From the Vault: Ant Wars, Episode 3

Aunt Wars episodes. Now. In the previous episodes, we've already covered a ton of different topics, the evolution of you social insects like ants um. We talked about the conflicts between army, ants and and everything in their path. We talked about theories of combat disparities and how those may apply to ants and and control the ways that's Aunt sometimes select which members of the colony go out to fight. We talked about the bivouax, the big war rig for

the Queen made out of army ants um. It's been it's been a great journey so far, but we have to press on. That's right. Uh So, one thing I want to talk about it at the very start here is the idea of empires of the ants, because, as with human civilizations, apparently it's the larger ant societies that spread the most violence. Smaller ant societies are less likely to engage in any kind of protracted war against other ant species. But but here's an interesting point raised by

entomologists Shawn O'Donnell in Ant Wars for Serious Science. Some species of highly successful invasive ants demonstrate unicolonality. Uh. They develop a willingness to identify members of other colonies as part of their own, and the result is a super colony, a true empire of the ants. Yeah, we discussed the

super colony adaptation in our episode. It's about the multiple species of ants known as crazy ants, and this name comes from their rapid, almost frantic or radic looking movements sometimes when you like, if you watch video of them moving around on the ground, it almost looks like flies buzzing around. It looks like they're flying. Yeah, it's it's it's visually, at least to us, starkly different from the sort of you know, linear lines were used to seeing

for ants. Yeah, but the super coloniality issue came up in our episodes on the Mystery of Crazy ants supposedly being attracted to electricity or electrical appliances. Remember that where we're talking about all those stories people had of like the their TV being full of crazy ants and people didn't know why that was happening. That was, of course the raspberry crazy ant of the genus Nylanderia, and then we also talked about them in our episodes on Christmas Island.

Remember it was the invasive species of crazy ant known as yellow crazy ants or anoplo Lepis grass sillipps that was severely threatening the Christmas Island crabs. It was actually colonies of those ants that were spraying formic acid into the eyes of the crabs and into the leg joints until they were immobilized and then the ants just eat them. And there was an interesting project to try to introduce a species of insect there to Christmas Island that would

help cut down on the populations of invasive ants. But anyway, it's the tendency for crazy ants to form super colonies that is considered one factor in their success as an invasive species. Um you know, so they're super colonial, meaning that when colonies of the same species meet one another, instead of duking it out and going to battle with one another. They just act as if they were from the same colony. They team up instead of antagonizing one another.

UM and there are examples where people think they've detected gigantic super colonies of these ants. One that we read in one of those previous episodes was a New York Times article that that quotes Edward Lebrun, who's in a college US at the University of Texas at Austin UM, and he apparently believes that there was a single super

colony in the Texas town called Iowa Colony. I know that's confusing because we're talking about ant colonies and it's in Texas, not Iowa, but that's a town it's called Iowa Colony, and he believes that there was a super colony of crazy ants occupying up to forty two hundred acres in that town and spreading two hundred meters a year in every direction. But that's by no means the only Aunt super colony that's been found there. There are other species and other super colonies that have been found

all over the continents. That's right. Mark W. Moten mentioned an extremely large super colony of Argentine Aunt that ranges from San Francisco to the Mexican border. Trillion strong and united. It's a it's a super colony, and wars rage just perpetually along its borders. He writes. Each month, millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego. Clashes occur with three other colonies and wars that may have been going on since the species arrived

in the state a century ago. And these wars, as we've discussed in our previous episodes, are far from random thrashings of aunt brutality. Uh. These are wars that align with some of the same mathematics and tactics and principles that we see a play in human military history. And we have another example of this to consider, another interesting parallel that's drawn between the wars of ants and the wars of humans, and that is uh, the the the this thing that we refer to as ant tournaments or

AUNT tournament sites. So for starters, you might need to dismiss whatever sort of Mortal Kombat scenario is entering your mind here at the thought of an ant tournament. Yeah, but don't worry, because the reality is much cooler than just like a single or double elimination tournament for ance. Uh. So here's the here's an example that MafA Eo will Sin and others bring up frequently, and that is honey pot ants. Now, these ants are astonishing creatures in their

own right, even before you get to the tournament issue. Uh. Their their way of storing food is something that you must see for yourself. You you you should look up video of them. Yeah, because their name honey pot ants. Because what happens is the workers will the workers have the ability to gorge themselves unto their abdomens are enormously swelled and they look like little honey pots, uh, just filled

with liquid food. So instead of storing excess food within a stash within the colony like a lot of ants do, uh, the honey pot ants store it within themselves in these little mobile depositories that are themselves and swollen workers that we call repleats. And then if if you're another aunt in the colony you need a little food, will you come up to one of the repletes uh? And I believe you, like you can touch their antenna and just

the right way and they'll regurgitate up some food for you. Right, You you you you poke your estimate and it will barf up your dinner. Yeah, they're like little vending machines. Ah and I see you included a picture of this in our in our notes here for me to look at, Joe. They're wondrous, They're beautiful. They do look like little drugs.

They're so swollen they look on droplets of honey or like extremely golden chickpeas their their back lid in this image that I've shared with Robert, and it makes their swollen abdomens look like bits of amber. Now, in addition to this, there are there are other wrinkles to their their peculiarity. So they're highly territorial. They frequently prey on foraging termites, and should two different groups of honeypot ants happen upon the same resource, a tournament begins to determine

who shall claim it. So what happens is the workers from each colony circle around each other, standing up as high as possible on their legs. Behavior that biot is called stilting. So yes, what they're doing is they're trying to look as imposing as possible, as large as possible. And basically, the idea here seems to be that that that the larger colonies of honey pot ants tend to have larger individuals. So it's not only a show of immediate force, like hey, look how big we are to

get away from our resources. It's also a show of what kind of backup forces you have to call in. That's interesting. So it's just like you can almost count on the fact that if if this ant is big, all of her buddies are big too. Yeah. It actually reminds me a little bit of the Imperial invasion of hot and the Empire strikes back with the deployment of those enormous A T eighties, which I recently saw described online as quote a giant impractical terror weapon. Absolutely, Why

the legs? Why make your all terrain attack vehicles so vulnerable to a simple harpoon and tow cable? These these tall spindle legs make no sense. Well, yeah, if you think too hard about it. But as my my son was recently telling me, we were watching the Own War series and he said, you know, walkers are just always cool. It doesn't matter which side they're on. They're just cool. And it's true. But but I think also you can look at it like, yes, it's a it's an impractical

terror weapon. It sends a message, Hey, we're the Empire and we have resources on this scale at our disposal, so you'd best just abandoned the ice planet to us. And so that's what the weaker honeypot at force ends up doing this whole tournament. Uh practice limits the need for conflict and avoids the need for full scale and war.

The smaller ant army flees, but much like the rebel alliance, they have to be darn sure that the forces there uh they're seeding to don't follow them and trace them to their primary base, because the larger honeypot force will attempt to do this and they will not hesitate to follow them back to their colony, decimate that colony, and

then enslave the swollen repletes as their own food stores. Now, this is really interesting, the idea that they they make this display and try to make a calculation about whether it's worthwhile to fight. It's something that goes against the naive version of the nature red in tooth and claw idea that you know, animals are just always fighting and killing each other. It's always a violent struggle for survival.

I don't know how you could quantify this, but my gut feeling is that the vast majority of conflicts in nature never come to violence. There are displays between animals and then one side backs down. Yeah, I believe we've talked about this before and discussing like animal weapons and animal violence. Is that, you know, how often does one animal outright kill another? You know it? I mean certainly

in from predation, Yeah, apart from predation. Like the idea of two animals fighting to the death in a scenario where one is not trying to eat the other is is more of a rarity. But even so, It's like if you have a t rex and a triceratops, Like the t rex wants to kill the the triceratops in this scenario EO, but it of course does not want to be killed itself the you know, so it would potentially fight to the death. But on the other hand, they try sterotops doesn't want to eat the t rex.

It just wants to not be eaten by the t rex. Yeah, I mean, it just brings to mind the fact that animals they don't want to lose a conflict, but probably even more than that, they don't want to die, and so if if things are not looking like a like a pretty clear wind for them, they will very often just back down and try to get away. Now EO.

Wilson and biologists Burnt a Whole Dobbler have have compared this tournament scenario to these symbolic battles and the Highlands of New Guinea, the initial phase of of of a battle or war in which the two sides square off at a distance, and what they'll do. Yeah, this so the scrap at a distance. They're not going to immediately, you know, rush into each other like some sort of brave heart scenario that's cinematic um trope that we all

have grown so used to. Instead, they're gonna throw o spears. They're gonna fire arrows at each other, but with range in wooden shields in place, so there's actually like a a low possibility for fatality. And from here it might give way to a heated, closer battle, but the its

aggressions might actually end right here. And this apparently is something that one sees throughout the history of human conflict, especially when it concerns smaller clans of fighters, because such groups like this simply don't have the resources to enter

freely into a state of total warfare. Yeah, I think that state is more common, as we were talking about earlier, in in like larger empires, where you also have you know, the army that arrives on the battlefield also has the force of like a huge state behind it that will not let it walk away. It's a you know that that maybe the emperor back home is not going to be pleased if you see that this battle doesn't look good for you and decide it's better not to fight, Yes,

you'll find that he's not as forgiving, right. So Yeah, I think this is obviously a smart strategy, and there's a reason humans do this and ants do this. It makes sense to try to avoid conflict if you can. I also can't help but wonder if there's a comparison to be made here. And this is just me, this is not any of these other commentators that I've read.

They might have gotten into this, and maybe I just haven't read it, But I wonder if you can make a comparison here to the proxy wars between superpowers in the human world. You know, human cases in which each side certainly has immense resources, but in which case the destructive potential of atomic weaponry essentially reduces both sides to smaller,

more vulnerable clans on their respective hillsides. There was something I was trying to look up because this also made me think of the at least epic literary tradition of the champion warfare. That is, you know that you read

about it in the Iliad. It shows up actually in a lot of of ancient epics and stuff where armies will meet, but instead of you know, the whole armies clashing with one another, they will each select their greatest fighter and then those two will fight a duel that is supposed to, at least in some cases, symbolically settle the outcome of the fight. So I think of Hector versus Achilles, and I was looking for example. I was like,

do aunts ever do this? So I was trying to find examples of champion warfare among ants, but I couldn't find anything. I don't know if you've come across anything like that, But if there were an example of something like that, that would be really interesting, that would man that. Yeah, I didn't read anything about that in the sources I was looking at it. I wonder how that would have

something like that would evolve. You know, it's kind of hard to imagine being a real state of affairs without I don't know, I guess symbolic thinking among I mean, maybe that is something that would be limited. I mean, it's even more than that. It seems like something that's more limited to epic poetry and storytelling than than happens

in real life. Right. It kind of brings maybe it's the kind of story that makes the most sense for people that are so centered on the individual, you know, like here is the individual in the war, the individual that is changing the course of the battle, that sort of thing um, and it enables you to to take larger scenarios of battle that are more difficult to fathom and putting them in a one on one scenario, like in the last episode we were talking about the Lanchester

square law. You know, we can you know, we can certainly imagine that in our head with forces of on one side versus the other. But then you can also put it in the scenario of David and Goliath, right, and there you instantly have this very individual based story of smaller force and larger force. Even though it tells it ultimately tells the story like if we were to take that and extrapolate it to just a smaller force against a larger force, uh per those laws we were discussing,

that makes no sense. Like ultimately the the Goliath force is going to win unless they is some sort of crazy you know, outside context event, right or well, I mean it depends on conditions, right, because not all combat is equivalent. But yeah, generally, all right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we will get into some of these specialized units of the ant war than all right, we're back, Robert.

When you were a kid, did you get one of those Star Wars visual encyclopedias and just like a devour all of the different types of Star Wars stormtroopers that we never saw in the movies. Because in the movies you see the main storm troopers. You see the ones in the snow with like the big robes and capes. Almost I guess that's to keep warm or something. But then I remember reading about these other types that never show up in the movies, like lava troopers or something.

I don't know. Did you never read about this? Uh No, I've never heard of lava troopers? Um? I mean, I'm trying, I'm only vaguely remembering, but it seemed very interesting to me. I was like, why isn't there a movie about that? I mean, it's it's drawing on the idea that, of course,

you would have different types of specialized units for different terrain. Yeah, I uh, Star Wars specific I never had that book, but certainly, just by virtue of being into like miniature war games and even even you know, plenty of games I don't play or collecting, I love to just pour over the army list, like, Okay, here are your here your ranking files, and okay, here your specialist. Here you're you're fast moving troops. Here are you're heavy troops. Here

are you're infiltration units. Here you're close combat units. There's there's something, um yeah, just just endlessly appealing about about going through the rank and file of a system like that. Totally. Uh. And of course it shouldn't come as any surprise that many different kinds of ants have their own specialized units. Yes, absolutely,

so we're gonna discuss some of these. We're not gonna be of course, We're not gonna be able to really do justice to the entire rich diversity of the ant world, you know, plenty of which is still being discovered and is yet to be uh discovered by scientists. But we'll touch on some highlights here that are known. So first

I want to talk a little bit about specialized defenses. Uh. You know, we've talked so much about offense with ants, uh, but but sometimes said there's this particular defensive strategy in mind as well. Zoologist and intomologist Shaun O'Donnell points out that leaf cutter ants and army ants are both dominant ants species, and when they wage war, those wars can wait for days. So it's a it's a classic matchup in many respects, right, It's a you know, ravaging warriors

on one side and foraging agriculturists on the other. Right, So you would think of the army antsw is primarily like rating carnivores that are on the attack, and the leaf cutter ants are there their cultivators of their environment. Right. Yeah, So leaf cutter ants most very famously depend on their workers.

They have to go out, they have to cut the leaf portions, bring the leaf portions back, and then those leaf portions are used to grow their precious food crop, which is a fungus I believe, right, Yeah, fungus that is uh if I remember correctly extinct in the wild, is purely domesticated by ants long before humans came on the scene. Unbelievable. So it's mostly the work of these, you know, these female workers. But there they do have a cast of larger soldiers, and apparently they were something

of a mystery for a while. Researchers would look at them and they would ask, what are these guys for. They don't seem to be doing anything, They don't seem to have a purpose. But by seating army and invasions in leaf cutter nests, researchers were able to discover that they seem to be specialists just for army ant invasions, sent to the front lines by the thousands, uh to in an attempt to defend the colony. Even though it does seem like they tend to fail in the end.

But I mean, even in cases where they fail, it's possible they could be, say, buying time for the rest of the colony. Yeah, and it's interesting to look at that. That's that reality in terms of how other ant species deal with army ants, because apparently you very roughly you kind of have. You have two extremes. On one hand, those they just put up a fight. They're like army answer attacking, We're going to fight them back. We're gonna

give it everything we have. But then you also have some varieties of ants that evacuate everybody at the first sign of an attack. The army answer coming, So pack it all up, we're getting out of here. But then they can move back in after the invaders have left because their army answer are not gonna live there. They're not gonna hang out in your colony and wait for you to come back. They're they're they're here for the goods, and if the goods are not here, they have to

keep moving. Now here's another just super interesting adaptation. UM. In the last episode, I mentioned Douglas j Emlin's book Animal Weapons, which deals with the evolution of bioweapons and organisms as well as the development of tool based weapons and humans. And he discusses the feodole and genus in which individuals fall into various casts. So there, of course the reproductive male and females. They're the small workers, they're

larger workers. And then there are the soldiers and the soldiers of this genus boast quote grossly enlarged heads, jaws, and teeth. Okay, these are these A particular ants are also known as the big headed ants. But then he also goes on to discuss another genus of ants. This is Odonto Marcus, the trap jaw ants, whose lock and release jaw structure functions a lot like a mantis shrimp. You know, there's all this stored potential energy like a

crossbow that has been pulled back and locked. So when these jaws shut on these trap jaw ants, they can shut its speeds a one hundred and forty three miles per hour, so they slam shut really fast. Right, And here's where it gets That was a stupid restatement of what you said. But let's keep it. Yes, very very fast, especially on this scale too. Right. Um. But but here's

where he gets even more in raising. This is where he gets kind of cunning because the trap jaw ants, of course, they can release this bite at their adversaries, but they can also unleashed this bite at the ground and in doing so, launch themselves backwards through the air twenty body lengths as a successful escape tactic. Wow. So

this reminds me of indungeons and dragons. There's this ability that rogues have called the cunning action ability that allows them to effectively disengage in backtrack out of battle, so they're able to strike at an enemy and then get out of there really quick, so the enemy can't smite them back the next round. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's so it's it's crazy to think. It's almost like they have jet packs these ants. Yeah. I was trying to think of what a what a human technological comparison would be.

I was thinking about, like, I guess escape pods or ejector seats from fighter planes, or or just like maybe like it's kind of like a sky hook. Maybe a plane flies over just picks you up. Yeah. Yeah, I don't even know if there is truly a direct because when we're when we're talking about retreat and effectively, you know, backing your forces out in a military scenario. I mean generally, it's a very delicate situation with with with human military forces.

I can't think of anything offhand it seems like a direct parallel to this. Now, a lot of ants boast chemical weapons. We touched on this in the very first episode where we talked about the basic evolution of ants, in which early on it seems like you had more like powerful stings that were aimed at large, for instance,

vertebrate threats to the ants. But then the the evolutionary pressure becomes more focused on UH and warfare, and there so therefore you see all these various um adaptations emerge where it's more about waging war against ants, and sometimes it takes place of new chemical weapons that they may use. So a very famous one, of course would be formic acid. The word formic coming from the word for ants formic to day, yeah, and so that's what we see with

the formic acid of the form maica would ants. So these ants can spray formic acid from the tips of their abdomen. In fact, formic acid was first extracted in sixteen seventy one by the English naturalist John Ray. Is John Ray, the guy we talked about who was doing the experiments with with ants and formic acid and was

comparing it to urine. I don't think it is. I had to pull him up and granted a lot of these individuals with portraits from from the late seventeenth early eighteenth century, UH kind of look the same to me. But um, I don't think we touched on him before, could be wrong, but anyway, the formic acid of these ants that this is a great example of one variety of of reriverally in and of itself amazing chemical weapons that have been developed by that have evolved in these

ant species. But there are even more exotic examples to look at. And in this we're getting into the topic of exploding ants, which this is so good. Yeah, and this is a lot of you probably heard about about examples of this before because I mean, it's just such an amazing topic and it's certainly made the rounds in science communication and science journalism. Uh and in fact, I

think we've probably mentioned it on the show in the past. However, we're going to touch on some new stuff as well here, like the new findings new species that have been discovered just in the last year or so. So um. Well, one and one example that comes up a lot is uh campan nautists sunders of Malaysia and Brunei, whose bodies are riddled with poison sacks and so when they attack.

When they're attacked, they constrict and rupture fatally, forcing sticky poison out of their mouth anous and through their exoskeleton. And again, don't think of this as of the individual in this scenario, think of the group. Think of the colony, the good of the colony. So this is a situation where the individual is a biological weapon and they can readily sacrifice themselves to do damage against or in some way slow down an invading species. Yeah. I mean again,

think of the colony as an organism. So this is sort of like an animal with poison skin. The ant is sort of like the skin of the poison arrow frog, right, And but in this case they can they can like bear down and burst themselves like a like a like a cooked sausage, you know, uh, like like a gusher, Yeah, poison gush exactly. This is called autopsis, and it's involved independently in a number of termite species as well. But but you see different varieties of it. The kind of

shed light on how this seems to have evolved. So sometimes you'll have an autopsis utilizing species. It simply defecates on their enemies get too close, and I'm going to poop onto you. Other times you see it more a situation where they're they're bearing down, like they're pooping so hard that they're going to rupture their abdomen. And from this we get into sort of more exaggerated modes of

just absolute abdominal m explosion. And in fact, like IM said, there's a there's a nice new example of this that's come out. I was just reading in April establishments published in zoo Keys via Lassity at All about another variety of exploding at known as uh Colobopsis explodings explodons. I love this exploding a k a. Yellow do ats, but we're just gonna call him explodings because that's that's clearly where the fun is. So this is a wonderfully fascinating

species because minor workers in the colony have this exploding ability. Uh. They can burst themselves into this yellow chemical goo that is kind of like a spice that you know, again will kill or slow down or or aggravate damage an invader. But then they also have um have these larger major type workers and they're referred to as door keepers because they have quote big plug shaped heads which they use to block intruders in the tunnels. Pause to appreciate this

for a moment. So this is something that other species of ant have have a version of this two specialized members that essentially have a locked door four ahead. It's like, this is a fascinating biomechanical way to raise the drawbridge on your colony. Right, These would be ants that have dug, you know, excavated colonies with tunnels, and the ants themselves to become part of the defensive structure by closing the entrances of the tunnels with their heads. Yeah, this is amazing.

I'll also point out I believe there's another variety of ant that seals its entrances with stones, and we'll get into some stone examples here in a bet, But I want to get back to explode and stuff. So this is a particularly elegant adaptation for defense, but it also, at least on the surface, seems to buck the trend we see earlier with marauder ants. For the marauders, the majors are the big guns. They're the A, T. S. D s that move into tear apart enemies that have

been bogged down amid the individually less impressive miners. For explodons, the majors are the plug heads, so they function mostly as barricade engines. Perhaps, you know, one could make a loose comparison to like a mobile field generator in Star Wars or something. And with explodings, the majors rarely leave

the nest. They're they're purely domestic defenses. It's the miners, however, that packed the explosive punch that are that are self detonating, uh, sacrificing themselves, ending their lives in an attempt to strike out against the invaders. So these are literally suicide missions. Yeah. Yeah, Like what apparently will happen is um like with the marauder miners, the explodings miners are indeed the first wave.

So there's an attack on the nest, then they pour into battle, they latch onto an enemy with their mandibles, and then they hold their abdomen close to their grappled enemy. Then they air down and they burst loosing out of a thick spiced yellow goo that again either kills them or hinders the attacker. Wow. And then again Marauder style, the explodents majors burst in with their plug heads to

barricade the tunnels against increased invasion. And I guess one of the interesting things to think about here is that we're really getting into a whole specialized realm evant warfare, defensive warfare fought within the nest um, you know, defensive urban warfare. UH specialists here tunnel warfare specialists, which is something of course we see tunnel warfare and urban warfare in human scenarios. And it makes me think back to the linear a Lanchester's linear loft that we discussed in

the last episode. Yeah, again as a refresher, the linear law tends to apply more to UH conflicts that are close something closer to a series of sequential duels, where a force with larger numbers can't use the square power of those larger numbers to easily overwhelm smaller forces. UH. You use defenses to your advantage to try to limit the scope of how much battle can take place at the same time. And a classic way to do this is to create choke points, to create tunnels. Yeah, and

so this species would seem a master at chuckpoints. So you're you're pouring into their UH to their home and you've got, you know, hundreds of of soldier ants that their at their disposal. Like they have numbers on their side, but they have specialists that can explode UH and a specialists that can seal off the tunnel. Uh so, which it gives seems to give them, uh you know, more

or less equal footing with the invaders. And I want to stress again that explode Us is a newly discovered variety of self sacrificing ant, first written about in and so more remains to be explored about them. But also in general, it just drives home how many aunt species are out there in the world that we just that we haven't fully documented yet, how many, how many strange and wonderful adaptations are out there, they just simply haven't

been chronicled yet. Isn't that amazing just just to know that there's so much more to learn that will be things like this, Just bizarre, amazing adaptations that already exist. It's not like they're gonna come into being in the future. I mean, obviously new species will come into being. They're already out there. We just never looked at them before, never at least never documented them in a in a

thorough way. Absolutely all right, on that note, we're gonna take one last break, but when we come back, we'll discuss the Stone Age tactics of bicolor ants. Than alright, we're back. So the next variety of and I want to touch on is the Dorry Meyer mix bicolor ants. So if you have the higher ground, you know all you need is gravity and mass. Right, soldiers can defend cliffs or the walls of a castle by dropping stones

on the heads of attackers. But of course you can also go on the offense, particularly via the technologies and the human in realm of bombardment, an enemy might drop things such as stones, bodies, or explosives upon an enemy city. Yeah, in the human realm. I mean, one way you can think about the evolution of an air force is that it is a It is a force evolved to give you permanent high ground. Uh. And sometimes ants can definitely

take advantage of this. In particular, these dory miromix by color ants of Arizona Um previously known as Cono Mirma by color ants. They were discovered back in ninety nine by Moglik and Alpert to actually use small stones to

drop um on their adversaries, basically ant tool use. Yeah. Now, I mean, I guess when you think about aunt tool use, you do have to like take a step back and think about what ants are always doing their manipulating uh, the soil they're manipulating little grains of sand and moving them around, and this is just kind of a byproduct of that. What are else are you doing with those

pieces of the ground. So basically, the researchers back in seventy nine observed that workers surrounding the nest would pick up small stones and other objects and drop them down the nest entrances of rival nests that we're you know, reasonably close by. Now, comparing it to bombardment might be a bit much, but it is at the very least active interference in a competitors industry. So so perhaps one

might think of it more as like industrial sabotage. I don't know, I mean, it's it seems like that would sort of counting me. It's using gravity and high ground to your advantage in the attack on the enemy's infrastructure. So in many ways, it seems a lot like bombing or shelling. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you could make an argument for it. Again, going back to our first episode, nothing in the ant world is gonna be

one to one right with the human world. But uh, like Moffatt said, you know, good comparisons, you know, worthy comparisons are not going to be a direct one to once, but there are a few other possible cases of soil and pebble based tool used by ants um which again shouldn't be really all that surprising given their intense manipulation of the Earth. Four sixty five paper from Line at All reported pavement ants using soil to attack bees and

the desert harvester. Ant will apparently drop bits of soil into honey water and then carry the soil particles back as a way to bring the honey water to the nest. This was this was via a study conducting eighty four by Philip McDonald of the New York Intomological Society, and it seems to be related to the similar use of of soil to cover up liquids that ants cannot just outright remove. Okay, so the idea here is that you come across a liquid food source that you want to

bring back to the nest. You obviously you can't hairy liquid the same way you could carry like a part of another insects body back is food, So they will pour like soil into the liquid to create a sponge full of sugar, and then carry that soil sponge The sugary soil sponge back towards the queen. That seems to be the case here. Now uh, it's it's possible that this is something that more is obvious in experimental scenarios.

I'm not entirely certain on that, but it it certainly underlines like what is possible using the properties of soil at that scale. And again, it seems like the more u uh usual activity that you see is like there's some sort of sail poison or a chemical and the ants don't know what to do with that. They can't really interact with it directly, but they can put soil on it. They can essentially bury it. They can cover it up right, like kicking soil onto a smoldering camp

fire or something. Yeah. So yeah, I would imagine that these studies alleging some form of ant tool use, like most of the are these alleging types of tool use and animals probably have encountered some dispute, you know, about interpretation of the behaviors. U It seems like that always comes up. Now here's another one that's pretty interesting. This is an example brought up by Moffatt concerning the so called slave maker ants. So slave making is also known

is duosis in the biology world. So these are cases where you'll have ants that are brood parasites that in some species rely on the practice absolutely, but another species are not obligate slave makers. So basically what they do is they invade a colony, they capture the brood of

another ant. Usually they're capturing the young, and generally it is a very specific species that they're focusing on, and then they bring those young back to their own nest where they're made to work, while members of the slave maker species itself just focus on rating more nests for

more workers. Now, moffat ship Ar is that while slave making ants are generally heavily armored, heavily armed with superior fighting abilities, some species use a propaganda chemical uh is the is the term he uses to throw off the enemy during raids. Uh So you have to think about this, right, You may be big and strong, but it goes back to that linear law that if you're going in to invade a colony, if you're gonna go into the thick of it, then great armor, great weapons, that's only gonna

get you so far if you're outnumbered. But if you have some sort of chemical advantage, if you're able to trick the others into thinking you're supposed to be there, then do you have an enormous advantage, doesn't matter about their superior numbers. And so in these cases, these propaganda chemical using slave maker ants, they can often carry all of this out without any fighting or killing taking place. You know, it's not just forms of rival ants there.

It almost seems like there is a whole genre across different types of animals that's just adaptations for the safe infiltration of ant colonies. Yeah, Mermica phile. So the the whole classification of animals that have have come to depend upon the ants, and in many cases you use some sort of chemical signal to trick the colony into thinking they're supposed to be there. Now here's another example just of of general sort of ant war um strategies that is that has brought up off It brings this one

up as well. Uh, we've ants, so we've answered not merely an army on the move, but they hold and control territory. They spread their workers out across it and then focus resources around key choke points. They even established leafy barrack nests in the crowns of trees and Moffitt points out that that we've answered therefore less rigid compared to army ants quote. Weavers, in contrast, wander more freely and are more versatile in their response to opportunities and threats.

The difference in style calls to mind the contrast between the rigidity of Frederick the Great's armies and the flexibility and mobility of Napoleon bonaparte troops. That's interesting. Yeah, So so the idea is that if a weaver aunt does encounter a problem in the empire, he uses a recruitment pheromone to call in reinforcements from the immediate area, as opposed to just having like one war gang ravaging around

the territory. So, again, these are not This is not an attempt to create an exhaustive list of all the amazing adaptations that ants have developed to wage wars against each other defend against each other, but hopefully it helps provide uh more of an idea of the rich diversity out there. This is one of my favorite types of

topics that that frequently comes up on the show. It's one of those where you feel like you've gotten just a tiny glimpse, you know, behind through through a curtain or through a window into a vast uh you know, mansion possibilities and and and rich relationships. Uh, that that you don't even think about most of your waking hours,

that you know that the world is just shocking. Yeah. Absolutely, and um and I think it's really interesting to look at the work of of you know, Wilson, Moffatt, uh and others when they compare ants to the human world, because on one hand, it helps us better understand the ants, right, you know, that's how humans work. Like if we can see ourselves reflected to some degree and another organism, then we can understand that organism better, even if it's you know,

we're kind of anthropomorphizing to get there. But then on the other hand, it does seem like we potentially have a lot to learn about what we are, right, we're getting into, you know, the sociobiology of V. O. Wilson or can or you know, certainly Moffatt gets into this a lot in his book The Human Swarm, where he's he's he's not just looking at the ant world, he's he's moving from there into the human world and trying

to make sense of what we're doing. Yeah, and of course, you know, we're we're incredibly different creatures than ants, but some of the same resource dynamics and things like that are always going to be in play no matter what species you're talking about. Yeah. In that E. O. Wilson documentary, I believe he shares this quote. Uh, he says, quote

the real problem of humanity is the following. We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology, and it is terrifyingly dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. I think in many ways that's true, and

it brings to mind. You know, something that's been sort of simmering for me throughout these episodes is that what I would hope we could learn by by looking at the warfare of other organized species like you social insects, and uh comparing that to to get perspective on human life is not that we learn how better to wage war through it, but maybe how not to wage war and how to avoid war. Yeah. Yeah, there's the sort

of the lesson that we don't need to live like ants. Um. I mean, because ants, for all the comparisons we've made, you know, they're they're free of these human burdens that we mentioned, you know, they're emotionless. There, their ways, while comparable to human institutions, in some way, are free of institutional constraints. Well, Robert, while I agree with you in a sense about that, though I would I would be careful about the idea that they're emotionless given our well true, yes,

our our invertebrate emotions episode. But yeah, we we don't know. We don't think that they have complex inner lives the way that we do, even though they have these internal states that you could probably recognize as being something like fear or joy, possibly, right, Yeah, I mean, I I think I have heard before I forget who there was

an entomology. I don't think it was Wilson Um. Maybe it was Moffitt and an MPR piece talking about the watching ants and feeling that some ants had almost a personality. So yeah, you're you're correct. I shouldn't be too fast to dismiss them as emotionless. Though an individual ant soldier is well far I think, far less of an individual than a than a human. I think we can we can at least focus on that, um and then in terms of like what they can do, I mean, certainly

they are a powerful force within the ecosystem. It's been observed that if all humans died today, ants would proceed just fine, But if all the ants died, the world would be in a state of absolute chaos. All right, we're gonna go ahead and close it out right there. We hope you've enjoyed this three part look at ant warfare. But obviously there's so so much in the ant world. We can easily return, probably will return at some point in the future to discuss ants once more, especially as

researchers continue to make new discoveries. Totally in the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just asked that you rate, review, and subscribe. You thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

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