Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be talking about traps.
Speaker 1: I think I've mentioned this in some Weird House Cinema episodes,
Speaker 1: But for some reason, ever since I was a little kid,
Speaker 1: I have always loved movie scenes where the protagonists build
Speaker 1: a trap to use against the villain or the monster.
Speaker 1: I remember, like Home Alone, when I was a little kid,
Speaker 1: that that that whole sequence was a great It's sort
Speaker 1: of expands to fill my whole childhood impression of what
Speaker 1: the movie was. And if you go back and watch
Speaker 1: it as an adult, it's kind of weird that it's
Speaker 1: only like fifteen or twenty minutes of the runtime in
Speaker 1: in Home Alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does seem like
Speaker 1: that's the main thing I remember. Yeah, they the traps,
Speaker 1: the traps, and and certainly people feel certain nostalgia for them.
Speaker 1: My heart swells at the thought of a nail going
Speaker 1: into Daniel Stearn's foot. Um. But but also, yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember other ones, like you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger builds a
Speaker 1: bunch of traps in Predator. Um and but like this
Speaker 1: wasn't just when I was a kid. It still works
Speaker 1: on me. I remember there was a sequence I just
Speaker 1: loved in the more recent horror movie It follows where
Speaker 1: the characters build a trap for the monster. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: They that is very they have a very, very much
Speaker 1: a kind of home alone's setup that they do there.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's not only the heroes that that have traps.
Speaker 1: I always love a good villain trap as well, especially
Speaker 1: the trap door ump. Trap door sequence is always a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. Um uh you know, be it something
Speaker 1: like in in Lynn Labyrinth. I love the trap when
Speaker 1: the trap door springs on our hero and that. But
Speaker 1: actually Tomorrow's Weird House Cinema also has a fun trap
Speaker 1: door sequence. Uh oh yeah, so look forward to that.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, on the side of the protagonists getting through
Speaker 1: traps set for them. Another one of my favorite movie
Speaker 1: sequences as a child was the beginning of Raiders the
Speaker 1: Lost Art. Oh yeah, and when Indians going through all
Speaker 1: the traps. Something about it is just like deep in
Speaker 1: the brain, it's very satisfying. Wall to wall traps. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a great sequence as well. Um, and all
Speaker 1: of these are great sequences in spite of the fact
Speaker 1: that when you when you can, when you really think
Speaker 1: long and hard about any of these scenarios, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the cracks definitely show would would all of these traps
Speaker 1: still be working in this ancient ruin that Indiana Jones
Speaker 1: finds himself in. I don't know, it's it's a hard
Speaker 1: argument to make their right, How did the spring trap
Speaker 1: operate by you sticking your hand through a shaft of
Speaker 1: light when it was made like thousands of years ago? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Or you know, if it's duke and predator, like, how
Speaker 1: does he um? How does he make this super powerful
Speaker 1: calm pound bow just in the space of a few
Speaker 1: hours on an afternoon in the jungle? That's just standard
Speaker 1: survival training and all these other various ewok traps that
Speaker 1: he builds didn't didn't you go to that camp? Did
Speaker 1: I build a bow like that at a camp? Now?
Speaker 1: I think we sharpened sticks, you know, that would be
Speaker 1: that would be more believable. Right, he makes a spear
Speaker 1: to battle, that's the way there. Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: I think it probably speaks volumes for humans to be
Speaker 1: you know, to be saying all of this about traps,
Speaker 1: and especially about you know, loving these cinematic treatments of traps,
Speaker 1: because because what are traps? Ultimately, very broadly speaking, they're clever,
Speaker 1: tactical and or technological innovations that level the playing field
Speaker 1: against predators, against prey, and even against fellow humans. Traps
Speaker 1: are the sort of things that humans have been up
Speaker 1: to since prehistory. So of course we love traps, and
Speaker 1: of course we admire things like traps that we find
Speaker 1: another species. Right, So today we're going to be focusing
Speaker 1: on some allegations of insects with the ability to build traps,
Speaker 1: specifically ants that do things that may in fact be
Speaker 1: biological evolutions that allow them to trap prey. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: there are some other animals that I think we could
Speaker 1: say more more clearly and and famously create traps. I
Speaker 1: think the obvious example here would be spiders. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: spiders are the trap builders par excellence. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: there are no finer trap builders in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1: Maybe you could make a case for human beings, um,
Speaker 1: but personally I'm not in favor of that. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, well, building spiders especially are just such highly
Speaker 1: evolved trap masters. Every detail of their anatomy and behavior
Speaker 1: enhances their trapping ability, and the trap is very much
Speaker 1: an extension of their own bodies in so many ways.
Speaker 1: And we've covered this, and we've covered spiders in general
Speaker 1: numerous times in the show before, and we'll likely keep
Speaker 1: coming back to them. But yeah, that the spider, the
Speaker 1: spider is the trap maker. There's nothing else that the
Speaker 1: spider really does. Um in anything else it does, the
Speaker 1: web building spider is going to do in close proximity
Speaker 1: to the web that it has built. Yeah. Another example
Speaker 1: that's come up before, I think in our Sarlac episodes
Speaker 1: was the ant lion. Yes, yeah, uh. This is a
Speaker 1: case where we have predatory larvae that in some species
Speaker 1: of antline anyway, set up at the bottom of sand
Speaker 1: pits that they dig, ready to lash out at anything
Speaker 1: that disturbs their grains and you know, ventures down into
Speaker 1: the trap. Um. Again, not all ant lion species dig
Speaker 1: trap pits, but some of the most famous ones do.
Speaker 1: I remember. One of the great things we learned about
Speaker 1: the ant lion was that, like you say, the it
Speaker 1: is the ones that make traps. It is just the
Speaker 1: larval period of their lifespan, their life cycle that they
Speaker 1: make the traps. Then they later metamorphos into into another form.
Speaker 1: But while they're in that larval stage, I think at
Speaker 1: least some of them never poop. Oh yeah, catching ants
Speaker 1: and eating them and just like waiting, and it's like
Speaker 1: if you had to wait until you turned eighteen to poop.
Speaker 1: We'll go back and listen to that Sarlac episode if
Speaker 1: you'd like to hear more about the ant lion. There's
Speaker 1: also um the species of creature known as the worm lion,
Speaker 1: and this is this is unrelated to the ant lion.
Speaker 1: It's just a matter of convergent evolution that ends up
Speaker 1: utilizing largely the exact same method again when it's a larva.
Speaker 1: Uh though the pit itself in this case is generated
Speaker 1: via site a slightly different method, so it digs its
Speaker 1: pit in a slightly different method, but it's still consumes
Speaker 1: its prey in the same manner. But for me, at least,
Speaker 1: if you ask me to make a list of non
Speaker 1: human animals that make traps, I could obviously go spiders.
Speaker 1: I would have thought of the ant lion, maybe by
Speaker 1: association the worm lion. But there before I was reading
Speaker 1: up for this episode, I think I would have drawn
Speaker 1: on a blank I wouldn't know what to go to next. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and part of it comes down to just how are
Speaker 1: you going to going to define a trap? Uh? For example,
Speaker 1: here's here's an interesting potential example. Uh. We can discuss
Speaker 1: that I read across read read about when I was
Speaker 1: reading Gilbert Wald Bowlers How Not to Be Eaten, which
Speaker 1: which is largely about insects, but there's a part where
Speaker 1: the author is discussing the burrowing owl. So these are
Speaker 1: small birds native to the Great Plains in southern Florida. Um,
Speaker 1: I think they're about the size of a robin. I'm
Speaker 1: to understand that. You know, they're small, little little guys,
Speaker 1: but they make their home in burrows that they did themselves.
Speaker 1: And one of the interesting things that they do in
Speaker 1: addition to this, if this wasn't you know interesting enough already,
Speaker 1: is the burrowing owl will scatter horse or cow dung
Speaker 1: around the entrance to their burrows. And in you know,
Speaker 1: times before European contact, this would have probably been bison dung.
Speaker 1: And the dung does seem to be important because if
Speaker 1: if researchers remove the dung from the vicinity, the birds
Speaker 1: will just the bird will just go out and obtain
Speaker 1: more dung and place it in the vicinity. So it's
Speaker 1: it seems to be doing this intentionally. The theory is
Speaker 1: that they place the dung to bait dung beetles, So
Speaker 1: they put the dung out dung beetles come, And indeed,
Speaker 1: researchers have been able to tell that the owls eat
Speaker 1: ten times more dung beetles than usual when the dung
Speaker 1: is out. Well, this will in fact mirror one of
Speaker 1: the two examples of potential aunt trap making that I
Speaker 1: want to talk about later. Yeah, I mean it's but
Speaker 1: but this is a great example. It's certainly clever. I
Speaker 1: like it. But it kind of forces us to ask
Speaker 1: the question of a trap, like what is a trap?
Speaker 1: Is just merely baiting a trap? Um? That is a
Speaker 1: good question, Yeah, because and um, how much does the
Speaker 1: trap structure have to be separate from your body in
Speaker 1: order on as a as a constructed trap? And how
Speaker 1: much does it have to how much work does it
Speaker 1: have to do for you? Yeah? And at what point
Speaker 1: does an animal's behavior stop being a trap and just
Speaker 1: become sneaky behavior, sneaky tactics, or or simply ambush predation.
Speaker 1: Because obviously there are plenty of examples of ambush predators
Speaker 1: on land and in the sea, and these include everything
Speaker 1: from well, the trap door spider for one, which I
Speaker 1: think is is definitely a case of of trap building
Speaker 1: because it's it's an ambush predator, but it builds a
Speaker 1: silk hinge trap door to aid in those ambushes, right,
Speaker 1: so the trapdoor hides it. I think you could count
Speaker 1: that as like infrastructure necessary to constitute a trap. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that, Yeah, definitely with the trapdoor spider. But
Speaker 1: then you also have just various camouflage predators, including things
Speaker 1: like frog fish, praying mantis is, chameleons, and more, which
Speaker 1: are not building anything. They're not altering their environment, but
Speaker 1: they've evolved to look like a part of or environment. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they have you know, often tremendous abilities of camouflage
Speaker 1: that enable them to quickly ambush something that they want
Speaker 1: to eat. Okay, that probably doesn't that doesn't really seem
Speaker 1: like a trap to me, because they're just evolved to
Speaker 1: look that way and they do the actual hunting themselves, right.
Speaker 1: And then of course we have various birds and cats
Speaker 1: and big cats even, uh that are just very stealthy
Speaker 1: that are just very good at not being observed by
Speaker 1: the things they want to kill. So I was reading
Speaker 1: a little bit about this in Douglas j Imland's excellent
Speaker 1: book Animal Weapons that have Referenced on the Show before,
Speaker 1: and he points out that creatures such as this generally
Speaker 1: depend on quote, a quick strike weapon that immediately incapacitates
Speaker 1: its victim. And of course these bioweapons might be enhanced
Speaker 1: by special features, such as in various deep sea ambush
Speaker 1: predators a bioluminescent lure, which again is not something they
Speaker 1: have created or engineered out of their environment, but it
Speaker 1: is a part of their body. So when we come
Speaker 1: back of this idea that what needs to be something
Speaker 1: that's built, it needs to be something that's engineered, or
Speaker 1: just a whole dug in the in the ground. Even um,
Speaker 1: we come back to that same question, well, why don't
Speaker 1: we find more of this? And I actually found an
Speaker 1: interesting paper title out there, why are pitfall Traps so
Speaker 1: rare in the natural World? By G. D Ruxton and M. H. Hansel,
Speaker 1: And it appeared in Evolutionary Ecology in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1: Interesting question. Yeah, So the authors here point out that
Speaker 1: in order to lay a trap, you generally need either
Speaker 1: advanced cognitive powers as with humans obviously, or you need
Speaker 1: specialists self secreted materials as with spiders and catis fly
Speaker 1: larvae thing which the Catasta catass fly larvae use that
Speaker 1: their their secretions to create a net like even meshed
Speaker 1: trap like a silk um trap in order to like
Speaker 1: filter catch their prey. That makes sense. So humans can
Speaker 1: create all kinds of traps because we have of you know,
Speaker 1: cognitive powers that allow us to imagine what could be done.
Speaker 1: How you know, other materials in the environment could be
Speaker 1: repurposed to uh, to passively ensnare or kill prey, animals
Speaker 1: and spiders and stuff. That that's just the trap you
Speaker 1: could almost say, is a part of their body. Even
Speaker 1: though the web is a built thing. They're evolved to
Speaker 1: secrete the silk for the web out of their bodies,
Speaker 1: and they have very instinctually driven behaviors for how they
Speaker 1: extrude that silk where and in what patterns. Right, So
Speaker 1: Ruxton enhansl here ultimately point out that, okay, we have
Speaker 1: the ant lion though, and of course the worm lion. Uh,
Speaker 1: these are exceptions to the rule. Um they make use
Speaker 1: of a pitfall trap, and so the authors asked, why
Speaker 1: is this basic tactic not more common in the animal world?
Speaker 1: How hard is it, after all to dig a hole?
Speaker 1: They're easy, they're cheap um, And yet you don't see
Speaker 1: this technique used by virtually anything outside of and of
Speaker 1: some ant lions and worm lions. Apparently, the lack of
Speaker 1: more pitfall traps in nature was something of a mystery,
Speaker 1: or and remains something of a mystery. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: is interesting, Okay, so I it took me a second
Speaker 1: to get the distinction they're making. But they're saying that
Speaker 1: the ant lion and the wormline would be kind of
Speaker 1: an outlier because they don't have complex intelligence and imagination
Speaker 1: like humans, so they're not inventing traps with cognitive powers.
Speaker 1: But they also don't secrete a material that constitutes the
Speaker 1: basis of the trap like a spider. They're literally just
Speaker 1: building a trap out of the dead environment around of
Speaker 1: them by digging a conically shaped hole in such a
Speaker 1: pattern that that ants get stuck in it when they
Speaker 1: fall down the side. But and and why is that
Speaker 1: so rare, because it would seem like that that should
Speaker 1: be a strategy that lots of animals could easily employ. Right, Yeah, again,
Speaker 1: holes are ultimately easy to make, low energy? Why not? Why? Why?
Speaker 1: Why is? Why is this cat not making a hole
Speaker 1: and using that as part of its hunting tactics? So what? What?
Speaker 1: What are their thoughts on this? Like, why would why
Speaker 1: wouldn't we see this more often? Well, they proposed to
Speaker 1: speculative reasons for the lack of pitfall traps in nature.
Speaker 1: The first one is pitfall traps may require a specialist
Speaker 1: micro habitat. In other words, you can't do this just anywhere.
Speaker 1: Conditions have to be just right, uh, such as you know,
Speaker 1: we can look at the ant lions, they have to
Speaker 1: be kind of sandy conditions, you know, you have to
Speaker 1: have that kind of granular environment. Um. So it's the
Speaker 1: kind of tactic that a potential trap builder would not
Speaker 1: necessarily be able to employ all over the place. You
Speaker 1: would have to depend on us, again, on a specialist
Speaker 1: micro habitat. I think I recall from our Starlac episode
Speaker 1: where we had a segment about the ant lion that
Speaker 1: they needed the grains of soil to be of a
Speaker 1: particular size, like the sandy grains above or below a
Speaker 1: certain diameter threshold would not work very well for making
Speaker 1: the traps. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the second point is that
Speaker 1: with the ant lion in particular, the trap targets small prey,
Speaker 1: and since they may be more functionally tied to their
Speaker 1: trapped and spiders are traps of this nature, could serve
Speaker 1: as like basically a major bull's eye for potential predators.
Speaker 1: And indeed the main predators of ant lions and worm
Speaker 1: lions are birds who know what to look for. That's
Speaker 1: a really good point. So by building a trap and
Speaker 1: then sitting in it and waiting for your prey to
Speaker 1: fall in, you were also usually going to be making
Speaker 1: a structure that makes it easy for things that want
Speaker 1: to eat you too, I defind where you are. You know,
Speaker 1: they don't have to look too hard because you've made
Speaker 1: a big hole in the ground, right and uh, and
Speaker 1: spiders just have a little more leeway with the situation. Now,
Speaker 1: I should point out Hansel also wrote an entire book
Speaker 1: which I'm gonna reference here in a minute. He spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time in that book talking about spiders
Speaker 1: and how you know, some sometimes spider webs are very visible,
Speaker 1: h in other times they're not, and how that plays
Speaker 1: into the you know, the ultimately kind of complex relationship
Speaker 1: between spiders and uh, and the creatures that would eat spiders. Um.
Speaker 1: But but just thinking about this as the trap being
Speaker 1: this conspicuous thing. This we actually see this in a
Speaker 1: lot of our fantastic trap fiction. You know that moment
Speaker 1: when the target of the clever cinematic trap, especially if
Speaker 1: it's laid by the protagonists. Uh, the the enemy almost
Speaker 1: sets it off, right, like the predator almost triggers the
Speaker 1: trip line you've prepared. But then something happens right the uh,
Speaker 1: the monster deduces that the trap is there, or it
Speaker 1: suspects that something is a little off. Oh and maybe
Speaker 1: even the presence of a trap is how the hero
Speaker 1: knows that they have stumbled across the bad guys hideout.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um. It even reminds me a bit of
Speaker 1: our recent weird house selection the Lift. This was the
Speaker 1: killer elevator movie. Uh, the killer elevator in this or
Speaker 1: I guess you were more specifically the weird bio brain
Speaker 1: that's been installed in the elevator shaft to power these elevators.
Speaker 1: It's kind of an obligate trap predator. Um. But it's
Speaker 1: so tied to that in ironment that it's a little tricky.
Speaker 1: Like it it's not able to pull off every kill,
Speaker 1: and it's eventually destroyed by prey that is too clever
Speaker 1: for it. Brilliant analogy. This this is true. The killer
Speaker 1: Elevator is an obligate trap predator. I also have to
Speaker 1: point out, speaking of the Star Lack, is that recent
Speaker 1: Mandalorian episodes have also, you know, sort of played with
Speaker 1: this idea. Yeah. Yeah, the Mighty Star, like the Star
Speaker 1: looks pretty impressive, but they make it clear that even
Speaker 1: these great trap predators can be a consumed by the
Speaker 1: mighty crate dragon that lives in the deserts of Tate
Speaker 1: wein uh, so knowing you're there being you know, this
Speaker 1: identifiable organism in the sand that can have a huge
Speaker 1: downside to it. Now, I was trying to think of
Speaker 1: counterpoints to the idea that okay, so, uh sitting at
Speaker 1: the bottom of a pitfall trap and waiting for prey
Speaker 1: to fall into you and then eating that that makes
Speaker 1: you vulnerable to two predators that want to find you. Well, well,
Speaker 1: what if you just make pitfall traps and then you
Speaker 1: go away and then you you know, leave them there
Speaker 1: and then come act like a human hunter might do
Speaker 1: you know, leave a trap out in the woods and
Speaker 1: then come and see what it collected, lobster traps or something.
Speaker 1: But but I can see downsides to that as well,
Speaker 1: because if it's just a pit trap, you could imagine that, well,
Speaker 1: something might fall in there, but then something else might
Speaker 1: eat it before you get to it, um so or
Speaker 1: it might you know, if you have to make these
Speaker 1: all over the place, you might spend a lot of
Speaker 1: energy going around from one to the other. So is
Speaker 1: that really all that much better than just hunting? Well,
Speaker 1: and then it kind of comes back to this idea
Speaker 1: that that the trap laid by an animal, especially um
Speaker 1: still requires the lethal mechanism, and in the case of
Speaker 1: the ant line, the lethal lethal mechanism is itself. It
Speaker 1: is still essentially uh an ambush predator like again, like
Speaker 1: Emlyn says, quote a quick strike weapon that immediately incapacitates
Speaker 1: its victim. That, yeah, that I can't believe. I didn't
Speaker 1: think of that. That's of course a good point. You
Speaker 1: have to find a way to kill the prey. So
Speaker 1: I mentioned that that Hanzel has a has a whole
Speaker 1: book that deals with with with some of this a
Speaker 1: little bit, but just sort of the broader picture of
Speaker 1: animals building things it's titled animal architecture, and I was
Speaker 1: reading through this a bit. He contends that we're not
Speaker 1: looking at traps when we're looking at cases of an
Speaker 1: animal baiting another animal, because traps are a kind of
Speaker 1: subset of animal architecture, an engineered space that aids and capture. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: by his metric here, what the burrowing owl does by
Speaker 1: by leaving dung out around its nest and having this
Speaker 1: attract insects to it, that would not count as a
Speaker 1: trap because it is not a structure that in any
Speaker 1: way aids and capture. It just attracts prey to a site. Oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, I want to also speak speaking of
Speaker 1: the burrowing owl again, I want to throw in that
Speaker 1: that while some burrowing owls do build their own burrows,
Speaker 1: they're also burrowing owls that acquire the burrows of other creatures. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I want to read this quote from Hansel here. I
Speaker 1: think he puts it rather well, uh, concerning the animal
Speaker 1: architecture and traps quote. Whereas a house can just be
Speaker 1: a barrier between the builder and the outside world, a
Speaker 1: trap has a dynamic relationship between itself and the prey.
Speaker 1: The prey needs to approach the trap in a particular
Speaker 1: orientation to it, and then needs to be restrained by it.
Speaker 1: Traps are therefore more complex than homes and need to
Speaker 1: be more precisely engineered, and then he goes on to
Speaker 1: point out the quote among the vertebrates, trap builders were
Speaker 1: apparently absent until the recent history of man. Now he
Speaker 1: cites human mental capacity once more for the construction of
Speaker 1: such traps, noting quote, Virtually all non human trap builders
Speaker 1: use self secreted materials, and the capture principle they adopt
Speaker 1: is the net. The exceptions are simple in design and operation,
Speaker 1: as well as rare, and then he goes on to
Speaker 1: specifically mentioned ant lions, uh, worm lions um and larval
Speaker 1: dip tira. But anyway, a large takeaway here is that
Speaker 1: trap building is not as widespread in the animal kingdom
Speaker 1: as you might expect. Humans make a lot of traps.
Speaker 1: There are some very specialized animals, especially some invertebrates, that
Speaker 1: use traps made of materials that they secrete from their
Speaker 1: own bodies, but generally, trap building is not a very
Speaker 1: widespread hunting strategy among animals of planet Earth, in which
Speaker 1: case it would be very interesting to find examples of
Speaker 1: animals such as ants that make traps in order to
Speaker 1: get their nutrition. And I guess that's a good segue
Speaker 1: to what I to the main focus of today's episode,
Speaker 1: which was a couple of examples I came across of
Speaker 1: ants that do something that could be interpreted as building
Speaker 1: traps as a hunting strategy. Yeah, and I mean it
Speaker 1: it would make sense that we might find something like
Speaker 1: this in the ant world because ants are masters of
Speaker 1: construction there, they alter their environment. They're capable of of
Speaker 1: practicing um agriculture. Uh. They as we've discussed in previous
Speaker 1: episode the show, Uh, they engage in complex conflicts that
Speaker 1: we may might well compare to warfare. They can solve
Speaker 1: problems there. I mean, the list goes on and on.
Speaker 1: Ants are amazing um as as of course, as as
Speaker 1: the now lady oh Wilson was fond of reminding us, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, ants, there are incredible creatures that we've We've
Speaker 1: covered them numerous times in the show before we're covering today,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure we'll cover them again exactly. So the
Speaker 1: first example I want to talk about I found so interesting,
Speaker 1: and this one also has some interesting differences in interpretations
Speaker 1: that came across. But just to to start with the
Speaker 1: basic report. I was reading about this in a paper
Speaker 1: published in Nature in the year two thousand five by A.
Speaker 1: Land Jean Pascal, Jean Solano, Julian Iralay, Bruno Corbara, and
Speaker 1: Jerome Oriville called arboreal ants build traps to capture prey uh.
Speaker 1: And also as a supplement to the paper in Nature,
Speaker 1: I was reading a summary feature that was also in
Speaker 1: Nature by Nourrell Tawie published in April two thousand five,
Speaker 1: called Amazonian ants ambush prey. So here's the deal. There's
Speaker 1: a plant in the Amazon called her tell Phisophora or
Speaker 1: maybe Physophora p h y s O p h O
Speaker 1: r A. I'm gonna try to say phiz opera. So
Speaker 1: these here here teleplants. Plants in this genus are woody
Speaker 1: trees or shrubs. I've seen them called both trees and shrubs,
Speaker 1: but there if you're trying to picture them as a tree,
Speaker 1: you should be imagining a small tree. So woody stems
Speaker 1: but not like you know, sky high. Plants in this
Speaker 1: genus are found in the tropics across multiple continents, but
Speaker 1: their diversity is concentrated around the Amazon, and they typically
Speaker 1: have flowers that are pollinated by butterflies. And this one
Speaker 1: species in particular here tell a phiz offerra, is what
Speaker 1: the authors of the paper call an ant plant. This
Speaker 1: is a plant species that is known to have a
Speaker 1: specific biological relationship with a species of ant uh and
Speaker 1: these can be found throughout the world. They're they're very
Speaker 1: common mutualis ums or you know, various kinds of symbiotic
Speaker 1: relationships between ant colonies and the trees or plants they inhabit. Now,
Speaker 1: this plant in particular has a relationship with the arboreal
Speaker 1: ant alomeras decim articulatus, and they live on the body
Speaker 1: of the plant, forming colony centers in what the authors
Speaker 1: of the paper called leaf pouches. They're these little bull
Speaker 1: looking things that can usually be found at the places
Speaker 1: where the branches split into leaves. They look like the
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to describe. They're just these little
Speaker 1: like green lobes or orbs, and apparently the ants like
Speaker 1: to get inside those and make nests in there. Now
Speaker 1: all already, one of the things that's that I'm reminded
Speaker 1: of is the idea of like a specialist micro habitat.
Speaker 1: And if you have a situation where a plant is
Speaker 1: is the home to the ants that they have this uh,
Speaker 1: this this ant plant relationship in place. Um, you know
Speaker 1: that the plant itself is kind of the environment. It's
Speaker 1: kind of the micro habitat that the the ant is
Speaker 1: the master of. That's exactly right. But the interesting thing is,
Speaker 1: of course ants being builders, some ants will form complex,
Speaker 1: you know, dugout colonies in the ground or or other
Speaker 1: types of interesting engineered environments. They can also engineer the
Speaker 1: micro habitat of the surface of a plant, and that's
Speaker 1: what we're gonna be talking about in this case. So
Speaker 1: uh oh, and I should say that the colonies that
Speaker 1: were looked at in this two thousand five paper were
Speaker 1: from French guyana in in northern South America. But so,
Speaker 1: what you find in these plants that are occupied by
Speaker 1: their by their familiar ant species is that along the
Speaker 1: stems of the host plant, the ants will build what
Speaker 1: the authors of this paper called galleried structures, or sometimes
Speaker 1: they just say galleries. It's kind of hard to describe
Speaker 1: exactly what this is, but imagine a kind of platform
Speaker 1: built out over the surface of the stem of the plant,
Speaker 1: and it's a platform that the ants can crawl underneath,
Speaker 1: and then this platform has a kind of spongy texture,
Speaker 1: almost as if it's or honeycomb texture. It's aligned with
Speaker 1: all these holes in the platform that the ants can
Speaker 1: crawl in and out through. Generally, generally the holes are
Speaker 1: just slightly larger than the diameter of one of the
Speaker 1: worker ants heads. So they're these platforms raised above the
Speaker 1: stem of the plant. Ants crawl underneath them, but then
Speaker 1: crawl up and up and down in and out through
Speaker 1: the holes in the platform. Yeah, it is kind of
Speaker 1: difficult to describe it because it is so different from
Speaker 1: something that that humans would for the most part build,
Speaker 1: you know, the um you know, by virtue of the
Speaker 1: ants being far more mobile and sort of living in
Speaker 1: a in a more three dimensional space than human beings
Speaker 1: tend to. By the way, these are great to look up,
Speaker 1: probably unless you suffer from trip to phobia, in which
Speaker 1: case stay far away if you're if you're freaked out
Speaker 1: by things like lotus pods, uh and um and random
Speaker 1: holes and things, yeah, you might you might want to
Speaker 1: avoid this particular Google image search. Now, how do the
Speaker 1: ants build these galleries, Well, they apparently make them by
Speaker 1: cutting off tricombs from the stems of the plant. Tricombs
Speaker 1: is a word that comes from the Greek word for hairs.
Speaker 1: These are small, little fibery appendages that poke out from
Speaker 1: the surface of a plant. You've probably seen lots of
Speaker 1: plants before that have little hairy things all over the
Speaker 1: stem or the leaves. Those are tricombs, and they do
Speaker 1: look a lot like hairs. So the worker ants will
Speaker 1: move along the stem of a of a Hairtella Fhizophora plant,
Speaker 1: clearing away the tricombs and then just to read from
Speaker 1: the language used in the paper here quote, then using
Speaker 1: uncut tricombs as pillars. They build the galleries vault by
Speaker 1: binding cut tricombs together with a compound that they regurgitate later.
Speaker 1: This structure is reinforced by the mycelium of a complex
Speaker 1: of sooty mold species that has been manipulated by the ants.
Speaker 1: Fungal growth starts around the holes and then spreads rapidly
Speaker 1: to the rest of the structure. So I think you
Speaker 1: you heard that right. So these ants build their galleries
Speaker 1: along the stem of the plant by cutting the hairs
Speaker 1: off of the plant where they live, then using those
Speaker 1: hairs as building materials along with their own barf as
Speaker 1: a kind of mortar, and then holding everything together by
Speaker 1: seating it with mold or fungus that they farm, So
Speaker 1: they have a kind of agricultural project. Were farming fungal
Speaker 1: rebar that they used to reinforce the galleries that they build.
Speaker 1: And in quotes given to the press, I've seen the
Speaker 1: authors of the study compare this composite material to fiberglass. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that does seem like a good comparison. Oh man, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just so amazing that it's not just like this
Speaker 1: physical um act, but they're actually have seating it with uh,
Speaker 1: with this this mold. Oh man, they're kind of they're
Speaker 1: they're building it, but they're also kind of growing it.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, and and they tend to it as it grows.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to read another section from the study
Speaker 1: where they talk about the evidence that the ants are
Speaker 1: actively tending the fungus as it reinforces these structures. They say, quote,
Speaker 1: we noted that the stems of thirty four young seedlings,
Speaker 1: which had not yet developed leaf pouches, did not bear fungus.
Speaker 1: Nine saplings raised in a greenhouse in the absence of
Speaker 1: Alamira's that's the the ants di developed leaf pouches, but
Speaker 1: never bore fungus. However, fifteen saplings raised in the presence
Speaker 1: of ants bore my celia, whose development was limited to
Speaker 1: the galleries. When we eliminated the associated ants from five
Speaker 1: of the fifteen, the fungus on the galleries grew into
Speaker 1: a disorganized structure, and none of the nine new stems
Speaker 1: that developed bore any fungus at all. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: fungus is only showing up on the plant when the
Speaker 1: ants are there on the plant. And if you take
Speaker 1: the ants away from the plant after they've been using
Speaker 1: the fungus to reinforce their their galleries, the fungus kind
Speaker 1: of grows out of control and what they call a
Speaker 1: disorganized structure. But with the ants still there, it stays
Speaker 1: nice and tightly formed around the holes in the galleries.
Speaker 1: So they're they're tending their garden. It's like a living
Speaker 1: and I don't know, it's like if you have to
Speaker 1: have maintenance workers constantly sort of gardening and tending to
Speaker 1: the fungus that held up your skyscrapers. But but but
Speaker 1: here's where we start getting to the trapping. So the
Speaker 1: authors of this study say that they noticed that sometimes
Speaker 1: larger insects would become immobilized on the surface of the galleries.
Speaker 1: So you got these these spongy surfaces, ants crawling underneath them,
Speaker 1: and sometimes like a locust or a butterfly, some bigger
Speaker 1: insect lands on the gallery and then it gets stuck.
Speaker 1: What's going on here, Well, they started to investigate whether
Speaker 1: the galleries could be functioning as a type of trap.
Speaker 1: And here's what they say about how the ambush works quote.
Speaker 1: Our observations revealed that Alomiris workers hide in the galleries
Speaker 1: with their heads just under the holes, mandibles wide open,
Speaker 1: seemingly waiting for an insect to land. To kill the insect,
Speaker 1: they grasp its free legs, antenna, or wings and move
Speaker 1: in and out of the holes in opposite directions until
Speaker 1: the prey is progressively stretched against the gallery and swarms
Speaker 1: of workers can sting it the and then slide the
Speaker 1: prey over the top of the gallery, again moving in
Speaker 1: and out of the holes, but this time in the
Speaker 1: same direction. They move it slowly towards a leaf pouch
Speaker 1: where they carve it up. Oh, and then once they
Speaker 1: get to one of these population centers of the colony,
Speaker 1: you know, these these nests, nest sites in the leaf pouches. Uh.
Speaker 1: They tend to feed bits of protein from the insect
Speaker 1: to their young. Well yeah, this is amazing and suitably
Speaker 1: brutal for the world of ants. So this this, this
Speaker 1: larger creature lands or walks on to the structure. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, they're reaching out of holes to pull it
Speaker 1: straight down and then they transfer it to a place
Speaker 1: where they can carve it up. Right. Uh So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no sentimentality in the world of ants. They're just like, okay,
Speaker 1: this is edible. It's time to get to butcher in.
Speaker 1: But anyway, these observations reveal this this fascinating three way
Speaker 1: interaction between the plant, the fungus, and the ant all
Speaker 1: sort of ving together in this this this uh three
Speaker 1: way life cycle essentially that apparently serves the purpose of
Speaker 1: creating a trap to get larger insects. You know these stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh I don't think I mentioned, but the Alamira's decim
Speaker 1: articulatus ants are very small. It's a it's a structure
Speaker 1: that allows these tiny ants apparently to capture kill and
Speaker 1: butcher much much larger prey. All right, And of course
Speaker 1: the plant, out of all of this gets some slight
Speaker 1: mutilation from the ants, but is protected from larger insects
Speaker 1: that would otherwise uh not on it and do more
Speaker 1: harm to it than just you know, creating an interesting
Speaker 1: lattice work out of its body. Presumably, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think often there is such a relationship going on. The
Speaker 1: insect also provides a benefit to the plant somehow, uh
Speaker 1: though in the sources I was reading, it wasn't clear
Speaker 1: to me exactly if it's known what what the major
Speaker 1: benefit provided by the ants is. But I would guess
Speaker 1: that's right, that they're probably protecting the plant from from
Speaker 1: herbivore large herbivore insects that would chew it sleeves down
Speaker 1: or something. But I don't know for sure. I gotta
Speaker 1: admit r And then of course we also have to
Speaker 1: do always realize that in the natural world the line
Speaker 1: between parasitism and symbiosis is sometimes a bit thin. These
Speaker 1: are not relationships that are governed by strict contracts, so
Speaker 1: you might see a little bit of push and pull
Speaker 1: over the course of evolutionary history. Yeah, ants will take
Speaker 1: whatever they can get, right, so you be careful about
Speaker 1: entering into a bargain with with with the ants. But
Speaker 1: on the other side of all this, I wanted to
Speaker 1: come back on it because I found a book where
Speaker 1: the trap interpretation of these structures has been challenged. And
Speaker 1: in fact, this book was by somebody who's come up
Speaker 1: on the on I think episodes we did about ants
Speaker 1: last year, the biologist Mark W. Moffatt. Yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he has a book called Adventures among Ants that
Speaker 1: was that came out in two thousand ten University of
Speaker 1: California Press. And in this book I found a section
Speaker 1: where Moffatt argues that the trap interpretation of these structures
Speaker 1: built by Alamiras desim articulatus is in fact a misinterpretation.
Speaker 1: Now I'm not sure he's right about this, but I
Speaker 1: do want to explain what he claims. So it's a
Speaker 1: bit of background. In In the section of the book
Speaker 1: directly preceding this, Moffatt has been talking about his observations
Speaker 1: of various species of army ants on rating parties to
Speaker 1: forage for food and also on defensive patrols to protect
Speaker 1: the colony and the rating column from threats. And one
Speaker 1: of his observations in this in this preceding section is
Speaker 1: how difficult it is sometimes to tell the difference between
Speaker 1: these two behaviors and how easily one bleeds into the other. So,
Speaker 1: according to de Mofat, for most army ants, their defensive
Speaker 1: attacks on a creature that is received to be threatening,
Speaker 1: the rating column can quickly turn into a foraging rate
Speaker 1: in itself. So if the threat is killed, it is
Speaker 1: pretty much immediately chopped up into pieces and carried away
Speaker 1: as food. So it's kind of like if you imagine
Speaker 1: every monster movie ended with the heroes butchering and eating
Speaker 1: the monster after they finally defeated it. Well, we do
Speaker 1: see that sometimes. In fact that that occurs in the
Speaker 1: Mandalorian but um in the case of the Great Dragon.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, we should see more more consumption of
Speaker 1: the drag of the dragons and monsters and so forth.
Speaker 1: Use every part of the monster be responsible. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I mean that's you know, our humans are
Speaker 1: different than ants. I mean, ants are not going to
Speaker 1: let anything go to waste. Humans after you fought a monster,
Speaker 1: you might just want to have nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: To each species their own. But anyway, so from here,
Speaker 1: Moffatt moves on to describing the aunt I've been talking
Speaker 1: about Elmira's decim articulatus, and he's describing its living situation.
Speaker 1: The one distinction he makes I couldn't find out what
Speaker 1: was what was the disconnect here? But he said, you
Speaker 1: remember how I said that the ants build these gallery
Speaker 1: structures out of tricombs cut from the plants, a little
Speaker 1: plant hairs, mixed with their own regurgitation or vomit, and
Speaker 1: then uh and then lined with the mycelium of the
Speaker 1: fungus that they cultivate. Moffatt describes it the same way,
Speaker 1: but he mentions feces rather than vomit. And I don't
Speaker 1: know who's right there, but anyway, Moffatt gives a few
Speaker 1: reasons that he had doubts about the generally accepted interpretation
Speaker 1: of this structure as a trap, specifically as a trap,
Speaker 1: because he says a trap implies that, for example, a
Speaker 1: locust landing on the ant gallery would not have landed
Speaker 1: there if it saw the ants. The trap would be
Speaker 1: performing the function of hiding the ants, so you know,
Speaker 1: they're hidden beneath the vault of the gallery, so that
Speaker 1: the prey insect feels it's safe enough to land and
Speaker 1: then they jump out and grab it. Okay, this would
Speaker 1: be in keeping with say the trapdoors Fighter. Uh, would
Speaker 1: probably be a great example of this. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's comparable. That that's how it would function
Speaker 1: as a trap. But Moffatt writes that he thinks this
Speaker 1: is unlikely because he doubts that grasshoppers would really be
Speaker 1: able to notice the tiny workers of this ant species anyway, quote,
Speaker 1: particularly in mid leap, or that they would be able
Speaker 1: to change course in mid leap after noticing them. So
Speaker 1: he was a little iffy on that. He's like, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that the trap would really serve much purpose
Speaker 1: if it's supposed to be hiding the ants from the
Speaker 1: prey animal, because these are these are insects that are
Speaker 1: much larger than the ants anyway. Right, So he's saying, basically,
Speaker 1: he's saying like this might be if this was a trap,
Speaker 1: which he doesn't think it is. Uh, it would be
Speaker 1: a preposterous trap. Uh, an unnecessary trap. And while again
Speaker 1: we love unnecessarily complex and preposterous traps in our cinema,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about cinema here. We're talking about evolution
Speaker 1: and full of sufficient yeah. Yeah, and things need to
Speaker 1: be ruthlessly efficient and if it's not ruthlessly efficient. Uh,
Speaker 1: it is going to change or go away. But anyway,
Speaker 1: those are his suspicions, so he decided to put them
Speaker 1: to the test. So he tells a story of that
Speaker 1: that he was studying colonies of this ant in the
Speaker 1: wild in Ecuador, and he put together a test to
Speaker 1: interrogate the trap interpretation. So to read from the section
Speaker 1: of Mofet's book where he describes this test, he says, quote,
Speaker 1: I hung a mosquito net over a plant with a
Speaker 1: thriving Alamira's colony, added a hundred grasshoppers and katie DIDs
Speaker 1: and sat inside for the next five mornings, an unusual
Speaker 1: case of using a mosquito net to keep insects in
Speaker 1: instead of out. Even after the grasshoppers settled down, they
Speaker 1: were indiscriminate in their movements, hopping from where the ants
Speaker 1: hid under the structures to where aunts strolled in full view,
Speaker 1: to where there were no ants at all. When they
Speaker 1: landed among the ants, even on the structures that got
Speaker 1: away on hurt. Certainly, if the structures served as traps,
Speaker 1: they were inefficient ones. So he's saying in his observations here,
Speaker 1: he's seeing very little correlation between the structures and the
Speaker 1: hunting behaviors of the ants or the behaviors of the
Speaker 1: prey insects, So what purpose does he believe the galleries
Speaker 1: are serving. Well, he points out that the galleries tend
Speaker 1: to run along the stems of the tree, connecting each
Speaker 1: nest pouch to to another nest pouch, and they quote
Speaker 1: contain a highway of workers commuting from nest to nest.
Speaker 1: And then he points out that other insects, including other
Speaker 1: ant species, do sometimes build various types of physical covers
Speaker 1: over their trails, which are generally interpreted to be defensive
Speaker 1: in nature. For example, some marauder and driver ants have
Speaker 1: been observed to build soil covers over their trails. So
Speaker 1: could that be what's going on in this case? Could
Speaker 1: these galleries that the ants build at actually be defensive
Speaker 1: in nature? Another strike here, According to Moffatt, he observed
Speaker 1: that the workers at his study site did not actually
Speaker 1: sit and wait at the holes in these galleries, as
Speaker 1: you might expect them to do if they were planning
Speaker 1: an ambush. He says that when conditions were normal, so
Speaker 1: like if the colony is not in an agitated state,
Speaker 1: things are just sort of going along normally most of
Speaker 1: the gaps in the gallery structures were unoccupied, but he
Speaker 1: says this changed when there appeared to be some kind
Speaker 1: of threat to the colony. Quote, after a day of
Speaker 1: pulling grasshoppers from my hair, I noticed interlopers of another ant,
Speaker 1: a species of fidoli or big headed ant, climbing the
Speaker 1: plant to pin down a wounded grasshopper missed by the Elamiras.
Speaker 1: Upon the arrival of the fidoli ants, the Alamiris workers
Speaker 1: began to guard each of the several dozen entrances to
Speaker 1: their arcade. And that's the arcade, is what he's calling
Speaker 1: the things that the other authors called the galleries, the
Speaker 1: several dozen entrances to their arcade nearest the commotion caused
Speaker 1: by the intruders. These guards, aided by nest mates roaming
Speaker 1: the arcade surface, also caught and killed one fight ali
Speaker 1: and carried it off. So, based on these observations, Moffatt
Speaker 1: argues that the galleries are more likely defensive to protect
Speaker 1: trails of workers moving from one leaf pouch to the other,
Speaker 1: but that when something attacks or threatens the colony, the
Speaker 1: workers quickly shift their behavior from travel to defense, and
Speaker 1: then they occupy the holes and start biting violently at
Speaker 1: anything that comes near. And of course, if they are
Speaker 1: able to immobilize an attacker, or not necessarily an attacker,
Speaker 1: if they're able to immobilize whatever it is that put
Speaker 1: them on the defense, they immediately shift rolls again and
Speaker 1: turn that threat into food and begin butchering it for
Speaker 1: the colony again, to to cook the monster, so speak.
Speaker 1: So we might be better to think of these as
Speaker 1: defensive fortifications, kind of like to use like a medieval
Speaker 1: castle or fortress scenario. It's kind of like the various
Speaker 1: uh crinulations and murder holes and uh and and aero slits,
Speaker 1: except with the with the with the added point that
Speaker 1: in this case the occupants of the castle or fortress
Speaker 1: would eat those that they killed defending it. Right, That's
Speaker 1: what Moffatt argues, uh And So to to finish up
Speaker 1: his section, he says in the end quote in this
Speaker 1: way the organization of a super organism. He's referring to
Speaker 1: ants there because I think you can make the argument that,
Speaker 1: you know, an ant colony might be best understood as
Speaker 1: one organism rather than many. It is a super organism
Speaker 1: composed of many different bodies, he says it quote can
Speaker 1: be more responsive than the tissues in a body. Trail
Speaker 1: bound workers can shift seamlessly in their behavior from transport
Speaker 1: to protection to predation. It's as if one's liver could
Speaker 1: change function when the heart is incapacitated and pump blood.
Speaker 1: So obviously I don't know who's right here. Moffatt's book
Speaker 1: is more than ten years old at this point. Uh,
Speaker 1: And most of the things I read about this ant species,
Speaker 1: alameirastsim articulatas still described the galleries as ambush traps and
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure which interpretation is correct, but I
Speaker 1: do think either way, Moffatt makes a very interesting point
Speaker 1: about the fluidity of function when it comes to ant behavior.
Speaker 1: How you know one moment's enemy is the next moment's lunch, right, Yeah?
Speaker 1: Like that, Like the ant colony is not just trying
Speaker 1: to do one thing. Um, it has a lot of
Speaker 1: objectives and it has again this fluidity of function. Whereas
Speaker 1: it's it's far easier to look at at a web
Speaker 1: building spider and know what's up. You know that the
Speaker 1: web is it's uh is its purpose, The web is
Speaker 1: kind of its soul, uh, And there's no question about
Speaker 1: why it constructed. The web I guess also that this
Speaker 1: raises another question about what counts as a quote trap,
Speaker 1: because assuming for a second that Moffatt's interpretation is correct.
Speaker 1: I don't know it is, but if he's right that
Speaker 1: these structures are primarily to defend the ant trails, but
Speaker 1: then when some when a threat presents itself, they turn
Speaker 1: around and use the holes in the galleries as murder
Speaker 1: holes and then eat whatever they can immobilize, does that
Speaker 1: count as a trap? Like? How how specialized does a
Speaker 1: structure have to be for the purpose of catching prey
Speaker 1: in order to be thought of as a trap, Because
Speaker 1: you can imagine other examples where an animal builds a
Speaker 1: structure that's primarily defensive in some way. It's more like
Speaker 1: the home from the example you talked about at the
Speaker 1: beginning in that book. You know it's a barrier between
Speaker 1: you and the outside world. Yet it has some kind
Speaker 1: of feature that like another animal or something could get
Speaker 1: stuck on or something. You know, it's somehow allows you
Speaker 1: to sometimes opportunistically harvest from the structure and then eat
Speaker 1: from it. And does that count as a trap? Now?
Speaker 1: I haven't seen this movie in a very long time,
Speaker 1: but but I think there might be something comparable and
Speaker 1: Home Alone too, am I oh lost in New York,
Speaker 1: the one with Tim Curry. What Tim Curry is in
Speaker 1: that one? I think he plays a he plays a
Speaker 1: snooty bell hop or something that sounds about right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I think the uh Actually, we were trying
Speaker 1: to figure what this out, what this was, and Seth
Speaker 1: just chimed in to let us know he was right. Um.
Speaker 1: The house where he builds the traps in Home Alone
Speaker 1: two is a house that's like under renovation, so it
Speaker 1: already has featured Like all the traps don't have to
Speaker 1: be imagined from scratch. There are already features of the house.
Speaker 1: I don't remember exactly what they are, but there are
Speaker 1: things that are dangerous about it already. Okay, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about my second example of ants
Speaker 1: potentially doing something that you could interpret as a trap,
Speaker 1: and this one also involves using foreign materials around the nest.
Speaker 1: So the second example was described in a paper that
Speaker 1: I was reading published in twenty nineteen in the journal
Speaker 1: Ecological Entomology by A. Nacio Gomez Diego, Santiago Ricardo Campos,
Speaker 1: and Geraldo Vasconcelos. It was called why do Fight Ali?
Speaker 1: Oxyops ants place feathers around their nests. And I also
Speaker 1: got some additional information from reading an article about the
Speaker 1: study published in Scientific American by Joshua rap Learn in
Speaker 1: November twenty nineteen. But here's the deal. So there is
Speaker 1: this species of ant called fidoli oxyops. We were already
Speaker 1: talking about some fidoli ants in the last example because
Speaker 1: the remember the fidoli ants invaded the tree and then
Speaker 1: they got kind of butchered by the by the Alamira's aunts.
Speaker 1: But fidoli answer a genus known as the big head ants,
Speaker 1: and this species, in particular, Fidoli oxyops, is native to
Speaker 1: South American savannahs. So these should be you know, grasslands ants.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they appear to do something pretty we beard. They
Speaker 1: collect feathers and place them around the entrance of their nests.
Speaker 1: So if you imagine the nest is buried, the entrance
Speaker 1: is basically a hole in the ground, and then you
Speaker 1: might just find feathers all around the whole, scattered around
Speaker 1: on the ground outside the hole. That's weird. It might
Speaker 1: make it look like the ants ate a live chicken
Speaker 1: or something, but that is not what happened. They appear
Speaker 1: to collect the feathers and put them there. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: kind of looks like there's a hole in the ground
Speaker 1: and like a bird was sucked down that hole. And
Speaker 1: if this is the cartoonish remnants of that incident, I
Speaker 1: thought the same thing. Yeah, I was like pop and
Speaker 1: then just puff of feathers they settle around it. But no,
Speaker 1: that is not what has happened. The ants put the
Speaker 1: feathers there. Uh. Strange. So this paper published in twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen in in Ecological Anthropology, it claims that these feathers
Speaker 1: function as bait to attract prey animals, which then tumble
Speaker 1: into the nest entrance as if it were a pit trap.
Speaker 1: And the Scientific American article actually reports a bit of
Speaker 1: the background on the paper. It says that the studies
Speaker 1: first author in Nacio Gomez, is an ecologist at the
Speaker 1: Federal University of Visosa and Brazil, and while walking around
Speaker 1: city parks and his college campus, he noticed examples of
Speaker 1: these ant nest entrances with feathers all around him. Apparently
Speaker 1: this had been observed before. And also I was looking
Speaker 1: at another paper about this ant species. Finally oxy ops. Uh.
Speaker 1: This one was by Diego a cise at all from
Speaker 1: one and this paper said that in addition to feathers,
Speaker 1: there will sometimes be other objects around these nest and entrances,
Speaker 1: including shells, flower, pedals, and seeds. But this study in
Speaker 1: particular was was focusing on the feathers, and uh so,
Speaker 1: so he noticed these feathers around the entrances, and he
Speaker 1: wondered was the deal with this? Apparently this had been
Speaker 1: observed before, and there were already a couple of untested
Speaker 1: hypotheses in the scientific literature about what the feathers were
Speaker 1: doing there. One idea was that the feathers could collect
Speaker 1: do in arid regions, so they would help provide the
Speaker 1: ants with water in the mornings. And the other idea
Speaker 1: was that somehow the feathers could serve as lures, attracting
Speaker 1: prey to the nest. And so the twenty nineteen study
Speaker 1: tested both ideas. In one experiment, the researchers supplied the
Speaker 1: ant colonies with water soaked cotton balls, so made sure
Speaker 1: they had access to plenty of water, But the ants
Speaker 1: in these cases preferred to collect feathers anyway. It did
Speaker 1: not seem like access to water played any role in
Speaker 1: in their their desire to collect feathers, and this could
Speaker 1: be evidence that the feathers were not primarily for collecting water.
Speaker 1: But another test was designed to see if feathers scattered
Speaker 1: on the ground would attract prey. So they tested this
Speaker 1: with artificial traps that were made to resemble the nest
Speaker 1: entrances of these ants, and the team found that if
Speaker 1: you put out a trap and scatter feathers around it,
Speaker 1: for some reason, it will tend to trap more just
Speaker 1: sort of uh, wanderers, you know, arthropods that are out
Speaker 1: on the ground than traps without feathers, And so interesting question,
Speaker 1: why would they do that. Why would a hole in
Speaker 1: the ground surrounded by feathers get more bugs to fall
Speaker 1: into it. It's not known, but Gomez suggests that maybe
Speaker 1: it's something about the smell of the feathers, something about
Speaker 1: the visual appearance. Maybe a quote he gives to the
Speaker 1: Scientific American article, he says, just in general, soil insects
Speaker 1: are quote very curious. So maybe putting an unusual item
Speaker 1: around the entrance to the nest will just tend to
Speaker 1: get wandering bugs to walk up to it and see
Speaker 1: if it's something of use to them. But I think
Speaker 1: this would not count just as baiting the way the
Speaker 1: way the burrowing out owl example, would with the how
Speaker 1: dung or the bison dung, because in this case it's
Speaker 1: not just to get the insects close to the nest.
Speaker 1: In this case, the actual nest entrances basically holes in
Speaker 1: the ground, function quite well as pit traps because once
Speaker 1: the prey insect falls in, they have difficulty climbing back out,
Speaker 1: and the ants will rather quickly grab and butcher them. Now,
Speaker 1: this is clearly not the only way this ant species
Speaker 1: has to acquire prey. Fight only oxyops do leave the
Speaker 1: nest to acquire prey. They forage like other ant species.
Speaker 1: But it's possible that using the nest as a pit
Speaker 1: trap and surrounding it with feathers as some kind of
Speaker 1: UH evolved behavior for luring more insects into the hole
Speaker 1: UH that helps the colony supplement their diet during especially
Speaker 1: times of the years, such as the dry season in
Speaker 1: this region, when prey is more scarce, harder to come by.
Speaker 1: So they wouldn't be obligate trap builders. They would they
Speaker 1: would be sort of they would have like a trap
Speaker 1: business on the side. I guess you would say, yes,
Speaker 1: it is. If the trap interpretation is correct, it seems
Speaker 1: like this would be a supplemental role in getting extra
Speaker 1: food to them, extra diet diversity, especially in times when
Speaker 1: they're they're going to be getting less in their foraging,
Speaker 1: or maybe when they're doing less foraging. Okay, yeah, because
Speaker 1: there you know, again they're altering their immediate environment anyway.
Speaker 1: Um there so, and then again, a whole like this
Speaker 1: is not a huge energy investment. Um, the whole getting
Speaker 1: already part of the nest. I guess the question is
Speaker 1: coming back to those those reasons that were put forth
Speaker 1: um earlier, that we don't see more pit traps. Does
Speaker 1: this would this make the the ant population more visible
Speaker 1: to potential predators? Um? I mean maybe maybe so, maybe not.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe the animals that would be interested in eating
Speaker 1: the ants already would be able to detect their presence.
Speaker 1: And then again, also the ants have more capabilities than
Speaker 1: that one little larva at the bottom of a small pit.
Speaker 1: You know, we're not dealing with one organism. We're dealing
Speaker 1: with this, um uh, this entire colony of organisms that
Speaker 1: that kind of behave as a single organism. Yeah, obviously,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know what all the you know,
Speaker 1: the cost benefit analysis of of this evolutionary calculus would
Speaker 1: be um. But but yeah, there must be some reason
Speaker 1: why by having your aunt nest as a as a
Speaker 1: pit trap in this environment. For this ant is is
Speaker 1: not such a it's not such a danger that it
Speaker 1: outweighs the benefit of getting some bugs to fall in
Speaker 1: as free meals. But I also like this because it's
Speaker 1: like by house analogy. It's like if your entire house
Speaker 1: was just like below the ground and the entrance to
Speaker 1: the house was a spike pit trap like a tiger trap,
Speaker 1: just waited for things to fall in and be like,
Speaker 1: oh bonus, here's dinner, and you alway, and the you
Speaker 1: had the lures, you had the feathers all around. I
Speaker 1: don't know what that would be in the human example,
Speaker 1: you put just cotton candy around the around the trap
Speaker 1: that you come in through. Well, this is certainly another
Speaker 1: fascinating example. Um yeah, and I love how both present
Speaker 1: the possibility of ants building traps. But since they are ants, like,
Speaker 1: it's it's not that cut and dry like like, ants
Speaker 1: have a complexity all their own, so you can't really
Speaker 1: look at them in the same way that you would
Speaker 1: look at a a single solitary spider or or certainly
Speaker 1: even the you know, the human example, Like what we
Speaker 1: do with traps and how we think about traps is
Speaker 1: a rather different scenario compared to anything, you know, anything
Speaker 1: that we're seeing in in several of these animal examples. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I guess that does it for for ant traps on
Speaker 1: my end. But well, who knows what the future will hold.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there'll be more exciting studies coming out of the
Speaker 1: world of ant research. I mean, it's it's it's highly possible.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're still we're just still making a significant
Speaker 1: discoveries about about ant species and what they're up to.
Speaker 1: There are frontiers of ants you couldn't even dream of.
Speaker 1: There are aunt traps that we don't even know about
Speaker 1: yet because they haven't been sprung on us when you
Speaker 1: fall into them. You go through the two thousand one
Speaker 1: stargate and in the in the room with the the
Speaker 1: French furniture. You know, we've never watched an ant movie
Speaker 1: for a weird house cinema. I wonder if we should
Speaker 1: at some point. Oh, I have for years been looking
Speaker 1: at the cover of a Blu ray at video drome
Speaker 1: called Phase four. It's a picture of a hand with
Speaker 1: some ants. I know it involves ants. I don't know
Speaker 1: anything else. I guess that the question I would have,
Speaker 1: especially after talking about ants like this again, is are
Speaker 1: we looking at thinking about movies that that just that
Speaker 1: have a giant ant in them and have encounters with
Speaker 1: various giant ants, or is it truly about the ants
Speaker 1: as this kind of superorganism um and I like the ladder. Yeah, though,
Speaker 1: maybe having a giant sized ant is kind of a
Speaker 1: way through our fantastic fiction that we think about super organisms.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like, yes, the ants are small,
Speaker 1: but they they work together and they're able to do
Speaker 1: great things. So we just think of like a giant ant.
Speaker 1: That's like just one way of contemplating what they're capable of.
Speaker 1: So the next time Aunt movies come back, if you're
Speaker 1: out there thinking about resurrecting the giant Aunt movie, consider
Speaker 1: having them like care people apart things like that, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, crawling out of windows, pulling people Taunt against
Speaker 1: the sides of a building and then transferring them up
Speaker 1: to the rooftop and tearing them to pieces final processing. Yes,
Speaker 1: all right, well we're gonna go and close out this
Speaker 1: episode here, but we'd love to hear from everybody out
Speaker 1: there about traps, traps and movies, Traps in the human world,
Speaker 1: traps in the animal world. Um is there is there
Speaker 1: some corner of this topic you'd like for us to
Speaker 1: explore more in the future. Let us know we would
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. If you would like to
Speaker 1: listen to other episod those of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you will find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind podcasts. Feed core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday's listener
Speaker 1: mail on Monday's short form artifact on Wednesdays. On Friday,
Speaker 1: we do weird how cinema. That's our time to set
Speaker 1: aside most serious concerns and just look at a strange film.
Speaker 1: As always, you can also get to us rather quickly
Speaker 1: by going to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other
Speaker 1: to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact and Stuff to Blow
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