Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, are you welcome to stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind? My name is Robert Land and Joe McCormick. Robert,
Speaker 1: Let's have a reading from our holy book The Daily Mail. Shelly, Yes,
Speaker 1: let's do headline June crazy ants that feast on electronics
Speaker 1: and are invading the US cannot be killed with normal insecticide.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I love I love everything about that headline
Speaker 1: because it just implies that these ants are coming to
Speaker 1: eat your precious xbox and there's nothing you can do
Speaker 1: to penetrate its exo skeleton. It's just gonna laugh at you.
Speaker 1: They feast on electronics, They're crazy, cannot be killed, cannot
Speaker 1: as capitalized. Um, they've got the little subheads here. Since
Speaker 1: it was first spotted in Houston in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: it's spread to some twenty one counties in Texas, twenty
Speaker 1: counties in Florida, and a few locations in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Speaker 1: The omnivorous and attacks and kills other species, as well
Speaker 1: as monopolizing food sources to the detriment of the entire ecosystem.
Speaker 1: It also attacks electrical wiring causing millions of dollars worth
Speaker 1: of damage. So it's just an unstoppable force. It's like
Speaker 1: an invasion. I'm imagining those ants from Indiana Jones and
Speaker 1: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Did you watch there?
Speaker 1: You didn't watch it? No, you know that the buzz
Speaker 1: wasn't all that great, so I just never got around
Speaker 1: to it. Robert, I get mad when people haven't watched
Speaker 1: the same bad movies I have. You've got to go
Speaker 1: subject yourself to this. Have you heard about the gopher? No,
Speaker 1: there's a gopher like in Caddyshack Gopher. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: like a c g I gopher in it. And there's
Speaker 1: also c g I ants marching through the forest and
Speaker 1: attacking people. M I should probably check it out at
Speaker 1: some point. No, don't waste your time. It's the best
Speaker 1: part of it is Cape Blanchet, who's the best part
Speaker 1: of everything she does. But there are crazy ants. They're
Speaker 1: essentially crazy ants or their giant crazy ants. Is that
Speaker 1: what you're saying. No, I think it's actually not a
Speaker 1: very good point of comparison once we get into the
Speaker 1: details on crazy ants. But man, so I I put
Speaker 1: this up here because I hate the Daily Mail. That's
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say I hate things, but uh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: I kind of hate the way their their headlines work.
Speaker 1: But I also can't resist that they just go for it.
Speaker 1: They say, cannot be killed and feast on electronics. But
Speaker 1: of course we are talking about a real organism here, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one that's not quite as outlandish as this. Uh, these
Speaker 1: headlines and subheads make it sound. No, And while the
Speaker 1: idea of feasting on electronics is not quite exactly right,
Speaker 1: it's not as far off as you might imagine based
Speaker 1: on I don't know, you know, whatever you found out
Speaker 1: when you clicked on that Daily Mail article about the
Speaker 1: Longness monster washing up on the beach, you know. And
Speaker 1: I also have to point out that I have I
Speaker 1: have heard versions of this where people think that the
Speaker 1: crazy ants eat electricity, which is also not true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like their RoboCop they need to charge up at not right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're seeking out your electronics so that they can they
Speaker 1: can they just jagg onto that that that precious juice.
Speaker 1: Did you ever see that mid career West Craven movie Shocker? No,
Speaker 1: but this is one that that you've been telling me
Speaker 1: about for years. Yeah, it's so it's West Craven at
Speaker 1: at the height of his I don't care, and he
Speaker 1: makes a movie with the Oh what's a Mitch Pelegie,
Speaker 1: the boss from the X Files. Yeah, he plays like
Speaker 1: a murderer who gets sent to the electric chair, and
Speaker 1: then he turns into an electricity killer who like can
Speaker 1: fly through TVs, and he can go through power lines,
Speaker 1: and he when he gets hurt, he can heal himself
Speaker 1: by sticking his fingers in an electrical He's basically the
Speaker 1: electricity gremlin from Gremlins to the New Batch. You know,
Speaker 1: I've never seen Grimlin's too. How many people hate me? Now?
Speaker 1: Uh no, So let's explain. Are a little bit more
Speaker 1: anecdotes about what the deal with this crazy aunt is
Speaker 1: and why people say it feasts on electricity, even if
Speaker 1: that's not exactly true. So there is a New York
Speaker 1: Times story on crazy ants by the writer John Muallam,
Speaker 1: and it tells stories of people with crazy ant nightmares
Speaker 1: in their homes, specifically with the ants attacking their electronics.
Speaker 1: So there's one story about a man named Mike who
Speaker 1: had his house infested to an unbelievable degree. Quote one day,
Speaker 1: his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from
Speaker 1: the vents in his living room floor, so he powered
Speaker 1: up his shop back to clear them. By the time
Speaker 1: he was done, he had sucked out five gallons of ants.
Speaker 1: Soon he and his wife were waking up to find
Speaker 1: vast frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor
Speaker 1: in all directions. When the picture on their fifty inch
Speaker 1: box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel
Speaker 1: and found the guts throbbing with ants. Oh that's that's lovely.
Speaker 1: I mean that just sounds like like Tales from the
Speaker 1: Dark Side episode. Yeah, you can't, well there, what's in
Speaker 1: the Tales from the Crypt movie? There's a guy who
Speaker 1: gets flooded with It's not ants. I think it's cockroaches,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Oh, are you thinking about Stephen King's creep show?
Speaker 1: Not Tales from the Crypt creep show? But you know
Speaker 1: the Tales from the Crypt. I'm sure it has an
Speaker 1: insect horror episode that I'm forgetting. Yeah. Another story from
Speaker 1: that New York Times article, there's a man named strom Duke.
Speaker 1: The story of strom Duke quote, one evening his iron
Speaker 1: stopped working, Then sparks shot from the appliance, and a
Speaker 1: tide of crazy ants came rushing out. Other Dukes lived
Speaker 1: in neighboring houses, and they all had similar stories. The
Speaker 1: ants had caused six dollars of electrical damage to one
Speaker 1: woman's car, infiltrated the glass break detector of one house's
Speaker 1: alarm system, causing the alarm to blare, and just the
Speaker 1: previous night, shut off the water at Strom's brother Melvin's
Speaker 1: house by disabling the pressure switch on his well. It
Speaker 1: really sounds like it could be a horror movie. I
Speaker 1: can imagine all these essentially the movie Squirm, except instead
Speaker 1: of screaming earthworms, you have ants just streaming out of
Speaker 1: telephones in various household gadgets. Yeah, and if you don't
Speaker 1: dig too deep, if somebody just says it, it sounds
Speaker 1: like it could be plausible. Right. The answer eating electricity.
Speaker 1: You keep finding them inside the TV, inside the iron,
Speaker 1: inside the sensor, the air conditioner, compressor, the gas pump.
Speaker 1: They're everywhere the wires are, So why why wouldn't we
Speaker 1: assume they're eating electricity? Yeah? I mean, the mere idea
Speaker 1: of ants being drowned electricity isn't that crazy? I mean
Speaker 1: eating electronics? Yes, that's nuts. But organisms are inherently bioelectric,
Speaker 1: even in the know the mighty electric eel. It's nothing
Speaker 1: compared to lightning or the lethal volts coiled inside your
Speaker 1: household electric outlets, but it's there. It's it's really not
Speaker 1: that grandiose to think of it as as a sparkle
Speaker 1: of life. Even so. Yeah, just the mere connection between
Speaker 1: electricity organisms, uh, you know, one can easily buy into that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can easily imagine they're trying to power up right,
Speaker 1: or at least that Yeah, there's maybe some kind of
Speaker 1: electromagnetic field being omitted, and that field tends to draw
Speaker 1: in insects of a certain sort. It makes me think of, um, Robert,
Speaker 1: did you ever see that ants circling the iPhone viral video?
Speaker 1: I don't think I ever did, know, Well, allow me
Speaker 1: to show you something. Oh wow, So it's just a
Speaker 1: phone looks like it's receiving a call, and ants are
Speaker 1: just circling around it like uh, like they're they're intending
Speaker 1: to invade it where they was sieging it, corralling it
Speaker 1: even yea. As I look at this video now, it's
Speaker 1: got almost five million views. It obviously was a viral
Speaker 1: hit and It was published by something on YouTube called
Speaker 1: Viral Video Lab. I'm pretty sure it's fake. I looked
Speaker 1: at the Snopes thing on it. The Snopes article is like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we haven't proven it's real. It's hard to
Speaker 1: prove a video like that is fake. But a lot
Speaker 1: of the people who have been analyzing it, you know,
Speaker 1: their Reddit threads on it and stuff, and people are like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you look at certain parts of it,
Speaker 1: it really looks like the ants are blurry kind of
Speaker 1: animations that have been edited into the to the picture.
Speaker 1: But yet again, it doesn't seem impossible that a phone
Speaker 1: which puts out an electromagnetic field could cause something like
Speaker 1: ants to circle around it. I mean, we know that
Speaker 1: certain animals like birds use a certain amount of magnetic
Speaker 1: kind of path finding to orient themselves for migration. We
Speaker 1: know that there are electromagnetically sensitive animals that live in
Speaker 1: the water. Sharks and rays have a certain amount of
Speaker 1: electromagnetic sensitivity. So you kind of might assume, even though
Speaker 1: this video turns out to be fake, that there could
Speaker 1: be things like that there's some kind of field being
Speaker 1: put out that sucks in all the insects around it.
Speaker 1: But with crazy ants. Uh, that does not appear to
Speaker 1: be the case. But the answer, that answer is still
Speaker 1: quite fascinating, right it is. So there is more than
Speaker 1: one kind of crazy ant. Actually, the kind we're talking
Speaker 1: about is Nylandria Fulva, commonly known as the Raspberry crazy
Speaker 1: aunt Raspberry without a P because it's named after a
Speaker 1: guy named Raspberry r A S B E r r Y,
Speaker 1: or also known as the Tawny crazy ant. Maybe we
Speaker 1: can mostly call it Nylanderia Fulva or something, because who
Speaker 1: wants to say raspberry or tawny when you're talking about ants?
Speaker 1: They sound delicious, though, Yeah, this is it a flavor
Speaker 1: of ants? Yeah? I think so. It's kind of I'm
Speaker 1: imagining ice cream cone crawling and crazy ants. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are ice cream cones like that. Another point
Speaker 1: of comparison I should make is that when reading about
Speaker 1: how these ants pile up, you know they're these massive
Speaker 1: volumes of ants. The guy talked about sucking five gallons
Speaker 1: of ants out of his air conditioner with a vacuum cleaner.
Speaker 1: The people who have really bad infestations of Nyland Area
Speaker 1: Fulva in Texas and stuff say that the ants will
Speaker 1: sort of like pile up head against the sides of
Speaker 1: their house like snow drifts, and if you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're looking at, it can look like huge piles
Speaker 1: of coffee grounds or something, suggesting there could be a flavor.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the zombies and war Zy right where
Speaker 1: they're just kind of piling up against the wall. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a kind of interesting thing, the way
Speaker 1: that ants can behave a little bit like the zombies
Speaker 1: in the World War Z movie if you haven't seen
Speaker 1: the movie, zombies are getting over a barrier by just
Speaker 1: like piling their bodies up against it and eventually forming
Speaker 1: a staircase made out of other zombies to get to
Speaker 1: the top of the wall. Yeah, they're really just playing
Speaker 1: ant like behavior in that in that in that film,
Speaker 1: because I'm instantly reminded of cases that we've talked about
Speaker 1: in the past of uh, you know, I believe the
Speaker 1: fire ants in particular forming a raft, Yes, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll make a raft for themselves when it floods,
Speaker 1: a raft made out of ants for ants to survive
Speaker 1: a flood. I want to see zombies do that. Maybe
Speaker 1: the zombies have done that in a in a film
Speaker 1: or a TV show I just haven't seen it. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a reminder of the bizarre, deep, almost kind
Speaker 1: of group intelligence that you see in use social insects
Speaker 1: like ants and bees. But anyway, as we were saying,
Speaker 1: there's more than one kind of crazy ant. Crazy ants
Speaker 1: are native to South America, specifically northern Argentina and southern Brazil,
Speaker 1: so picture kind of middle Middle region in South America.
Speaker 1: And they were first discovered in Texas by an exterminator
Speaker 1: named Tom Raspberry in two thousand two, and since then
Speaker 1: they've been spreading throughout the Gulf Coast. They're now in
Speaker 1: Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi. And people thought in those
Speaker 1: regions that the red fire ant was pretty bad. They
Speaker 1: thought it was a troubling invasive species. But the crazy
Speaker 1: ant has actually been replacing the red fire ant for
Speaker 1: many years there Now it's also displacing other arthropods like
Speaker 1: spiders and centipedes, which can destabilize the food chain because
Speaker 1: larger predators like birds need to be able to eat
Speaker 1: things like spiders and centipedes. They're not so keen on
Speaker 1: a crazy ants. All right, hold that thought. We're gonna
Speaker 1: take a quick break and when we come back, we
Speaker 1: will jump back into the swarm of crazy ants. Than alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we mentioned that the crazy ants are
Speaker 1: of the genus Nyland area. Um, you might wonder how
Speaker 1: do they get the name crazy ants? Is it because
Speaker 1: they're crazy because they want to get into your TV?
Speaker 1: That doesn't really seem like how a name would come about.
Speaker 1: Apparently they get this name from just descriptions of their
Speaker 1: foraging behavior. And if you've never seen what this looks like,
Speaker 1: you should go to YouTube and you should look up
Speaker 1: videos of crazy ants foraging because it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: hard to describe. It's this frantic, erratic, extremely fast movement.
Speaker 1: Uh to me, crazy ants moving around in a swarm.
Speaker 1: It almost looks like a swarm of gnats zipping around
Speaker 1: in the air, except the movement is confined to a
Speaker 1: flat surface on the ground. Yeah, if you're used to
Speaker 1: sing and you know ants embarking on journeys generally like
Speaker 1: a path from one place to another, you look at
Speaker 1: this and it just looks like they're just a scramble.
Speaker 1: They're just a mess. Yeah, it's just a mindless swarm. Well,
Speaker 1: you think it's a different kind of foraging strategy based
Speaker 1: on different mathematics. Right, when you've got a single line
Speaker 1: between two things, you're maximizing efficiency there, Like the ants
Speaker 1: are not expending any more energy than they need to
Speaker 1: to get from one place to another in order to
Speaker 1: transport goods and seek out new stuff and all that.
Speaker 1: But when you see these these ants moving around, you
Speaker 1: get a very different idea. It's almost as if they're
Speaker 1: going for a different type of investment bet payoff matrix,
Speaker 1: Like they're betting more on random movement leading to possible
Speaker 1: discoveries of things leading to potential payoffs in in a
Speaker 1: kind of like cloud type movement. Yeah, they're just scouring
Speaker 1: the terrain to see what they can find. Now, I
Speaker 1: listened to an interview with a U. T. Austin researcher
Speaker 1: named Dr Edward Lebrun, who is an expert on crazy
Speaker 1: antswer who studies invasive ants in general and um, one
Speaker 1: of the things you're saying is that they're very successful
Speaker 1: invasive species because they share traits with other successful invasive ants,
Speaker 1: one of which is that the crazy ants are what
Speaker 1: he calls super colonial, meaning you've got no divisions between
Speaker 1: colonies of the same species. So some other ants might
Speaker 1: set up a colony here and then a colony over
Speaker 1: in the neighbor's yard. And if the ants of those
Speaker 1: two colonies come into contact with another, they're going to
Speaker 1: fight it out right, like rival kingdoms exactly. They're in
Speaker 1: competition for the same resources. It's like, you know, you
Speaker 1: and your neighbor fighting over I don't know what you
Speaker 1: would fight over with your neighbor. You found treasure, yeah,
Speaker 1: buried treasure right on the property line, and you say,
Speaker 1: I'm getting my sword, that's my treasure. But the crazy
Speaker 1: ants don't necessarily behave that way. Crazy ants from different
Speaker 1: colonies apparently treat one another with deference in respect. They
Speaker 1: come across members of another colony, and they treat them
Speaker 1: basically as if they were members of the same colony. So,
Speaker 1: con specifics, members of the same crazy aunt species don't
Speaker 1: tend to antagonize one another. They team up. And from
Speaker 1: that New York Times article I mentioned earlier by Mullum Lebroun,
Speaker 1: the researchers says that he believes there's a single super
Speaker 1: colony of crazy ants that occupies quote as many as
Speaker 1: four thousand, two hundred acres in Iowa Colony, which is
Speaker 1: a place in Texas strangely enough, uh, and is spreading
Speaker 1: two hundred meters a year in all directions. It's basically
Speaker 1: just this one giant organism because in many ways a
Speaker 1: colony of ants or a colony of any youth social
Speaker 1: insects kind of does behave like a single organism split
Speaker 1: across multiple bodies. Wow. So yeah, this is they're essentially
Speaker 1: the the the Tyrannids from Warhammer forty thousand. There just
Speaker 1: this invading superorganism. Well you've mentioned the Tyrannids before, but
Speaker 1: you've got to tell me a little more about him, Robert. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's an army of xenomorph inspired sort of biohr is
Speaker 1: also very inspired by the the alien antagonists from Starship Troopers,
Speaker 1: so that kind of adversary and the ideas that they
Speaker 1: just come and they just lay waste two entire planets.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny you should mention Starship Troopers because
Speaker 1: we were just talking about the World War Z kinda
Speaker 1: and aunt. What what World War Z zombies and ants
Speaker 1: have in common is that they'll make mega structures out
Speaker 1: of their own bodies to climb over things and stuff.
Speaker 1: The bugs in Starship Troopers do the same thing. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. They did in the film version. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know if they do in the book. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've I've read the book, but I don't I don't recall. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's time we've got to address this question.
Speaker 1: Why do the crazy ants keep invading electronics? Why do
Speaker 1: you find them in the TV and the iron in
Speaker 1: the detector and the all that stuff. Well, part of
Speaker 1: the answer, of course, is based on the way they
Speaker 1: hunt for food and resources. They are simply going to
Speaker 1: come across electronics, right, I mean, they are going to
Speaker 1: find them because that's they're They're just scouring everywhere. They're
Speaker 1: gonna scour your home and they're going to run across
Speaker 1: your various electronic gadgets. Yeah, you're exactly right. I Mean
Speaker 1: one of the things that comes through in the stories
Speaker 1: about crazy and infestations is that that they they become
Speaker 1: so pervasive in everywhere. You know, if you've got an
Speaker 1: infestation in your house, they're gonna be all over the place,
Speaker 1: and so they will be scouting out all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: And this actually leads to one thing that Edward Lebrun
Speaker 1: said that I thought was pretty interesting. He didn't use
Speaker 1: these words, but he said essentially that there's got to
Speaker 1: be some selection bias in the characterization of them, mainly
Speaker 1: invading electronics. And his exact quote was quote, when your
Speaker 1: power goes out, you want to know why you find
Speaker 1: a bunch of ants. That's a good reason to get
Speaker 1: your video camera. Which is a very good point about
Speaker 1: the way that we tend to notice things, right, We
Speaker 1: tend to notice something when it's an unusual problem. You're
Speaker 1: much less likely to get the camera out if it's
Speaker 1: you know, not turning off something that you might be
Speaker 1: trying to use. That's right. And then of course the
Speaker 1: reason that that that they wind up in your electronics,
Speaker 1: the reason why it becomes a problem has a lot
Speaker 1: to do with not so much the certainly not the
Speaker 1: electronic components there, but just the case itself. Like if
Speaker 1: if they end up in your computer tower for your
Speaker 1: your PC, it's not because there's a you know, there's
Speaker 1: an active battery in there or anything, right, it's the
Speaker 1: it's it's the tower itself is an ideal container for
Speaker 1: the ants exactly. So crazy ants are different than many
Speaker 1: other types of ants. If you've got a group of
Speaker 1: red fire ants, Solenopsis invicta, which they've got a great
Speaker 1: Latin name, Solenopsis in victa. They're gonna build a colony, right,
Speaker 1: They're gonna dig, and they're gonna build a mound, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna dig tunnels in the mound. Their their ecosystem engineers, right,
Speaker 1: like we were talking about in the City Evolution episode.
Speaker 1: They build their own ecosystem and then they guard it
Speaker 1: to the death. Crazy ants are different. They don't dig
Speaker 1: very much. They dig a little bit and not much.
Speaker 1: They prefer to nest in existing cavities they come across
Speaker 1: in the environment. So the insides of boxes containing electronics
Speaker 1: tend to be an eye deal type of enclosed protected
Speaker 1: space that's perfect for them to climb into and form
Speaker 1: a nest inside. Yeah, enclosed spaces with with space in
Speaker 1: there and a limited numbers of of entrances and exits, right,
Speaker 1: and very small entrances and exits, so predators, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be hard for them to get in there. When was
Speaker 1: the last time an ant eater got inside your TV? Rightly,
Speaker 1: it's it's true, it's it's it's it's pretty safe from
Speaker 1: less than five times. It's got to be. But also
Speaker 1: Lebron and other experts have pointed out another reason why
Speaker 1: you might tend to find tons of ants and the
Speaker 1: guts of your TV, or tons of crazy ants pouring
Speaker 1: out of a compressor box or something. Lebron says that
Speaker 1: when the crazy ants get agitated, they released something known
Speaker 1: as an alarm pheromone. Now we know that a lot
Speaker 1: of the communication between ants who share a colony is
Speaker 1: pheromone base. They release chemical signals that are distributed through
Speaker 1: the air that can essentially smell messages from one another,
Speaker 1: and the alarm pheromone is a chemical that has a
Speaker 1: smell that alerts conspecific ants to danger or trouble. Now
Speaker 1: you can imagine that this could work several different ways
Speaker 1: in the wild. Right, one way an animal might use
Speaker 1: an alarm pheromone would be to say, Hey, I'm in danger.
Speaker 1: There's something dangerous here, you better stay away. But not
Speaker 1: so with the crazy ants. You know, I feel like
Speaker 1: this sort of pheromone based behavior you often see this
Speaker 1: pop up in monster movies, is a way to outsmart
Speaker 1: or defeat the adversary. Blade too comes to mind. There's
Speaker 1: the end up like mimicking the pheromones of the reaper
Speaker 1: vampires and you know, directing where they swarm. But I
Speaker 1: feel like it's rarely explored as that the prime motivator.
Speaker 1: Is there a monster movie out there where the whole
Speaker 1: crazy interspecies conflict comes down to a misunderstanding over alarm pheromone?
Speaker 1: May be interesting. I've never heard of that, but you
Speaker 1: could easily see how, especially given what I'm about to say,
Speaker 1: that that things could get mixed up and go bad.
Speaker 1: So another what Lebron says is, actually, it's not the
Speaker 1: way that I just mentioned. It's not that they put
Speaker 1: out an alarm pheromone that says I'm in danger, stay away.
Speaker 1: When you put crazy ants in a vial, he says,
Speaker 1: they get very agitated, and they get mad, they release
Speaker 1: their alarm pheromone. And if you take a vial of
Speaker 1: these really angry agitated ants and you put it next
Speaker 1: to a trail of other crazy ants, instead of avoiding
Speaker 1: the vial, the ants are going to swarm all over it.
Speaker 1: They're actually attracted to the alarm pheromone. And this kind
Speaker 1: of makes sense for ants because being used social insects,
Speaker 1: this is how they defend nests. Like if you've got
Speaker 1: a nest and something's in the nest. Attacking the nest,
Speaker 1: what you want to do is bring all of your
Speaker 1: family members in to fight the attacker off. So basically
Speaker 1: they're there. Their whole way about doing things is if
Speaker 1: you mess with one crazy ant, you're messing with all
Speaker 1: the crazy ants, right, I mean, one crazy ant doesn't
Speaker 1: stand much of a chance right there. They're they're very small.
Speaker 1: Crazy antswer tiny, especially compared to some other AUNT competitors
Speaker 1: of theirs, which are bigger and have powerful venom glands
Speaker 1: and stingers and stuff. Crazy an'ts are little things. But
Speaker 1: of course the problem here is someone with an invaded xbox.
Speaker 1: They're they're not intentionally messing with the crazy ants. They're
Speaker 1: not trying to eat crazy ants. They're not They're not
Speaker 1: they're not trying to do the uh, the colony's harm.
Speaker 1: But what happens if, if, if a if a single
Speaker 1: crazy ant comes to harm within your xbox. That's exactly
Speaker 1: the problem. So it has been hypothesized by Lebron and
Speaker 1: others that what may be going on here is you've
Speaker 1: got an electronic device, or an electrical power box or
Speaker 1: something crazy ant comes in, maybe multiple crazy ants come in,
Speaker 1: either one ant or a group of ants touching one
Speaker 1: another create a short circuit. They touched the wrong contact points,
Speaker 1: they close a circuit and get electrocuted or burned because
Speaker 1: they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how
Speaker 1: circuits work. No, they're like Indiana Jones's buddy wandering through
Speaker 1: the temple. They don't know there are traps here. They
Speaker 1: don't know to stay out of the light, so that
Speaker 1: so they they just get burned or get electrocuted. And
Speaker 1: then when there's trauma, they release the alarm pheromone, and
Speaker 1: of course this draws in more ants, and maybe more
Speaker 1: ants get electrocuted or burned or something like that, and
Speaker 1: they release more alarm pheromone, and it draws in even
Speaker 1: more ants, until you've just got a TV sagging with ants.
Speaker 1: And this again, this could work wonderfully. And say a
Speaker 1: zombie movie, what if the whole reason the zombies are
Speaker 1: attacking the the house all odd night of the Living
Speaker 1: Dead is because one zombie happened to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: burn up in a toaster. I feel like there's got
Speaker 1: to be a good monster movie that already has a
Speaker 1: treatment of this. It must exist. I can't call anything
Speaker 1: to mind right now. Yeah, like I say, it seems
Speaker 1: like you see the pheromone angle used as a as
Speaker 1: a brilliant scientific, you know, tactic against the monsters, but
Speaker 1: it's rarely the uh, the the actual cause of the
Speaker 1: of the encounter. Now, if you don't already live within
Speaker 1: range of Nylondaria fulva, I'm sure you're wondering when can
Speaker 1: I get them in my EXAs well. The fortunate thing
Speaker 1: is that they don't tend to travel very far on
Speaker 1: their own because they don't have wing dispersal, so they
Speaker 1: don't you know, fly off new queens to set up
Speaker 1: new colonies far away. They move very slowly. I've seen
Speaker 1: it characterized as on average about two hundred meters per
Speaker 1: year is about as far as they go unless somebody
Speaker 1: moves them. And you can imagine how somebody might move
Speaker 1: them by accident if they tend to inhabit cavities. So
Speaker 1: say one of these things gets inside your car or
Speaker 1: gets inside your TV and you move houses, or gets
Speaker 1: inside something else, and that is how these things can
Speaker 1: be transported to new places. Now, there are some questions
Speaker 1: that haven't been fully answered yet about what's the up
Speaker 1: upwards northern end of their possible range. How how far
Speaker 1: north could they go before, for example, of freezes hard
Speaker 1: freezes in the winter would prevent them from surviving. And
Speaker 1: we don't fully know the answers tell those questions yet.
Speaker 1: But once we answer those questions, then of course who
Speaker 1: knows if climate change is gonna affect that over the
Speaker 1: coming decades anyway, So right, there's gonna that's changing the
Speaker 1: playing field for so many different organisms. Yeah, so what
Speaker 1: ultimately is at steak here with the crazy ants? I mean,
Speaker 1: it truly goes beyond just the the average, the the
Speaker 1: the odds shorted out xbox right right. Well, the the
Speaker 1: damage is mainly not too human electronics. It's mainly going
Speaker 1: to be too ecosystems. Because they can out compete native insects.
Speaker 1: They can destroy beehives and other ant colonies. Um, I've
Speaker 1: read that they can even sometimes they're so thick, they swarm,
Speaker 1: so thick that they can smother and suffocate ground dwelling birds.
Speaker 1: It's horrible to picture, but yeah, they just get into
Speaker 1: the nasal cavities of chickens and other ground dwelling birds
Speaker 1: and asphyxiate them. U they can get in the eyes
Speaker 1: of live stock. It's really gross as far as damage goes,
Speaker 1: I actually have read that there was at least one
Speaker 1: time when they shut down a chemical plant by getting
Speaker 1: into electronics. So we've been saying, okay, here are these
Speaker 1: these more reasonable explanations. Is not that they eat electricity,
Speaker 1: it's that there's this pheromone and here's what happens to
Speaker 1: get them inside your electronics. I should note that in
Speaker 1: that New York Times story I mentioned earlier, Dr David Oi,
Speaker 1: an entomologist with the U. S Department of Agriculture. He
Speaker 1: according to him, he said, you know, we can't rule
Speaker 1: out the possibility that the ants are in some way
Speaker 1: actually attracted to electromagnetic fields and get in there. For
Speaker 1: that reason, that just hasn't been you know, we haven't
Speaker 1: demonstrated that, but you can't rule it out as an
Speaker 1: influencing factor. So who knows. Maybe they are, maybe they
Speaker 1: are shocker material. But anyway, as as far as their
Speaker 1: effect on humans goes, I mean, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of it is actually more psychological than material damage. When
Speaker 1: you read about people who live in the places where
Speaker 1: they're dealing with infestations of these ants, they they they
Speaker 1: hate them, They're they are freaking out. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: sure not everybody is like that, but there there are
Speaker 1: some people who are really distressed. I can't at a
Speaker 1: voluminous the antsw are I can't imagine anyone not freaking
Speaker 1: out like we. We don't really want our homes to
Speaker 1: be um habitats for anything besides ourselves and our sanctioned pets. Nobody,
Speaker 1: nobody wants to see ants in their house. That is
Speaker 1: always a problem. You know that John Muellam article in
Speaker 1: The Times, It takes a dark turn when he quotes uh.
Speaker 1: He quotes the American psychologist James Hillman and says that
Speaker 1: Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception
Speaker 1: of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your
Speaker 1: individual consciousness to a merely numerical or statistical level. Well,
Speaker 1: I can't say that's exactly how I think about it.
Speaker 1: When I encounter ants in the house. Usually I'm I
Speaker 1: think more, Oh, well, we left something out, the ants
Speaker 1: came in and are trying to eat it, and now
Speaker 1: I've got to set out some of these grotesque traps
Speaker 1: to try and kill them. Everyone loses, the ants lose,
Speaker 1: I lose. Nobody wants this situation. You know, I I
Speaker 1: don't like killing bugs and wildlife, but when I've had
Speaker 1: aunt infestations in my house, I've noticed that, like I
Speaker 1: just turned into a cold hearted murderer. I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna kill you all it. It does something to
Speaker 1: my brain. Well, they're they're just they're out of place.
Speaker 1: They're not supposed to be here. That's not what the
Speaker 1: house is for. I feel like I should learn to
Speaker 1: be a better person. It's it's easy to do that
Speaker 1: when you were out and about and encounter the ants
Speaker 1: in the yard, But it's just in the house that
Speaker 1: changes everything. Now, one of the things that a lot
Speaker 1: of the conversation on crazy ants has centered on has
Speaker 1: actually been like bureaucratic, scientific and government response to them.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of that New York Times article I mentioned.
Speaker 1: While it's got some great anecdotes and stuff in it,
Speaker 1: a lot of the article is actually focused on the
Speaker 1: scientific community and the government's alleged slowness to identify the
Speaker 1: species and respond to its spread in a way that
Speaker 1: might not be fair. Right. Yeah. I found an interesting
Speaker 1: response to this particular New York Times article by a
Speaker 1: research scientist, Alex Wilde and he offered this critique. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: this is not accurate. Scientists did not, in fact, quote
Speaker 1: swarm into debate unquote. The slow response to identifying in
Speaker 1: fullva was exactly the opposite. The trouble is that figuring
Speaker 1: out the origin and invasive ants isn't anyone's job, at
Speaker 1: least not in the United States. What happened was that
Speaker 1: a few ants scientists, in their spare time from whatever
Speaker 1: their official duties were, have occasionally offered an opinion about
Speaker 1: these new invaders. And he goes on to summarize further
Speaker 1: and said, and he says, I don't see the point
Speaker 1: of singling out the egghead scientists for being slow to
Speaker 1: identify Nylanderia fulva when the real trouble is bigger and structural.
Speaker 1: Americans simply don't value basic research enough to support a
Speaker 1: system that rapidly pinpoints emerging pest problems. If we want
Speaker 1: to quickly identify new pests, we need to salary thousands
Speaker 1: of positions for taxonomists where afpid response to emerging threats
Speaker 1: is part of the job. I think that's a good
Speaker 1: point to make. I mean, uh, maybe we should have
Speaker 1: made it more clear that one of the things in
Speaker 1: the article is that you get this idea that these
Speaker 1: like exterminators and people have to be the ones to
Speaker 1: step in and really push forward on identifying the species
Speaker 1: because the scientists are dropping the ball. It really basically
Speaker 1: the horror movie just writes itself again because you can
Speaker 1: imagine the poor exterminate. Yea, the exterminator character dies in
Speaker 1: the opening scene. Then the scientist comes in and it
Speaker 1: is all and trying to interpret it but ultimately can't
Speaker 1: get a handle on the monsters, and the monsters eat him.
Speaker 1: But the reality is rather different. There's no crack team
Speaker 1: of egghead scientists to show up to deal with with
Speaker 1: with different outbreaks of ants. Yeah, and especially with the
Speaker 1: world we live in right now. I mean we live
Speaker 1: in a world that is number one globally connected through
Speaker 1: commerce and travel, so things can get back and forth
Speaker 1: between places really easy. And number two, we live in
Speaker 1: an era of changing climate where it's going to be
Speaker 1: we're always going to be altering ecosystems and changing the
Speaker 1: types of life forms they can support. We're getting into
Speaker 1: an invasive species. What would you call it the dead zone?
Speaker 1: Not the dead zone, a life zone. Actually that's the opposite.
Speaker 1: A zone that is just rife for infestations of all types. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to be careful not to overly demonize invasive species,
Speaker 1: because you can sometimes see people get into this mindset
Speaker 1: of like, oh, this species from South America or something.
Speaker 1: They're just these horrible pests. It's not that the animals
Speaker 1: themselves are horrible. I mean, they didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 1: They're just trying to live. The problem is they're suddenly
Speaker 1: living in an ecosystem that was not prepared for them,
Speaker 1: and they're they're disrupting that ecosystem and causing rapid change
Speaker 1: within it. Yeah, we're the ones who disrupted the balance.
Speaker 1: So you can't. You can't getting mad at the weights
Speaker 1: when you're the one who switched them around on the scales. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That being said, you you can try to exterminate the
Speaker 1: weights in this case of the ants. All Right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll discuss the ant on ant action, the ant war
Speaker 1: between the fire ants and the crazy ants. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: It's fire ants versus crazy ants. How does this epic
Speaker 1: war go down? Robert, You've got to tell me. Is
Speaker 1: there a fire ant or any kind of ant Mexican
Speaker 1: wrestler or Japanese wrestler. Oh, well, there are some. There
Speaker 1: are some sort of uh, there are some ant based
Speaker 1: wrestlers out of believe it's with Chakara, which is a
Speaker 1: US independent pro wrestling group, and they have a whole
Speaker 1: slew of ants. There's like fire ant soldier AUNT and
Speaker 1: they're all mass wrestlers. Yeah, how did I guess this?
Speaker 1: It just it it rights itself. You would just assume
Speaker 1: there would be AUNT wrestlers, and there are. I bet
Speaker 1: they're a good tag team, right, because answer great team players,
Speaker 1: I believe. So. I'm not a I'm not a big
Speaker 1: Chakara viewer, but my understanding is they have uh they're
Speaker 1: like like tag team and six man tag team specialist. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: let's imagine that the team they're going up against is
Speaker 1: a team of fire ants. You've got a team of
Speaker 1: crazy ants, crazy ant wrestlers going up against fire ant wrestlers.
Speaker 1: Who's gonna win this battle? Turns out the crazy ants,
Speaker 1: the crazy ants are gonna win even though the crazy
Speaker 1: ants they're small, Uh that they don't have this powerful
Speaker 1: scary sting like the fire ants do. Like you get
Speaker 1: some fire ants on you sting you. That is a
Speaker 1: that's a bad day, and it's gonna be some bad
Speaker 1: days like that. That hurts. Uh. The crazy ants, while
Speaker 1: they can be incredibly irritating if you've got an infestation
Speaker 1: in your home, their bite has been described as barely noticeable.
Speaker 1: It's it's not too painful to humans. Yeah, by humans,
Speaker 1: always important to know when we're dealing with miniscule species.
Speaker 1: But then again, it speaks to the power of the
Speaker 1: fire ant that we're all aware of what a fire
Speaker 1: ant can do, so much so that we all know
Speaker 1: what it means when EO. Wilson j M's his hand
Speaker 1: into the fire ant nest and you see them just
Speaker 1: joyfully beaming with the ant pain. But anyway, Yeah, you've
Speaker 1: got these competitors red fire ants or Solenopsis invicta and
Speaker 1: the crazy ants or Nylon diarya fulva. And when they
Speaker 1: come together, the crazy ants apparently win. So how do
Speaker 1: the crazy ants generally protect themselves? Well, there's a good
Speaker 1: article by Dina Fine marin inteen called the Rise of
Speaker 1: the Crazy Ants and Scientific American UH, and it profiles
Speaker 1: some good research in science from by Lebron, Jones and
Speaker 1: Gilbert about chemical warfare between crazy ants and fire ants,
Speaker 1: And so one of the first things you would observe
Speaker 1: is that if you've got equal numbers of fire ants
Speaker 1: and crazy ants that show up, they've got equally matched
Speaker 1: tag teams, and they show up to fight, the crazy
Speaker 1: ants win about ninety three percent of the time. That's
Speaker 1: a really good record. Yeah, that is that they are.
Speaker 1: They are the victors by far. Does any wrestler win
Speaker 1: of the time stone cold? Um? Well, I I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, some some have phenomenally high, you know, win
Speaker 1: win records. You know. It's just it depends who's the
Speaker 1: top character in a promotion, I guess, and that would
Speaker 1: definitely be the crazy ant here, probably because they would
Speaker 1: be the most popular. Fans love the crazy ant. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's not just these in vivo matchups. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: colony snatching. Sometimes crazy ant colonies are found inside fire
Speaker 1: ant mounds that still have some fire ants in them alive,
Speaker 1: meaning that these nests were not abandoned by fire ants
Speaker 1: and then ex appropriated by crazy ants. They were actively
Speaker 1: invaded while the fire ants were still there and the
Speaker 1: crazy ants took over. So the way the crazy ants
Speaker 1: are able to do this is that they can secrete
Speaker 1: substances from their glands, one of which is formic acid
Speaker 1: that was already shown to be a weapon that could
Speaker 1: be sprayed at attackers. There's a study in Toxicon in
Speaker 1: teen by gian Chin. It all called Defensive Chemicals of
Speaker 1: Tawny crazy Ants Nyland Area Fulva. Actually it's got a
Speaker 1: long title. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but
Speaker 1: basically it says that Nyland Area Fulva they produce formic
Speaker 1: acid in their poison glands and then two keytones and
Speaker 1: alkanes in their dufes glands, all of which are used
Speaker 1: as toxic weapons against fire ants. So they've got these
Speaker 1: poisons they use. The DeFord Land compounds are used more
Speaker 1: as contact poisons. They're more potent if you like dab
Speaker 1: some on the enemy, whereas the formic acid has a
Speaker 1: higher fumigation toxicity, so that's like gassing your enemy. So
Speaker 1: they have both melee and ranged weapons at their disposal. Basically,
Speaker 1: it is true, and in a high enough concentration, formic
Speaker 1: acid can even be an inhalation hazard to humans, causing
Speaker 1: like lung edema, you know, fluid in the lungs. But
Speaker 1: fortunately you don't have to worry about ants producing it
Speaker 1: in a high enough concentration that's going to hurt you,
Speaker 1: but they could hurt other ants. I was a little
Speaker 1: bit interested in formic acid because I was reading about
Speaker 1: it and I found you know, okay, so it seems
Speaker 1: like this has been known about for a while and
Speaker 1: it's actually been used in in in some human industry. Well,
Speaker 1: I found an extract of a letter about the discovery
Speaker 1: of formic acid in ants in the seventeenth century that
Speaker 1: was written by a guy named John Ray to the
Speaker 1: publisher of Philosophical Transactions in sixteen seventy. It was called
Speaker 1: concerning some uncommon observations and experiments made with acid juice
Speaker 1: to be found in ants juice spelled ju y c e.
Speaker 1: And I gotta be honest. The main reason I wanted
Speaker 1: to explore this is because I learned a new word.
Speaker 1: It's a note quote concerning the juice of piss myres
Speaker 1: piss myers. What's a pismire? Well, I did not know
Speaker 1: this word before. Piss Myers means ants, and yes, it
Speaker 1: is pronounced piss mere, and it comes from the route
Speaker 1: you're wondering about right now, named after the supposed smell
Speaker 1: of ant hills at the time. So my is meant
Speaker 1: ants an ant hill smell like urine. That was the idea. Huh,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know that I've ever really stopped
Speaker 1: and smelled the ant hills. Maybe I should. I'm not
Speaker 1: enjoying life enough. Apparently, now it makes sense where the
Speaker 1: phrase piss aunt comes from. Yeah, okay, it means piss.
Speaker 1: Myers always ant. I always thought it was just the
Speaker 1: random combination of two things, like, oh that that guy's
Speaker 1: really a poop duck. You know, there's nothing, there's not
Speaker 1: necessarily connection there, but you you put two things together
Speaker 1: and it sounds like an insult. What's you know? So
Speaker 1: I assume piss aunt was the same thing. No, but
Speaker 1: apparently this is not vulgar phrase at all. This is
Speaker 1: seventeenth century scientific journal stuff. There you go. But anyway,
Speaker 1: A Ray considers the the author of this letter, he's
Speaker 1: been writing about this experiment he read about where somebody
Speaker 1: would drop chickory leaves among an ant hill and it
Speaker 1: would cause the chickery leaves to change color, indicating some
Speaker 1: kind of chemical reaction. And he's wondering what's going on there,
Speaker 1: and he discovers that the juice of Pissmire's is an acid,
Speaker 1: causing similar effects to oil of vitriol, which means sulfuric acid.
Speaker 1: And in the end of his letter he writes, quote, Indeed,
Speaker 1: it seems strange that nature should prepare and separate in
Speaker 1: the body of this insect without and sensible heat, and
Speaker 1: that in good quantity, considering the bulk of the animal
Speaker 1: a liquor. The same for kind with those acid spirits
Speaker 1: which are by art extracted out of some mimeralds, not
Speaker 1: without great force of fire. So I like that he's marveling, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, how is it that ants can produce this
Speaker 1: powerful poison? But we can't do make anything that's powerful
Speaker 1: without some kind of serious alchemy. But another interesting little
Speaker 1: hidbit I came across is that formic acid is used
Speaker 1: by humans and things. Of course, it's used as an
Speaker 1: antibacterial preservative for things like livestock feed. But I've also
Speaker 1: read some stories just in recent months about how formic
Speaker 1: acid could be used as a liquid hydrogen carrier for
Speaker 1: fuel cell technology. So what if the electronics of future
Speaker 1: are powered by fuel cells containing the same defensive poisons
Speaker 1: used by Pissmires that shored out an invade current day
Speaker 1: electronics in the Gulf States. Oh my goodness. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: imagining a future in which the uh, the engine itself
Speaker 1: is a is a colony of some sort of crazy ants.
Speaker 1: I like it. It's like back to the future, except
Speaker 1: instead of the the garbage disposal that powers the futuristic
Speaker 1: to lorient, it's just he needs to dock has to
Speaker 1: find another crazy ant colony to shovin there. I think
Speaker 1: they really sad thing is that they're not like milking
Speaker 1: ants to get the formic acid. I think they. I
Speaker 1: think they make it in an industrial process, but how
Speaker 1: how disappointing. Man, I can still dream. But who knows,
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe we could change all that if somebody invents
Speaker 1: a really efficient ant milking machine. Anyway, Anyway, anyway, getting
Speaker 1: back to the role of the formic acid in the
Speaker 1: ants defense. So we know they can use it as
Speaker 1: an offensive weapon against enemies like the at the red
Speaker 1: fire ant. But this Lebron paper from what it found
Speaker 1: was really interesting. So they found that when crazy ants
Speaker 1: get into battles with red fire ants, they do this
Speaker 1: really weird series of behaviors. The crazy ant encounters red
Speaker 1: fire ant, then the crazy ant rears up on its
Speaker 1: hind and middle legs. Then it does this unbelievable body
Speaker 1: contortion where it curls its body all the way around
Speaker 1: to touch its mandibles to the tip of its abdomen.
Speaker 1: Then it starts doing something that looks like self grooming,
Speaker 1: rubbing a secretion around on its body. So what's going
Speaker 1: on there? Well, researchers experimented by placing a tiny dab
Speaker 1: of nail polish on the crazy ants glandular opening on
Speaker 1: the abdomen, and this would block the opening and prevent
Speaker 1: it from secreting whatever it normally secretes, and so this
Speaker 1: was the test group. They also placed a small dab
Speaker 1: of nail polish on the sides of the abdomen of
Speaker 1: control group. This dab would not block any secretions. And
Speaker 1: then of course you've got ant fight, right, crazy ants
Speaker 1: versus fire ants. So in the control group that just
Speaker 1: had the just had the nail polish on the sides
Speaker 1: and they could still secrete from the abdomen. The control
Speaker 1: group survived fire ant attacks almost a hundred percent of
Speaker 1: the time the crazy ants were just killing it. But
Speaker 1: in the experimental group, roughly half of the crazy ants
Speaker 1: were killed by fire ants, and among the ones that
Speaker 1: survived it may have been because the nail polish didn't
Speaker 1: completely cover the opening, so some secretions got through. So
Speaker 1: apparently the formic acid is not just a weapon, it
Speaker 1: is a defensive body shield as well, protecting the ant
Speaker 1: from the venomous attacks of its competitors. And so also
Speaker 1: from the labrun study, the researchers tested whether the formic
Speaker 1: acid would protect another ant species from the venom of
Speaker 1: the fire ant, and they found yep. Among a third
Speaker 1: ant species, those given a placebo were killed by fire
Speaker 1: ants about eighty percent of the time, while those treated
Speaker 1: with the crazy ants formic acid secretions almost all of
Speaker 1: them survived. So how does the formic acid produce this
Speaker 1: sort of body shield that protects the ant. We don't
Speaker 1: really know yet the secrets of ant warfare. There's always
Speaker 1: more to discover, you know. It makes me think about, um,
Speaker 1: how two different kinds of animals they live in a
Speaker 1: in a different arena of competition. And now, obviously fighting
Speaker 1: between ants will involve some kind of like mechanical action
Speaker 1: and shearing, pressure and pushing and all the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff we imagine when we're fighting. But when we imagine
Speaker 1: big mammals fighting, it's all like force. You're delivering energy
Speaker 1: to one another. You're biting and twisting and cutting and stuff,
Speaker 1: and and that's how animals like us fight And because
Speaker 1: of that, I think a lot of our fighting perception
Speaker 1: is based on things like movement and distance. You know,
Speaker 1: we're trying to see like how far something is from
Speaker 1: us and how asked it's moving. And when you're on
Speaker 1: the scale of an ant, the theater of perception and
Speaker 1: conflict is so much more chemical. It's all about what
Speaker 1: chemicals are present in the immediate area, what pheromones are
Speaker 1: telling you about what's going on around you, what pheromones
Speaker 1: you can put out that will do, you know and like?
Speaker 1: And because you're so small and the conflict itself is
Speaker 1: so largely venomous and chemical in nature. Yeah, But then
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you are they. You know, we
Speaker 1: want to think about the individual ant, but you have
Speaker 1: such a use social organization here with an aunt colony
Speaker 1: that it's uh, it's far from a one from one
Speaker 1: for one you you'd have to think of yourself as
Speaker 1: the colony really, I think to get anywhere close to
Speaker 1: imagining what it is to be ant, Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: good point to remind us. It's like it might actually,
Speaker 1: if you could understand the mind of an ant, to
Speaker 1: whatever extent there is such a thing as the mind
Speaker 1: of an ant, it might not make sense to be
Speaker 1: the mind of an individual aunt. It might maybe there
Speaker 1: really is no such thing as an individual aunt. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, there is the object of a single aunt body,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't really that's not really a biological unit
Speaker 1: as much as the colony is the unit. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: we fall into traps two of our our language I've
Speaker 1: I've read before regarding bees. Another famous youth social insect,
Speaker 1: of course, is that we we we know the Queen
Speaker 1: Bee is not an actual queen, and yet just by
Speaker 1: referring to her as such, by approaching bees with with
Speaker 1: human models in our mind, we think of her as
Speaker 1: being some sort of an authority figure. We can't. It's
Speaker 1: so easy to fall into that trap when really she
Speaker 1: is another cog in the machine. Yeah, I propose we
Speaker 1: replaced the phrase queen be with gene b. It's the
Speaker 1: b who's the vehicle for genes for the next generation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that we should push through that gene b
Speaker 1: gene b. But not like not like the name is gene.
Speaker 1: Well maybe it's j E A and it's you know,
Speaker 1: the feminine gene that will work. That'll work all right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Uh As always, head on
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