as maintaining the initiative. Now, obviously there are there are many uh, there are many advantages you can get from having a defensive structure, like a nest that's buried down in the ground. You know, the queen is very well protected, but that also limits your options, right and and this is sort of the all offense strategy of the ant world. Well, it seems

to be working well for them. I mean, it's not like they busted this strategy out of on a test basis. This has been honed over for millions of years. So there's another thing that I was thinking about because I was thinking about warfare and Game of Thrones, and one thing I like that's acknowledged in those books is sort

of like the real resource needs of moving armies. You know, it's not like a lot of fantasy where it's just sort of like uh, almost ethereal warriors just ranging limitlessly to do their heroic deeds, you know, I mean, like you get the idea in those books that like, our armies need supplies and all that. And and also it's acknowledged that there are huge numbers of people that a

company armies that are not themselves warriors. These are known as camp followers, and this is absolutely something that that happens in real warfare. Large armies don't operate in a vacuum. They have material needs that are not necessarily related to battle, and they also create needs and opportunities for resource capture

as they move and fight. And this this is why armies on campaign or historically a company both by camp followers that you know, might like sell things to soldiers or might be family members of soldiers, or sell services to soldiers, um, that kind of thing. But there are also often bandits that follow around moving armies because you know, when an army comes in and attacks somewhere, disturbs the

existing order, that creates a lot of opportunities to exploit. Yeah, I mean, it's an absolute disruption, so it makes sense that opportunists would be there to take advantage of it. And I agree, I think this is something that that that that is well explored in the Song of Ice and Fire books, the idea of of war that just you know, ravages the countryside in so many ways, like

it just just totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um. I think I think they probably, I think they probably brought this out well in this series to to a certain extent, especially early one. Yeah, I mean towards the end of that those human wars like West Ross is just decimated and just tired and exhausted. Yeah, that's true. And I mean it reflects reality that that the war is not just a clash between armies, but it's the sort of the army versus the entire environment and everyone

living within it. And I think this is in some ways very true, Uh for ants as well. I was reading a really good article. Uh it was a short article, but a good one in that GEO by the always great ed young Um that was focused on work by Carl and Marian retten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago. These are ant experts who created it a nearly exhaustive catalog of all of the animals that follow the army

ant species seton Bercellia. So these are the camp followers in the bandits that accompany this army uh, Ed writes, quote, there's no doubting their success as predators, but army ants also bring life wherever they march. They have an entourage of over five hundred and fifty species that hang around their legions, of which three hundred or so depend on

the ants for their survival. So in their disruption of of the environment around them, they are also creating enough opportunities for the exploitation of resources that a full like three hundred or so species couldn't live without these ants, and another two hundred something or so uh depend on them in large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I hadn't really thought about it. We talked about the ecological importance of the hants um and uh and this is

just another example of that. Yeah, so this includes like two hundred or so species of bird. One example is the oscillated ant bird. There are a number of antbirds ants as they as they move along the army ants will flush insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids, small invertebrates, and and so the ant birds will watch this happen and swoop in and take advantage of the

fleeing animals. Uh, they actually almost never prey on the ants themselves, And so the antbirds will fly around the forest checking in on seething bivouacs. Right they perform a bivouac check, they're like, okay, is this bivouac about to march? And if it looks like one is about to get the war rig ready and send its workers out on raids, and the birds will converge here and start looking for opportunities. Apparently, the ant birds will fight amongst each other for the

best spots. Of course, the best spot would basically be positioned just beyond the advancing front to catch all of the panic prey animals as soon as they're driven out of hiding. Interesting. You know, I wonder if anyone's ever tackled this from a sci fi perspective. You know, we're we're always encountering situations in sci fi where humanity is locked in a you know, an epic strup will struggle against some alien adversary or there or they've been partially

wiped out by an alien adversary. I wonder if anyone's ever explored the idea of of, you know, the alien force comes that decimates the planet. You end up with like a post apocalyptic scenario. But then the primary antagonist is not the destroyer because the destroyers moved on. It's the opportunists to come in their wake, right, the ant birds and the scavengers that come in after Earth has been Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that would be an

interesting thing. I've never read anything like that, but I bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if they have, someone tell me what it is. And if it doesn't exist, somebody write it so I can read it. You know. Another interesting thing about these ant birds at young points out is that on top of them existing as as sort of opportunists in what the ants do, there are

secondary opportunists. And these are are a lot of species of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed off of their droppings after they have preyed on the insects and other animals that are fleshed out by the ants. But beyond that that, there are a lot of other species. And there's not just species looking for food resources. Apparently parasitic wasps and flies that reproduced by implanting larvae in

the bodies of other invertebrates. They also follow army ants worms watching for the ants to drive crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and other critters out of hiding, and then the parasites take immediate advantage at young sites caladoxia flies, but also quote stylo gaster flies which shoot harpoon like eggs at fleeing cockroaches, and and flesh flies that lay their eggs in the open wounds of animals that have been injured

but not dismembered by the ants. Oh wow, So in some cases, not being killed by the ant horde um is war worse than actually being decimated. About it, well, I guess it depends on what you think is worse. I mean, is it worse to be injured by ants and then get maggots implanted in you, or just to be killed just to be disassembled out right? Yeah? Even more amazingly, some parasites actually live within the ant bivouax themselves,

having various adaptations. We've talked about aunt mimics before. There are apparently some species like this, like beetles, that survived by mimicking ants and just sort of like hanging out among the ants trying to be undetected. But this was my favorite part ed. Young writes that some parasites quote use the ants as mobile restaurants, jumping onto workers that are carrying food and eating their booty right under or over their very jaws. So they hang out on the

ant head, eating the food that the ant is carrying. Again, I think for a lot of species this would require very special adaptations or you know, you would immediately become prey yourself. But it's just amazing to imagine the tiny, like full ecosystems basically that are made possible by the

opportunities created by the chaos of a rating army. Yeah, in a way, you kind of have to come back to that that analogy of the superorganism, right, that the the ant colony is what we might think of as the individual, Like the ant colony is the body, and so it is going to have its own parasites, It's going to have its own uh symbiotic relationships and uh and and that's kind of what we're seeing here. Absolutely,

I think this is just the most astonishing species. I feel like maybe we're not even done with with with Ston. We can move on in this episode, but but we may have to come back to them in the future. All right, and that note, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we will consider the marauder ants. All Right, we're back. So we've already talked some about ant species that are referred to as the marauder ants. You read a passage from one of

those articles by Martin W. Moffatt about marauder ants. Yeah. Moffatt points out that marauder ants excel in deploying troops in ways that increase efficiency and reduce the cost to a colony. And one thing that really makes them interesting, uh, is their variety in sizes among the workers. They vary in size more than workers in any other ant colony. So this is where it gets interesting in a sort of war game point of view manner, because essentially we're

getting into different unit types here. So if you're fielding droids, for instance, on on on in a battle, yeah, we're doing clone wars here. You're not. You're not just busting out a ton of standard B one battle droids, right, you're also busting out B two super heavy battle droids or heavy weapon uh droid ecka droidka um roly poly guy. If you're playing something like Warhammer, forty thousand. It's not just space marines. You're also busting out specialized assault marines

or heavy terminators, that sort of thing. And so Moffatt points out that the marauders deploy smaller miners, uh that's what we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front line and there these are just weak and hopeless, uh individuals against adversaries. But there are tons of them, so they work as a kind of barricade. They bogged down the enemy long enough for larger ants to move in the media's and the majors. So again, same species, same essentially um variety of this ant, but it's like a

it's a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some of these individuals print the majors compared to the miners. They are five hundred times as heavy as the smaller version. So these are real bruisers, I mean, these are these are monsters. Uh. My initial impulse would be to compare these like strictly to larger um you know, bruiser heavy class fighters and fantasy armies, like I'm thinking about some of the big specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor.

But but then I was thinking about it. I was like looking at the size deferential here, and Okay, let's assume that an orc, or say a stormtrooper, uh is roughly the average weight of a human. If we're to multiply that by five hundred, you're talking thirty four tons. So in the real world, that's essentially the difference between a human and a humpback whale. Okay, so that's crazy. Even even the troll would not really capture the size

difference appropriately. Yeah, Like I ended up going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how heavy different fantasy and sci fi army vehicles and units were. And it's best I can tell based on some fan estimates. You might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial stormtrooper and one of those two legged a t ST walkers. That would be the difference between a Marauder minor aunt and a Marauder major aunt. This is what Mafata writes.

Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Ryans assure a low mortality for the media's and the majors, which require far more resources for the colony to raise and men maintain. Putting the easily replaced fighters at greatest risk is a time honored battle technique. So, in other words, stormtroopers are notoriously bad shots, and they are apparently easily replaced, But you'r a T S T S. Those are far more precious. Yeah,

that will they cost more to make? Yeah. Mafata also points out that the marauders tactics here line up with the example one season armies throughout history the use of conscripted farmers and laborers alongside elite professional soldiers, with the common soldiers absorbing the worst of it while the elite units are protected and move in at strategic intervals. He also points out that marauders use what is known in military strategy as defeat in detail tactics, defeating an enemy

unit by unit, rather than engaging in enemy's full strength. Now, marauder ants also battle their own kind, pitting colony against colony, and in these contests the majors and the media's also hang back and let the miners do most of the fighting, tearing each other apart, and in contests that tend to be even more brutal than the interspecies conflicts that also take place. I'm gonna get to some of the logic behind the differences in strategy here in just a minute.

By the way, yeah, because Moffatt refers to the work of University of Bristol's Nigel Franks, who found that the tactics of these ants in particular is consistent with Lanchester's square law, an equation developed in World War One by engineer Frederick Lanchester, who also devised Lanchester's linear law, which will also touch based on here. Yeah, I keep wanting to say, lanister, so don't let me say that. Keep

coming back to the fantasy warfare now. So, Lanchester's laws are a set of mathematical models trying to explain outcomes in battle based on various kinds of initial force disparities. Generally, the main disparities are going to be individual unit effectiveness, so like how much damage each unit can do, and then also the numbers of combatants on either side. Lanchester's square law in particular shows that in some types of combat.

This is not all conflicts, but in some types of combat, for example shooting wars involving masses of soldiers armed with rifles that can aim in any direction. In these types of combat, there are ways of organizing confrontations majorly to your advantage. Just just based on the numbers of forces and how they're grouped specifically, that the main takeaway is

don't split your forces. Um So to illustrate this, you can imagine, say you've got battle droids in in Star Wars, and say maybe one side has a hundred battle droids and the other side has exactly a hundred battle droids as well. If you imagine each of the battle droids can shoot its blaster one time every second, and each shot has a chance of destroying its target, you can work out that after one second of battle, both forces will be reduced equally by about maybe after another second, etcetera.

And it just goes on as the two sides decreased by attrition at roughly the same rate, until both armies are mostly are fully vanquished at around the same time, unless for some reason one side gets an advantage early on. But that kind of process does not scale in a

linear way. So if you have say a hundred droids versus an opponents at general grievous is your opposing army and he's just got fifty droids, you you probably can assume that the larger force will win, but you might not understand how much of an advantage the larger force has.

So if if you have the know the same kind of thing working, after the first second, your hundred droids will probably have destroyed roughly half of your opponent's fifty droids, but they really will not have destroyed many of yours at all, maybe only like twelve or so. And as each second of battle goes on, you reduce their fighting effectiveness more and more, until what you're left with in the end is very little casualties to the larger army

and total decimation of the smaller one. And so this shows, for example, that if you have a force of a hundred battle droids, it would be much easier for that those one hundred battle droids to win two consecutive battles against fifty battle droids than to win one single battle against a force of one hundred. And this is exactly why divide and conquer is such an important principle of warfare.

If you break your enemy up into smaller groupings with these certain types of combat, your advantage over them does not increase linearly, it multiplied by the square uh. In fact, if you choose your battles wisely, you can even use this to allow a smaller force to beat a bigger one.

So if you've got a hundred battle droids, general Grievas has two hundred, you could still potentially beat him overall by keeping your forces together and peeling off small segments of like ten or twenty at a time to face sequentially, with negligible losses to your own forces each time. So this is again where we come back to defeat in

detail exactly right. So, in mathematical terms, what Lanchester predicted was that in these certain types of scenarios, uh, the strength of a group on the battlefield is the product of two things. The effectiveness of each fighting unit not times the number of units, but times the square of the number of units. And that's why it's known as the square law. And it tells you that for certain types of combat, sheer numbers can easily overwhelm differences in

the effectiveness of individual fighting units. And it's interesting how this tends to go against what seems to be people's desire to understand like dramatic violent conflict in narratives like in you know, epic poetry and action movies and all that, where it seems like what people or at least what authors think people want to see. Uh is the idea that a single highly effective combatant you know, you're John Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective enemies ganging

up on them. And for many types of combat, this is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are significantly more important than skills, Like better to have five hundred off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah, it it. It certainly does run run counter to our our our epic storytelling. Yeah, where it's like a one rag tag group of talented individuals can can can turn the tide of battle against against the faceless hord. Yeah yeah.

And we should not again that the square law is not supposed to apply to all types of combat. For example, in situations where combatants have to face one another in one on one duels, one at a time, they're the advantages of superior numbers are reduced to something closer to a pure linear function, and the individual effectiveness of of

each unit becomes a lot more relevant. And so the way this works out in the real world is that, like in situations where your forces do not have numerical superiority, military leaders who are conscious of these issues will try to engineer battle conditions to avoid square law scenarios and enforced linear law scenarios instead. One example would be like using natural terrain or fortifications to create choke points where the majority of the enemy forces are held back from

the action. That can't all fight you at once, the number of them that can fight you at the same time is limited by topography, and thus the battle becomes it starts to resemble something more like a series of sequential duels instead of a simultaneous war of all against all. And of course examples of this in history. Or you know the way the thing about the way castles are constructed, narrow passageways, uh, you know, natural ravines, bridges, gates, a

spiral staircase in the castle tower. These tend to reduce the salience of the square law advantage and help you out, especially if you've got a smaller number of more effective fighters. So, to bring this back to ants, the question here is which of these models is better at predicting the outcomes

of ant wars. Is it the linear model where there's this direct linear relationship between the size of forces and the outcome, or is it the square model where the larger numbers of concentrated forces just easily overwhelm other concerns like the like individual fighting unit effectiveness. UH. There was a paper that was published in the nineteen nineties and

the journal Animal Behavior. This was in nine by Mary E. A. White how House in Klaus Jaffa called ant Wars Combat Strategies Territory and Nest Defense in the leaf cutting ant Atta leave Agatta And according to their research, they found quote the leaf cutting ant atta leave Agata responded to a simulated vertebrate threat by recruiting many soldiers, and the soldiers would be a special special fighters large workers, but responded to con specific and interspecific ant threats by recruiting

mainly small ants. So the vertebrate attack here was simulated pretty much by poking a stick and you know, as they poke a stick into the entrance of the colony nest and then shake it for twenty seconds. And this was meant to mimic the mechanical disturbance that would be caused by an ants by the ant's main predator, the armadillo. In these attacks, what the ants would tend to do is they would bring more of their elite fighters to defend the nest, So in this situation it appears evolution

maybe favoring the linear reasoning in this case. Meanwhile, when the ants are attacked by other ants, they tended to respond instead with overwhelming numbers of less dedicated fighters. So a threat from arrival ant colony seems to have been solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated by the square law. Along these lines, Mofa also points out the quote a fighter's value to its colony bears on

the risks the ant takes. The more expendable she is, the more likely she is to end up in harm's way. As such marauder ants, he writes, they guard their foraging trails with old and or maimed workers and in fire ants, it's been observed that the old stay and fight, while the very young runaway and and firemants more in their prime will actually uh fake their own deaths. Wow, we'll fake their own deaths. I mean, this is again something that makes more sense if you think about the ant

colony as a single superorganism. It's like it's it's putting the the already day imaged or less effective parts of itself out in front to absorb the brunt of the of the violence. Yeah, alright, So at this point you're you're you're probably thinking, oh my goodness, they're out of time, and you you would be right, just as the Aunt War is heating up. Uh, we're gonna have to close out this episode, but fear not, we're gonna be back with a third ant War episode that will more or

less round everything out. Though a word of warning, if I am, if I'm looking at the schedule correctly, there will be another episode that will publish before the third ant War episode publishes, So just bear with us. The third ant War installment is on its way in the meantime. If you like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us anywhere you get your podcast and wherever that happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as

always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.