Crazy Ants and Electricity

Oh wow, I love I love everything about that headline because it just implies that these ants are coming to eat your precious xbox and there's nothing you can do to penetrate its exo skeleton. It's just gonna laugh at you. They feast on electronics, They're crazy, cannot be killed, cannot

as capitalized. Um, they've got the little subheads here. Since it was first spotted in Houston in two thousand two, it's spread to some twenty one counties in Texas, twenty counties in Florida, and a few locations in Mississippi and Louisiana. The omnivorous and attacks and kills other species, as well as monopolizing food sources to the detriment of the entire ecosystem. It also attacks electrical wiring causing millions of dollars worth of damage. So it's just an unstoppable force. It's like

an invasion. I'm imagining those ants from Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Did you watch there? You didn't watch it? No, you know that the buzz wasn't all that great, so I just never got around to it. Robert, I get mad when people haven't watched the same bad movies I have. You've got to go subject yourself to this. Have you heard about the gopher? No, there's a gopher like in Caddyshack Gopher. Yeah, this is

like a c g I gopher in it. And there's also c g I ants marching through the forest and attacking people. M I should probably check it out at some point. No, don't waste your time. It's the best part of it is Cape Blanchet, who's the best part of everything she does. But there are crazy ants. They're essentially crazy ants or their giant crazy ants. Is that what you're saying. No, I think it's actually not a very good point of comparison once we get into the

details on crazy ants. But man, so I I put this up here because I hate the Daily Mail. That's I shouldn't say I hate things, but uh, yeah, I I kind of hate the way their their headlines work. But I also can't resist that they just go for it. They say, cannot be killed and feast on electronics. But of course we are talking about a real organism here, Yeah, one that's not quite as outlandish as this. Uh, these

headlines and subheads make it sound. No, And while the idea of feasting on electronics is not quite exactly right, it's not as far off as you might imagine based on I don't know, you know, whatever you found out when you clicked on that Daily Mail article about the Longness monster washing up on the beach, you know. And I also have to point out that I have I have heard versions of this where people think that the

crazy ants eat electricity, which is also not true. Yeah, like their RoboCop they need to charge up at not right, Yeah, they're seeking out your electronics so that they can they can they just jagg onto that that that precious juice. Did you ever see that mid career West Craven movie Shocker? No, but this is one that that you've been telling me about for years. Yeah, it's so it's West Craven at at the height of his I don't care, and he makes a movie with the Oh what's a Mitch Pelegie,

the boss from the X Files. Yeah, he plays like a murderer who gets sent to the electric chair, and then he turns into an electricity killer who like can fly through TVs, and he can go through power lines, and he when he gets hurt, he can heal himself by sticking his fingers in an electrical He's basically the electricity gremlin from Gremlins to the New Batch. You know, I've never seen Grimlin's too. How many people hate me? Now?

Uh no, So let's explain. Are a little bit more anecdotes about what the deal with this crazy aunt is and why people say it feasts on electricity, even if that's not exactly true. So there is a New York Times story on crazy ants by the writer John Muallam, and it tells stories of people with crazy ant nightmares in their homes, specifically with the ants attacking their electronics. So there's one story about a man named Mike who had his house infested to an unbelievable degree. Quote one day,

his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from the vents in his living room floor, so he powered up his shop back to clear them. By the time he was done, he had sucked out five gallons of ants. Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their fifty inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel

and found the guts throbbing with ants. Oh that's that's lovely. I mean that just sounds like like Tales from the Dark Side episode. Yeah, you can't, well there, what's in the Tales from the Crypt movie? There's a guy who gets flooded with It's not ants. I think it's cockroaches, isn't it? Oh, are you thinking about Stephen King's creep show? Not Tales from the Crypt creep show? But you know the Tales from the Crypt. I'm sure it has an

insect horror episode that I'm forgetting. Yeah. Another story from that New York Times article, there's a man named strom Duke. The story of strom Duke quote, one evening his iron stopped working, Then sparks shot from the appliance, and a tide of crazy ants came rushing out. Other Dukes lived

in neighboring houses, and they all had similar stories. The ants had caused six dollars of electrical damage to one woman's car, infiltrated the glass break detector of one house's alarm system, causing the alarm to blare, and just the previous night, shut off the water at Strom's brother Melvin's house by disabling the pressure switch on his well. It

really sounds like it could be a horror movie. I can imagine all these essentially the movie Squirm, except instead of screaming earthworms, you have ants just streaming out of telephones in various household gadgets. Yeah, and if you don't dig too deep, if somebody just says it, it sounds like it could be plausible. Right. The answer eating electricity. You keep finding them inside the TV, inside the iron, inside the sensor, the air conditioner, compressor, the gas pump.

They're everywhere the wires are, So why why wouldn't we assume they're eating electricity? Yeah? I mean, the mere idea of ants being drowned electricity isn't that crazy? I mean eating electronics? Yes, that's nuts. But organisms are inherently bioelectric, even in the know the mighty electric eel. It's nothing compared to lightning or the lethal volts coiled inside your household electric outlets, but it's there. It's it's really not that grandiose to think of it as as a sparkle

of life. Even so. Yeah, just the mere connection between electricity organisms, uh, you know, one can easily buy into that. Yeah, you can easily imagine they're trying to power up right, or at least that Yeah, there's maybe some kind of electromagnetic field being omitted, and that field tends to draw in insects of a certain sort. It makes me think of, um, Robert, did you ever see that ants circling the iPhone viral video? I don't think I ever did, know, Well, allow me

to show you something. Oh wow, So it's just a phone looks like it's receiving a call, and ants are just circling around it like uh, like they're they're intending to invade it where they was sieging it, corralling it even yea. As I look at this video now, it's got almost five million views. It obviously was a viral hit and It was published by something on YouTube called Viral Video Lab. I'm pretty sure it's fake. I looked at the Snopes thing on it. The Snopes article is like, well,

you know, we haven't proven it's real. It's hard to prove a video like that is fake. But a lot of the people who have been analyzing it, you know, their Reddit threads on it and stuff, and people are like, you know, if you look at certain parts of it, it really looks like the ants are blurry kind of animations that have been edited into the to the picture. But yet again, it doesn't seem impossible that a phone which puts out an electromagnetic field could cause something like

ants to circle around it. I mean, we know that certain animals like birds use a certain amount of magnetic kind of path finding to orient themselves for migration. We know that there are electromagnetically sensitive animals that live in the water. Sharks and rays have a certain amount of

electromagnetic sensitivity. So you kind of might assume, even though this video turns out to be fake, that there could be things like that there's some kind of field being put out that sucks in all the insects around it. But with crazy ants. Uh, that does not appear to be the case. But the answer, that answer is still quite fascinating, right it is. So there is more than

one kind of crazy ant. Actually, the kind we're talking about is Nylandria Fulva, commonly known as the Raspberry crazy aunt Raspberry without a P because it's named after a guy named Raspberry r A S B E r r Y, or also known as the Tawny crazy ant. Maybe we can mostly call it Nylanderia Fulva or something, because who wants to say raspberry or tawny when you're talking about ants? They sound delicious, though, Yeah, this is it a flavor of ants? Yeah? I think so. It's kind of I'm

imagining ice cream cone crawling and crazy ants. Well, I'm sure there are ice cream cones like that. Another point of comparison I should make is that when reading about how these ants pile up, you know they're these massive volumes of ants. The guy talked about sucking five gallons of ants out of his air conditioner with a vacuum cleaner.

The people who have really bad infestations of Nyland Area Fulva in Texas and stuff say that the ants will sort of like pile up head against the sides of their house like snow drifts, and if you don't know what you're looking at, it can look like huge piles of coffee grounds or something, suggesting there could be a flavor. It sounds like the zombies and war Zy right where

they're just kind of piling up against the wall. Well, that's a that's a kind of interesting thing, the way that ants can behave a little bit like the zombies in the World War Z movie if you haven't seen the movie, zombies are getting over a barrier by just like piling their bodies up against it and eventually forming a staircase made out of other zombies to get to

the top of the wall. Yeah, they're really just playing ant like behavior in that in that in that film, because I'm instantly reminded of cases that we've talked about in the past of uh, you know, I believe the fire ants in particular forming a raft, Yes, exactly. Yeah, they'll they'll make a raft for themselves when it floods, a raft made out of ants for ants to survive a flood. I want to see zombies do that. Maybe the zombies have done that in a in a film

or a TV show I just haven't seen it. It's kind of a reminder of the bizarre, deep, almost kind of group intelligence that you see in use social insects like ants and bees. But anyway, as we were saying, there's more than one kind of crazy ant. Crazy ants are native to South America, specifically northern Argentina and southern Brazil, so picture kind of middle Middle region in South America.

And they were first discovered in Texas by an exterminator named Tom Raspberry in two thousand two, and since then they've been spreading throughout the Gulf Coast. They're now in Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi. And people thought in those regions that the red fire ant was pretty bad. They

thought it was a troubling invasive species. But the crazy ant has actually been replacing the red fire ant for many years there Now it's also displacing other arthropods like spiders and centipedes, which can destabilize the food chain because larger predators like birds need to be able to eat things like spiders and centipedes. They're not so keen on a crazy ants. All right, hold that thought. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we

will jump back into the swarm of crazy ants. Than alright, we're back. So we mentioned that the crazy ants are of the genus Nyland area. Um, you might wonder how do they get the name crazy ants? Is it because they're crazy because they want to get into your TV? That doesn't really seem like how a name would come about. Apparently they get this name from just descriptions of their

foraging behavior. And if you've never seen what this looks like, you should go to YouTube and you should look up videos of crazy ants foraging because it's it's kind of hard to describe. It's this frantic, erratic, extremely fast movement. Uh to me, crazy ants moving around in a swarm. It almost looks like a swarm of gnats zipping around in the air, except the movement is confined to a

flat surface on the ground. Yeah, if you're used to sing and you know ants embarking on journeys generally like a path from one place to another, you look at this and it just looks like they're just a scramble. They're just a mess. Yeah, it's just a mindless swarm. Well, you think it's a different kind of foraging strategy based

on different mathematics. Right, when you've got a single line between two things, you're maximizing efficiency there, Like the ants are not expending any more energy than they need to to get from one place to another in order to transport goods and seek out new stuff and all that. But when you see these these ants moving around, you

get a very different idea. It's almost as if they're going for a different type of investment bet payoff matrix, Like they're betting more on random movement leading to possible discoveries of things leading to potential payoffs in in a kind of like cloud type movement. Yeah, they're just scouring

the terrain to see what they can find. Now, I listened to an interview with a U. T. Austin researcher named Dr Edward Lebrun, who is an expert on crazy antswer who studies invasive ants in general and um, one of the things you're saying is that they're very successful invasive species because they share traits with other successful invasive ants, one of which is that the crazy ants are what he calls super colonial, meaning you've got no divisions between

colonies of the same species. So some other ants might set up a colony here and then a colony over in the neighbor's yard. And if the ants of those two colonies come into contact with another, they're going to fight it out right, like rival kingdoms exactly. They're in competition for the same resources. It's like, you know, you and your neighbor fighting over I don't know what you

would fight over with your neighbor. You found treasure, yeah, buried treasure right on the property line, and you say, I'm getting my sword, that's my treasure. But the crazy ants don't necessarily behave that way. Crazy ants from different colonies apparently treat one another with deference in respect. They come across members of another colony, and they treat them basically as if they were members of the same colony. So, con specifics, members of the same crazy aunt species don't

tend to antagonize one another. They team up. And from that New York Times article I mentioned earlier by Mullum Lebroun, the researchers says that he believes there's a single super colony of crazy ants that occupies quote as many as four thousand, two hundred acres in Iowa Colony, which is a place in Texas strangely enough, uh, and is spreading

two hundred meters a year in all directions. It's basically just this one giant organism because in many ways a colony of ants or a colony of any youth social insects kind of does behave like a single organism split across multiple bodies. Wow. So yeah, this is they're essentially the the the Tyrannids from Warhammer forty thousand. There just this invading superorganism. Well you've mentioned the Tyrannids before, but

you've got to tell me a little more about him, Robert. Basically, it's an army of xenomorph inspired sort of biohr is also very inspired by the the alien antagonists from Starship Troopers, so that kind of adversary and the ideas that they just come and they just lay waste two entire planets. You know, it's funny you should mention Starship Troopers because we were just talking about the World War Z kinda

and aunt. What what World War Z zombies and ants have in common is that they'll make mega structures out of their own bodies to climb over things and stuff. The bugs in Starship Troopers do the same thing. Yeah, Yeah, that's right. They did in the film version. Yeah. Oh, I don't know if they do in the book. Yeah, yeah, I've I've read the book, but I don't I don't recall. Well, I think it's time we've got to address this question.

Why do the crazy ants keep invading electronics? Why do you find them in the TV and the iron in the detector and the all that stuff. Well, part of the answer, of course, is based on the way they hunt for food and resources. They are simply going to come across electronics, right, I mean, they are going to find them because that's they're They're just scouring everywhere. They're gonna scour your home and they're going to run across

your various electronic gadgets. Yeah, you're exactly right. I Mean one of the things that comes through in the stories about crazy and infestations is that that they they become so pervasive in everywhere. You know, if you've got an infestation in your house, they're gonna be all over the place, and so they will be scouting out all kinds of things. And this actually leads to one thing that Edward Lebrun

said that I thought was pretty interesting. He didn't use these words, but he said essentially that there's got to be some selection bias in the characterization of them, mainly invading electronics. And his exact quote was quote, when your power goes out, you want to know why you find a bunch of ants. That's a good reason to get your video camera. Which is a very good point about the way that we tend to notice things, right, We

tend to notice something when it's an unusual problem. You're much less likely to get the camera out if it's you know, not turning off something that you might be trying to use. That's right. And then of course the reason that that that they wind up in your electronics, the reason why it becomes a problem has a lot to do with not so much the certainly not the

electronic components there, but just the case itself. Like if if they end up in your computer tower for your your PC, it's not because there's a you know, there's an active battery in there or anything, right, it's the it's it's the tower itself is an ideal container for the ants exactly. So crazy ants are different than many other types of ants. If you've got a group of red fire ants, Solenopsis invicta, which they've got a great

Latin name, Solenopsis in victa. They're gonna build a colony, right, They're gonna dig, and they're gonna build a mound, and they're gonna dig tunnels in the mound. Their their ecosystem engineers, right, like we were talking about in the City Evolution episode. They build their own ecosystem and then they guard it to the death. Crazy ants are different. They don't dig very much. They dig a little bit and not much. They prefer to nest in existing cavities they come across

in the environment. So the insides of boxes containing electronics tend to be an eye deal type of enclosed protected space that's perfect for them to climb into and form a nest inside. Yeah, enclosed spaces with with space in there and a limited numbers of of entrances and exits, right, and very small entrances and exits, so predators, it's gonna be hard for them to get in there. When was the last time an ant eater got inside your TV? Rightly, it's it's true, it's it's it's it's pretty safe from

less than five times. It's got to be. But also Lebron and other experts have pointed out another reason why you might tend to find tons of ants and the guts of your TV, or tons of crazy ants pouring out of a compressor box or something. Lebron says that when the crazy ants get agitated, they released something known as an alarm pheromone. Now we know that a lot of the communication between ants who share a colony is

pheromone base. They release chemical signals that are distributed through the air that can essentially smell messages from one another, and the alarm pheromone is a chemical that has a smell that alerts conspecific ants to danger or trouble. Now you can imagine that this could work several different ways in the wild. Right, one way an animal might use an alarm pheromone would be to say, Hey, I'm in danger. There's something dangerous here, you better stay away. But not

so with the crazy ants. You know, I feel like this sort of pheromone based behavior you often see this pop up in monster movies, is a way to outsmart or defeat the adversary. Blade too comes to mind. There's the end up like mimicking the pheromones of the reaper vampires and you know, directing where they swarm. But I feel like it's rarely explored as that the prime motivator.

Is there a monster movie out there where the whole crazy interspecies conflict comes down to a misunderstanding over alarm pheromone? May be interesting. I've never heard of that, but you could easily see how, especially given what I'm about to say, that that things could get mixed up and go bad. So another what Lebron says is, actually, it's not the way that I just mentioned. It's not that they put out an alarm pheromone that says I'm in danger, stay away.

When you put crazy ants in a vial, he says, they get very agitated, and they get mad, they release their alarm pheromone. And if you take a vial of these really angry agitated ants and you put it next to a trail of other crazy ants, instead of avoiding the vial, the ants are going to swarm all over it. They're actually attracted to the alarm pheromone. And this kind of makes sense for ants because being used social insects, this is how they defend nests. Like if you've got

a nest and something's in the nest. Attacking the nest, what you want to do is bring all of your family members in to fight the attacker off. So basically they're there. Their whole way about doing things is if you mess with one crazy ant, you're messing with all the crazy ants, right, I mean, one crazy ant doesn't stand much of a chance right there. They're they're very small.

Crazy antswer tiny, especially compared to some other AUNT competitors of theirs, which are bigger and have powerful venom glands and stingers and stuff. Crazy an'ts are little things. But of course the problem here is someone with an invaded xbox. They're they're not intentionally messing with the crazy ants. They're not trying to eat crazy ants. They're not They're not they're not trying to do the uh, the colony's harm. But what happens if, if, if a if a single

crazy ant comes to harm within your xbox. That's exactly the problem. So it has been hypothesized by Lebron and others that what may be going on here is you've got an electronic device, or an electrical power box or something crazy ant comes in, maybe multiple crazy ants come in, either one ant or a group of ants touching one another create a short circuit. They touched the wrong contact points, they close a circuit and get electrocuted or burned because

they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how circuits work. No, they're like Indiana Jones's buddy wandering through the temple. They don't know there are traps here. They don't know to stay out of the light, so that

so they they just get burned or get electrocuted. And then when there's trauma, they release the alarm pheromone, and of course this draws in more ants, and maybe more ants get electrocuted or burned or something like that, and they release more alarm pheromone, and it draws in even more ants, until you've just got a TV sagging with ants.

And this again, this could work wonderfully. And say a zombie movie, what if the whole reason the zombies are attacking the the house all odd night of the Living Dead is because one zombie happened to, uh, you know, burn up in a toaster. I feel like there's got to be a good monster movie that already has a treatment of this. It must exist. I can't call anything

to mind right now. Yeah, like I say, it seems like you see the pheromone angle used as a as a brilliant scientific, you know, tactic against the monsters, but it's rarely the uh, the the actual cause of the of the encounter. Now, if you don't already live within range of Nylondaria fulva, I'm sure you're wondering when can

I get them in my EXAs well. The fortunate thing is that they don't tend to travel very far on their own because they don't have wing dispersal, so they don't you know, fly off new queens to set up new colonies far away. They move very slowly. I've seen it characterized as on average about two hundred meters per year is about as far as they go unless somebody moves them. And you can imagine how somebody might move

them by accident if they tend to inhabit cavities. So say one of these things gets inside your car or gets inside your TV and you move houses, or gets inside something else, and that is how these things can be transported to new places. Now, there are some questions that haven't been fully answered yet about what's the up upwards northern end of their possible range. How how far north could they go before, for example, of freezes hard

freezes in the winter would prevent them from surviving. And we don't fully know the answers tell those questions yet. But once we answer those questions, then of course who knows if climate change is gonna affect that over the coming decades anyway, So right, there's gonna that's changing the playing field for so many different organisms. Yeah, so what ultimately is at steak here with the crazy ants? I mean, it truly goes beyond just the the average, the the

the odds shorted out xbox right right. Well, the the damage is mainly not too human electronics. It's mainly going to be too ecosystems. Because they can out compete native insects. They can destroy beehives and other ant colonies. Um, I've read that they can even sometimes they're so thick, they swarm, so thick that they can smother and suffocate ground dwelling birds. It's horrible to picture, but yeah, they just get into the nasal cavities of chickens and other ground dwelling birds

and asphyxiate them. U they can get in the eyes of live stock. It's really gross as far as damage goes, I actually have read that there was at least one time when they shut down a chemical plant by getting into electronics. So we've been saying, okay, here are these these more reasonable explanations. Is not that they eat electricity, it's that there's this pheromone and here's what happens to

get them inside your electronics. I should note that in that New York Times story I mentioned earlier, Dr David Oi, an entomologist with the U. S Department of Agriculture. He according to him, he said, you know, we can't rule out the possibility that the ants are in some way actually attracted to electromagnetic fields and get in there. For that reason, that just hasn't been you know, we haven't demonstrated that, but you can't rule it out as an

influencing factor. So who knows. Maybe they are, maybe they are shocker material. But anyway, as as far as their effect on humans goes, I mean, I think a lot of it is actually more psychological than material damage. When you read about people who live in the places where they're dealing with infestations of these ants, they they they hate them, They're they are freaking out. I mean, I'm sure not everybody is like that, but there there are

some people who are really distressed. I can't at a voluminous the antsw are I can't imagine anyone not freaking out like we. We don't really want our homes to be um habitats for anything besides ourselves and our sanctioned pets. Nobody, nobody wants to see ants in their house. That is always a problem. You know that John Muellam article in The Times, It takes a dark turn when he quotes uh.

He quotes the American psychologist James Hillman and says that Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your individual consciousness to a merely numerical or statistical level. Well, I can't say that's exactly how I think about it.

When I encounter ants in the house. Usually I'm I think more, Oh, well, we left something out, the ants came in and are trying to eat it, and now I've got to set out some of these grotesque traps to try and kill them. Everyone loses, the ants lose, I lose. Nobody wants this situation. You know, I I don't like killing bugs and wildlife, but when I've had aunt infestations in my house, I've noticed that, like I just turned into a cold hearted murderer. I'm just like, yeah,

I'm gonna kill you all it. It does something to my brain. Well, they're they're just they're out of place. They're not supposed to be here. That's not what the house is for. I feel like I should learn to be a better person. It's it's easy to do that when you were out and about and encounter the ants in the yard, But it's just in the house that

changes everything. Now, one of the things that a lot of the conversation on crazy ants has centered on has actually been like bureaucratic, scientific and government response to them. Like a lot of that New York Times article I mentioned. While it's got some great anecdotes and stuff in it, a lot of the article is actually focused on the scientific community and the government's alleged slowness to identify the species and respond to its spread in a way that

might not be fair. Right. Yeah. I found an interesting response to this particular New York Times article by a research scientist, Alex Wilde and he offered this critique. He said, quote, this is not accurate. Scientists did not, in fact, quote swarm into debate unquote. The slow response to identifying in fullva was exactly the opposite. The trouble is that figuring out the origin and invasive ants isn't anyone's job, at

least not in the United States. What happened was that a few ants scientists, in their spare time from whatever their official duties were, have occasionally offered an opinion about these new invaders. And he goes on to summarize further and said, and he says, I don't see the point of singling out the egghead scientists for being slow to identify Nylanderia fulva when the real trouble is bigger and structural. Americans simply don't value basic research enough to support a

system that rapidly pinpoints emerging pest problems. If we want to quickly identify new pests, we need to salary thousands of positions for taxonomists where afpid response to emerging threats is part of the job. I think that's a good point to make. I mean, uh, maybe we should have made it more clear that one of the things in the article is that you get this idea that these like exterminators and people have to be the ones to step in and really push forward on identifying the species

because the scientists are dropping the ball. It really basically the horror movie just writes itself again because you can imagine the poor exterminate. Yea, the exterminator character dies in the opening scene. Then the scientist comes in and it is all and trying to interpret it but ultimately can't get a handle on the monsters, and the monsters eat him. But the reality is rather different. There's no crack team of egghead scientists to show up to deal with with

with different outbreaks of ants. Yeah, and especially with the world we live in right now. I mean we live in a world that is number one globally connected through commerce and travel, so things can get back and forth between places really easy. And number two, we live in an era of changing climate where it's going to be we're always going to be altering ecosystems and changing the types of life forms they can support. We're getting into an invasive species. What would you call it the dead zone?

Not the dead zone, a life zone. Actually that's the opposite. A zone that is just rife for infestations of all types. Now, I want to be careful not to overly demonize invasive species, because you can sometimes see people get into this mindset of like, oh, this species from South America or something. They're just these horrible pests. It's not that the animals themselves are horrible. I mean, they didn't do anything wrong.

They're just trying to live. The problem is they're suddenly living in an ecosystem that was not prepared for them, and they're they're disrupting that ecosystem and causing rapid change within it. Yeah, we're the ones who disrupted the balance. So you can't. You can't getting mad at the weights when you're the one who switched them around on the scales. Yeah. That being said, you you can try to exterminate the

weights in this case of the ants. All Right, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we'll discuss the ant on ant action, the ant war between the fire ants and the crazy ants. Alright, we're back. It's fire ants versus crazy ants. How does this epic war go down? Robert, You've got to tell me. Is there a fire ant or any kind of ant Mexican

wrestler or Japanese wrestler. Oh, well, there are some. There are some sort of uh, there are some ant based wrestlers out of believe it's with Chakara, which is a US independent pro wrestling group, and they have a whole slew of ants. There's like fire ant soldier AUNT and they're all mass wrestlers. Yeah, how did I guess this? It just it it rights itself. You would just assume there would be AUNT wrestlers, and there are. I bet they're a good tag team, right, because answer great team players,

I believe. So. I'm not a I'm not a big Chakara viewer, but my understanding is they have uh they're like like tag team and six man tag team specialist. Yes, well, let's imagine that the team they're going up against is a team of fire ants. You've got a team of crazy ants, crazy ant wrestlers going up against fire ant wrestlers. Who's gonna win this battle? Turns out the crazy ants, the crazy ants are gonna win even though the crazy ants they're small, Uh that they don't have this powerful

scary sting like the fire ants do. Like you get some fire ants on you sting you. That is a that's a bad day, and it's gonna be some bad days like that. That hurts. Uh. The crazy ants, while they can be incredibly irritating if you've got an infestation in your home, their bite has been described as barely noticeable. It's it's not too painful to humans. Yeah, by humans, always important to know when we're dealing with miniscule species.

But then again, it speaks to the power of the fire ant that we're all aware of what a fire ant can do, so much so that we all know what it means when EO. Wilson j M's his hand into the fire ant nest and you see them just joyfully beaming with the ant pain. But anyway, Yeah, you've got these competitors red fire ants or Solenopsis invicta and the crazy ants or Nylon diarya fulva. And when they come together, the crazy ants apparently win. So how do

the crazy ants generally protect themselves? Well, there's a good article by Dina Fine marin inteen called the Rise of the Crazy Ants and Scientific American UH, and it profiles some good research in science from by Lebron, Jones and Gilbert about chemical warfare between crazy ants and fire ants, And so one of the first things you would observe is that if you've got equal numbers of fire ants and crazy ants that show up, they've got equally matched

tag teams, and they show up to fight, the crazy ants win about ninety three percent of the time. That's a really good record. Yeah, that is that they are. They are the victors by far. Does any wrestler win of the time stone cold? Um? Well, I I don't know, you know, some some have phenomenally high, you know, win win records. You know. It's just it depends who's the top character in a promotion, I guess, and that would definitely be the crazy ant here, probably because they would

be the most popular. Fans love the crazy ant. Yeah. And it's not just these in vivo matchups. Uh, there's colony snatching. Sometimes crazy ant colonies are found inside fire ant mounds that still have some fire ants in them alive, meaning that these nests were not abandoned by fire ants and then ex appropriated by crazy ants. They were actively invaded while the fire ants were still there and the

crazy ants took over. So the way the crazy ants are able to do this is that they can secrete substances from their glands, one of which is formic acid that was already shown to be a weapon that could be sprayed at attackers. There's a study in Toxicon in teen by gian Chin. It all called Defensive Chemicals of Tawny crazy Ants Nyland Area Fulva. Actually it's got a

long title. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but basically it says that Nyland Area Fulva they produce formic acid in their poison glands and then two keytones and alkanes in their dufes glands, all of which are used as toxic weapons against fire ants. So they've got these poisons they use. The DeFord Land compounds are used more as contact poisons. They're more potent if you like dab some on the enemy, whereas the formic acid has a

higher fumigation toxicity, so that's like gassing your enemy. So they have both melee and ranged weapons at their disposal. Basically, it is true, and in a high enough concentration, formic acid can even be an inhalation hazard to humans, causing like lung edema, you know, fluid in the lungs. But fortunately you don't have to worry about ants producing it in a high enough concentration that's going to hurt you,

but they could hurt other ants. I was a little bit interested in formic acid because I was reading about it and I found you know, okay, so it seems like this has been known about for a while and it's actually been used in in in some human industry. Well, I found an extract of a letter about the discovery of formic acid in ants in the seventeenth century that was written by a guy named John Ray to the

publisher of Philosophical Transactions in sixteen seventy. It was called concerning some uncommon observations and experiments made with acid juice to be found in ants juice spelled ju y c e. And I gotta be honest. The main reason I wanted to explore this is because I learned a new word. It's a note quote concerning the juice of piss myres piss myers. What's a pismire? Well, I did not know

this word before. Piss Myers means ants, and yes, it is pronounced piss mere, and it comes from the route you're wondering about right now, named after the supposed smell of ant hills at the time. So my is meant ants an ant hill smell like urine. That was the idea. Huh, I don't. I don't know that I've ever really stopped and smelled the ant hills. Maybe I should. I'm not enjoying life enough. Apparently, now it makes sense where the phrase piss aunt comes from. Yeah, okay, it means piss.

Myers always ant. I always thought it was just the random combination of two things, like, oh that that guy's really a poop duck. You know, there's nothing, there's not necessarily connection there, but you you put two things together and it sounds like an insult. What's you know? So I assume piss aunt was the same thing. No, but apparently this is not vulgar phrase at all. This is

seventeenth century scientific journal stuff. There you go. But anyway, A Ray considers the the author of this letter, he's been writing about this experiment he read about where somebody would drop chickory leaves among an ant hill and it would cause the chickery leaves to change color, indicating some

kind of chemical reaction. And he's wondering what's going on there, and he discovers that the juice of Pissmire's is an acid, causing similar effects to oil of vitriol, which means sulfuric acid. And in the end of his letter he writes, quote, Indeed, it seems strange that nature should prepare and separate in the body of this insect without and sensible heat, and that in good quantity, considering the bulk of the animal

a liquor. The same for kind with those acid spirits which are by art extracted out of some mimeralds, not without great force of fire. So I like that he's marveling, Like, you know, how is it that ants can produce this powerful poison? But we can't do make anything that's powerful without some kind of serious alchemy. But another interesting little hidbit I came across is that formic acid is used by humans and things. Of course, it's used as an

antibacterial preservative for things like livestock feed. But I've also read some stories just in recent months about how formic acid could be used as a liquid hydrogen carrier for fuel cell technology. So what if the electronics of future are powered by fuel cells containing the same defensive poisons used by Pissmires that shored out an invade current day

electronics in the Gulf States. Oh my goodness. Yeah, you're imagining a future in which the uh, the engine itself is a is a colony of some sort of crazy ants. I like it. It's like back to the future, except instead of the the garbage disposal that powers the futuristic to lorient, it's just he needs to dock has to find another crazy ant colony to shovin there. I think they really sad thing is that they're not like milking

ants to get the formic acid. I think they. I think they make it in an industrial process, but how how disappointing. Man, I can still dream. But who knows, Maybe maybe we could change all that if somebody invents a really efficient ant milking machine. Anyway, Anyway, anyway, getting back to the role of the formic acid in the ants defense. So we know they can use it as an offensive weapon against enemies like the at the red fire ant. But this Lebron paper from what it found

was really interesting. So they found that when crazy ants get into battles with red fire ants, they do this really weird series of behaviors. The crazy ant encounters red fire ant, then the crazy ant rears up on its hind and middle legs. Then it does this unbelievable body contortion where it curls its body all the way around to touch its mandibles to the tip of its abdomen. Then it starts doing something that looks like self grooming, rubbing a secretion around on its body. So what's going

on there? Well, researchers experimented by placing a tiny dab of nail polish on the crazy ants glandular opening on the abdomen, and this would block the opening and prevent it from secreting whatever it normally secretes, and so this was the test group. They also placed a small dab of nail polish on the sides of the abdomen of control group. This dab would not block any secretions. And then of course you've got ant fight, right, crazy ants

versus fire ants. So in the control group that just had the just had the nail polish on the sides and they could still secrete from the abdomen. The control group survived fire ant attacks almost a hundred percent of the time the crazy ants were just killing it. But in the experimental group, roughly half of the crazy ants were killed by fire ants, and among the ones that survived it may have been because the nail polish didn't

completely cover the opening, so some secretions got through. So apparently the formic acid is not just a weapon, it is a defensive body shield as well, protecting the ant from the venomous attacks of its competitors. And so also from the labrun study, the researchers tested whether the formic acid would protect another ant species from the venom of

the fire ant, and they found yep. Among a third ant species, those given a placebo were killed by fire ants about eighty percent of the time, while those treated with the crazy ants formic acid secretions almost all of them survived. So how does the formic acid produce this sort of body shield that protects the ant. We don't really know yet the secrets of ant warfare. There's always more to discover, you know. It makes me think about, um, how two different kinds of animals they live in a

in a different arena of competition. And now, obviously fighting between ants will involve some kind of like mechanical action and shearing, pressure and pushing and all the kind of stuff we imagine when we're fighting. But when we imagine big mammals fighting, it's all like force. You're delivering energy to one another. You're biting and twisting and cutting and stuff, and and that's how animals like us fight And because of that, I think a lot of our fighting perception

is based on things like movement and distance. You know, we're trying to see like how far something is from us and how asked it's moving. And when you're on the scale of an ant, the theater of perception and conflict is so much more chemical. It's all about what chemicals are present in the immediate area, what pheromones are telling you about what's going on around you, what pheromones you can put out that will do, you know and like? And because you're so small and the conflict itself is

so largely venomous and chemical in nature. Yeah, But then on the other hand, you are they. You know, we want to think about the individual ant, but you have such a use social organization here with an aunt colony that it's uh, it's far from a one from one for one you you'd have to think of yourself as the colony really, I think to get anywhere close to imagining what it is to be ant, Yeah, that's a

good point to remind us. It's like it might actually, if you could understand the mind of an ant, to whatever extent there is such a thing as the mind of an ant, it might not make sense to be the mind of an individual aunt. It might maybe there really is no such thing as an individual aunt. I mean, of course, there is the object of a single aunt body, but that doesn't really that's not really a biological unit

as much as the colony is the unit. Yeah, Like, we fall into traps two of our our language I've I've read before regarding bees. Another famous youth social insect, of course, is that we we we know the Queen Bee is not an actual queen, and yet just by referring to her as such, by approaching bees with with human models in our mind, we think of her as being some sort of an authority figure. We can't. It's so easy to fall into that trap when really she

is another cog in the machine. Yeah, I propose we replaced the phrase queen be with gene b. It's the b who's the vehicle for genes for the next generation. Yeah, I like that we should push through that gene b gene b. But not like not like the name is gene. Well maybe it's j E A and it's you know, the feminine gene that will work. That'll work all right, So there you have it. Uh As always, head on

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