Speaker 1: For years, the Trailhead nest had been protected by a
Speaker 1: ten thousand member force of its adult members or soldiers.
Speaker 1: A soldier's exoskeleton, twice the size of that of an
Speaker 1: ordinary worker, is literally heavy armor, thick, tough, and pitted
Speaker 1: in places for resilience and strength. A pair of spines
Speaker 1: project backward from the mid section of the body to
Speaker 1: protect the waist. Spikes protect the neck, and the rear
Speaker 1: margin of the head is curved forward, forming a helmet.
Speaker 1: When attacked, the soldier can pull in her legs and
Speaker 1: antenna and tighten up the segments of her body, turning
Speaker 1: her entire surface into a shield. The ordinary Trailhead workers,
Speaker 1: while built for labor, were also available for combat. They
Speaker 1: served as the light infantry, using the swiftness and the
Speaker 1: agility of their supple bodies to dart in and out
Speaker 1: of enemy lines, seizing any leg or antenna available and
Speaker 1: holding onto it until their nest mates could close in
Speaker 1: and grab another body part. When the adversary was finally
Speaker 1: pinned and spread eagled, others piled on to bite, sting,
Speaker 1: or spray her with poison. Welcome to stot to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. Production of My Heart Radio Hey you welcome
Speaker 1: to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick in today It's Aunts, folks.
Speaker 1: That's right, this is going to be Ant Wars Episode one. Uh,
Speaker 1: the Ampire strikes Back. Perhaps I'm not sure. I haven't
Speaker 1: worked out that the full title yet, but yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be taking a couple of episodes to look at
Speaker 1: the wars of the Ants, and it seemed ideal that
Speaker 1: we kick off with a cold reading from the novel
Speaker 1: ant Hill, a novel by EO. Wilson which came out
Speaker 1: in so we were talking about this novel before we
Speaker 1: got started. It actually got some surprisingly good reviews. I
Speaker 1: was thinking about picking up a copy and reading it
Speaker 1: until I discovered that a significant portion of this novel
Speaker 1: is about human characters. And I was hoping with EO. Wilson,
Speaker 1: you know, especially in the past, we've talked about that
Speaker 1: video where he like plunges his hand into a nest
Speaker 1: of fire ants and beams with the most the most
Speaker 1: radiant joy as the ants all biden sting him. At
Speaker 1: the same time, I was hoping it would be all
Speaker 1: about ants, because if anybody could do ants as compelling
Speaker 1: central characters. I would think it would be EO. Wilson. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I was looking at one review of it
Speaker 1: that was glowing that said that they're about seventy pages
Speaker 1: in the novel that only EO. Wilson could have written.
Speaker 1: Um and uh, and I think this gives everyone a
Speaker 1: little taste of that. And when we say, you know, surprisingly,
Speaker 1: you know, great reviews, you know it's obviously EO. Wilson
Speaker 1: is a is a tremendous author, but generally he was
Speaker 1: he was associated with with nonfiction, uh, conveying oftentimes conveying
Speaker 1: science very effectively, um to a general audience. But of
Speaker 1: course fiction is a slightly different scenario. So you might
Speaker 1: expect even a very talented nonfiction writer, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: to to to perhaps stumble a bit in trying to
Speaker 1: create a work of fiction like this. Oh totally, that's
Speaker 1: what I mean. I didn't mean like EO. Wilson's a dummy.
Speaker 1: I just meant that usually when somebody who's not primarily
Speaker 1: a fiction writer is like, yeah, I'll do a novel,
Speaker 1: it's it's not always great. Well, you know, the main
Speaker 1: the main example that always comes to my mind is
Speaker 1: or would be the the tech Wars novels that were
Speaker 1: attributed to William Shatner that although I understand it was
Speaker 1: more of a ghost writing scenario, it was in place
Speaker 1: and there was some some spiritual composition in there. But
Speaker 1: but I have to say it was not the tech
Speaker 1: Wars that inspired inspired me to to seek this topic
Speaker 1: out this week, but rather the Clone Wars um and
Speaker 1: and also the miniature board gaming in general. So my
Speaker 1: son and I recently ordered a copy of Fantasy Flights
Speaker 1: Star Wars Legion miniature game, which is a miniature um
Speaker 1: war game in the tradition of things like say Warhammer
Speaker 1: Warhammer forty thousand, and then the older um the the
Speaker 1: older like Napoleonic um war games of old, the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that has been the past time of people
Speaker 1: such as H. G. Wells, who wrote a essentially a
Speaker 1: rule book for such miniature gaming, and then was also
Speaker 1: a favorite pastime of Peter Cushing. Right, you recently shared
Speaker 1: this video with me where Cushing is painting his little figurines.
Speaker 1: I guess it's Napoleonic Wars or some similar temporal event
Speaker 1: where all these little uniformed figures he's like posing them
Speaker 1: around barns and stuff that he's gotten on his floor.
Speaker 1: I think it was a video from the from the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties that was done. Yeah, it was, it was
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, And yeah, he's really getting into has a
Speaker 1: whole whole hobby set up. And yeah, then he's laying
Speaker 1: them out on the floor, getting them into into position. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, a very very historical based for sure. But yeah,
Speaker 1: just thinking about this sort of thing, thinking about miniature
Speaker 1: gaming in general, and thinking about the clone wars where
Speaker 1: you have on one side a bunch of um, you know,
Speaker 1: genetically um identical warriors going up against you know, armored
Speaker 1: robotic hords. I couldn't help but think of the ants,
Speaker 1: the wars of the ants. You know, it's amazing how
Speaker 1: much hymen opteran conflict we can miss because you're just
Speaker 1: going about your business. Maybe you're doing something in your yard,
Speaker 1: you're hanging out out in the sun or in the
Speaker 1: hammock or something, and you don't even realize that there
Speaker 1: is literally a battle raging just a couple of feet
Speaker 1: from you around the blades of grass. Oh. Absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: They the ants are are waging their wars, they're defending
Speaker 1: their territories. Um, and and we're talking about against other
Speaker 1: ants and not even talking about their their various struggles
Speaker 1: against other species, and it's everywhere. We did not even
Speaker 1: think about our aunts unless they actually invade our homes,
Speaker 1: and then then we get hot and bothered about it.
Speaker 1: But I imagine the most crucial question we have to
Speaker 1: consider before we proceed is can we really consider the
Speaker 1: conflict we see between ant species between different ant colonies
Speaker 1: as warfare more or less in the human sense of
Speaker 1: the word. Well, I mean, in one sense you could
Speaker 1: say maybe pedantically and obviously no, because it would necessarily
Speaker 1: fail to capture like the full range of human value
Speaker 1: and culture and passion that a company's conflict between humans.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, I think you could absolutely
Speaker 1: probably like see some parallels in terms of like pure
Speaker 1: resource dynamics. Yeah, I was thinking about this a little bit. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you see war defined as a declared armed hostile conflict,
Speaker 1: and of course the idea of ants actually declaring war
Speaker 1: on another group of ants is ridiculous because you've been
Speaker 1: getting into declarations of war. That's a human political reality,
Speaker 1: and as doctor Brundle would probably remind us, insects are
Speaker 1: rather short on politics. I mean, I think that that
Speaker 1: that fails to capture even a lot of actual war
Speaker 1: in the human context, where a lot of wars are
Speaker 1: not cold wars by the people carrying them out right.
Speaker 1: Another issue, too, is if we're talking about an armed
Speaker 1: hostile conflict, well, ants don't actually take up arms in
Speaker 1: the human sense, and of course they don't have to,
Speaker 1: because aunts have a number of biological weapons and chemical
Speaker 1: weapons at their disposal that make make such tool use unnecessary.
Speaker 1: And of course we'll be running through some examples of
Speaker 1: of these bio weapons as we proceed through these episodes. However,
Speaker 1: we do tend to discuss these conflicts between ant colonies
Speaker 1: between aunt species as being a form of war, something
Speaker 1: that we can think of as war. As bologist and
Speaker 1: entomologist Sean O'Donnell pointed out on Serious Science, ants engage
Speaker 1: in quote direct aggressive interaction between ants of different colonies.
Speaker 1: They also engage in such conflict over resources, and as
Speaker 1: a noted ant expert author of the Human Swarm tropical
Speaker 1: biologists Mark W. Moffatt has put it, war is quote
Speaker 1: the concentrated engagement of group against group in which both
Speaker 1: sides risk wholesale destruction. So it's easy to look at
Speaker 1: other animals perhaps and say, well, cats don't wage war,
Speaker 1: dogs don't wage war. It would be, for instance, kind
Speaker 1: of ridiculous to say that um lions are waging war
Speaker 1: against say an antelope. Right, Yeah, I think that the
Speaker 1: the analogy would really fall short there. But for the ant, however,
Speaker 1: it gets a little, a little little different. So Moffatt
Speaker 1: contends that the case for ant warfare is fairly convincing.
Speaker 1: It's not simply a matter of applying the lens of
Speaker 1: human civilization to the behavior of animals. What what they
Speaker 1: are doing and we humans have done for thousands of
Speaker 1: years are both endeavors that entail quote, an astonishing array
Speaker 1: of tactical choices about methods of attack and strategic decisions
Speaker 1: about when and where to wage war. Now, the parallel
Speaker 1: there gets especially interesting because while humans would have to
Speaker 1: make tactical and strategic choices in in organized conflict consciously,
Speaker 1: you know, they have to like use their brains, look
Speaker 1: at what's going on and try to judge. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think we would have to say that the ant
Speaker 1: carries out its campaigns almost entirely on instinct. Like it
Speaker 1: the ant doesn't have strategic theories except what it naturally
Speaker 1: does by instinctive behavior. That's right. Yeah, they they more
Speaker 1: or less simply do. And we'll get into some of
Speaker 1: the details of that here in a second. I want
Speaker 1: to throw in that Douglas j Emlin, who wrote an
Speaker 1: excellent book several years ago titled Animal Weapons uh he
Speaker 1: he uh, weighs in on this and says that, Okay,
Speaker 1: the most part, animals do not fight battles or wars, um,
Speaker 1: And you know it, basically, he says, most of the
Speaker 1: animal conflict that we see in the wild, it's ultimately
Speaker 1: more of a duel, you know, especially as far as
Speaker 1: interest species contests go, you know, like male fighting a
Speaker 1: male over a potential mate. But ants and termites are
Speaker 1: are certainly examples of something that could be a standout,
Speaker 1: you know, in which we do see this kind of
Speaker 1: large scale war with high stakes for both sides. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. I was thinking a bit about this too,
Speaker 1: that you know, even these other scenarios lions versus antelopes
Speaker 1: and all like, at best, we could maybe think of
Speaker 1: that as a skirmish, right, but certainly not a war.
Speaker 1: Not certainly not a war of of eradication. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would say that the conflicts between most animals you see
Speaker 1: in nature are much more individual, they're less group oriented,
Speaker 1: that they're less organized. Though at the same time that
Speaker 1: brings up an interesting question about what what really counts
Speaker 1: as an individual when you're talking about some thing like
Speaker 1: a colony of ants, because unlike say mammals or birds
Speaker 1: or something, answer a situation where within the colony, it
Speaker 1: gets harder to make the case that the individual ant's
Speaker 1: body is a is a like independent, autonomous agent, and
Speaker 1: it might be better thought of as like one organ
Speaker 1: of the the actual individual, which is the overall colony. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it comes down to the
Speaker 1: fact that they are so I mean, they're used social insects,
Speaker 1: and they're so connected that there there is this sense
Speaker 1: of civilization to them. You know, they are you know,
Speaker 1: they're managing resources in some cases, such with the leaf
Speaker 1: counter ant, they're engaging in agriculture. You know, they there's
Speaker 1: this this whole system that is there that that makes
Speaker 1: the argument for ant warfare a lot more convincing than saying, well,
Speaker 1: this invasive species is waging a war on the native species. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is out competing it for some resource,
Speaker 1: but it is not like this tight knit unit. It
Speaker 1: is not like a full blown colony. Now, obviously nothing
Speaker 1: humans do is going to be comparable to something in
Speaker 1: the ant world, but the similarities are pretty startling. I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from a wonderful two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven Scientific American article titled Ants and the Art
Speaker 1: of War, and this is also by Mark W. Moffatt. Quote.
Speaker 1: Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants and
Speaker 1: termites form tight knit societies with members numbering in the millions,
Speaker 1: and that these insects engage in complex behaviors. Such practices
Speaker 1: include traffic control, public health efforts, crop domestication, and, perhaps
Speaker 1: most intriguingly, warfare, the concentrated engagement of group against group
Speaker 1: in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these
Speaker 1: respects and others, we modern humans more closely resemble ants
Speaker 1: than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in
Speaker 1: far smaller societies. So the main similarity between us and
Speaker 1: the ants is that we organize ourselves more so than
Speaker 1: almost any other non insect animal. Right now, Biologically, of course,
Speaker 1: we're much larger vertebrates. We have impressive brains that have
Speaker 1: enabled us to achieve unequal technological accomplishments, including but not
Speaker 1: limited to, the production of nineteen fifty four Is Them
Speaker 1: and Birdeye Gordon's nineteen seventy seven film Empire of the Ants.
Speaker 1: You don't see the ants themselves making films this good.
Speaker 1: That's true, Aunt cinema is rather lacking, though, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I've seen this bird Eye Gordon movie or not.
Speaker 1: Of course, birt Eye Gordon has come up on the
Speaker 1: show several times. He's sort of Mr. A k A,
Speaker 1: Mr Big. He's the king of the force perspective effect,
Speaker 1: where you know, you take like a lizard and then
Speaker 1: you shoot it up close against the background and make
Speaker 1: it say that it's a dinosaur. Yeah. I have to
Speaker 1: say I haven't seen Empire of the Ants either. I
Speaker 1: mainly know it because it's referenced in a Warren Zevon song.
Speaker 1: But it's a nineteen seventy seven release. That's that's pretty
Speaker 1: late into in the Birdeye Gordon Giant Animal Rampaging world.
Speaker 1: I would think last time I checked, Bert Eye Gordon
Speaker 1: was still alive. I think he is, oh well, still
Speaker 1: going at Yes, he's ninety seven years old, all right,
Speaker 1: so obviously ants can't actually top that. You know, they
Speaker 1: don't have language, they don't have civilization in the sense
Speaker 1: that we do. Ants. However, they have a different way
Speaker 1: of going about things. So for instance, they produce While
Speaker 1: we're like a fifty fifty male female species, ants only
Speaker 1: produce males to serve as short lived reproductive drones to
Speaker 1: fertile queens. That's right, I mean ants are females basically. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of the colony consists of sterile females.
Speaker 1: And while the queen terminology, you know, if we talk
Speaker 1: about the queen ant and it brings with it the
Speaker 1: legacy of human centralized power structures, Ultimately, ants function without
Speaker 1: a power hierarchy or a permanent leader. They are entirely decentralized. So,
Speaker 1: like you said earlier, combat decisions, they're not made by commanders.
Speaker 1: You know, if if this was a miniature war game,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have the command or piece that's essential for
Speaker 1: all of this to take place. No, it's rather a
Speaker 1: case of swarm intelligence. That is one of the hardest
Speaker 1: things to keep in mind because there there's this natural
Speaker 1: tendency we have to assume that something called the queen
Speaker 1: is in charge. But Yeah, when you're thinking about aunts,
Speaker 1: you have to remember that basically ants are always at
Speaker 1: war and the queen is never in command. The queen
Speaker 1: doesn't tell the ants what to do. They are highly
Speaker 1: motivated to protect the queen. But that's kind of in
Speaker 1: the same way that like you are highly motivated to
Speaker 1: protect the most vulnerable parts of your body from injury, right,
Speaker 1: like you'd protect your face and stuff. Like, the queen
Speaker 1: is their reproductive chances, and that's why she is protected, right,
Speaker 1: and she's she is very important. There's some passages in EO.
Speaker 1: Wilson's novel where where the the tragedy of the fall
Speaker 1: of their their queen is discussed and how this is
Speaker 1: a you know, part of the peril that this key
Speaker 1: group of ants finds themselves in. But ultimately, the wars
Speaker 1: of ants in the wars of humans, they're often fought
Speaker 1: for the same reasons territory, food, ideal dwelling spaces, and
Speaker 1: even labor. So some ant species do in fact employ
Speaker 1: something that we might think of as slave labor, and
Speaker 1: we'll come back to that as we go, But also
Speaker 1: ants deploy various tactics depending on what is at stake, So, like,
Speaker 1: you know, not every war is equal to the ant colony.
Speaker 1: There is um, there's a fluctuation in you know, the
Speaker 1: amount of effort that is put into it, how much
Speaker 1: ant power is h is put on the line, etcetera. However,
Speaker 1: in his book The Human Swarm, Moffatt speaks a little
Speaker 1: bit more about this, about the basic comparison between human
Speaker 1: and ant warfare, and he does he does write that quote,
Speaker 1: if nothing else, remember this, Comparing identical things is deadly boring.
Speaker 1: Making comparisons is most fruitful when parallels are noticed between
Speaker 1: ideas or things or actions ordinarily treated as distinct. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he discusses this at length in that book, if,
Speaker 1: if if any wants to to pick that up and
Speaker 1: explore more. But I think this is also something that's
Speaker 1: important to keep in mind. Yeah, it's it's not a
Speaker 1: one to one, but if it were a one to one,
Speaker 1: we probably wouldn't be doing a podcast about it. Right,
Speaker 1: all right, we need to take a quick break, but
Speaker 1: when we come back, we will talk about aunt warriors
Speaker 1: in classic literature. Thank alright, we're back. So we spent
Speaker 1: the whole first portion of this episode talking about the
Speaker 1: idea of comparing ant warfare to human warfare and uh
Speaker 1: and to what, to what extent it's fair, what extent
Speaker 1: it makes sense? And ultimately it's irrelevant because we still
Speaker 1: do it, and we've been doing it for a very
Speaker 1: long time. We've been making that connection between human warfare
Speaker 1: and ant warfare, perhaps for as long as warriors have
Speaker 1: had a chance, uh, you know, to pause on the
Speaker 1: battlefield and look down between their human feet and see
Speaker 1: a smaller version of their campaigns playing out in the
Speaker 1: dirt beneath them. For instance, if we look back to
Speaker 1: the Iliad, uh, specialized warriors who serve the mighty Akellyes
Speaker 1: are known as the Myrmidons. The aunt people is the
Speaker 1: the literal translation of that. Now, I know, according to
Speaker 1: some mythological sources, the Mermanons who fight with Achilles actually
Speaker 1: were ants at some point. Isn't that right? They were
Speaker 1: like transformed into human warriors from their aunt origins. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The tradition that we see in Ovid's metamorphosis, for example,
Speaker 1: is that is that the gods transformed the ants into humans. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's why they have these these ant like uh
Speaker 1: uh tendencies. They have this ant like tenacity because they
Speaker 1: are essentially ants that were made human, but of course
Speaker 1: that was not the actual reality. These were These were
Speaker 1: human troops, and we have to make some sort of
Speaker 1: sense of it. Uh I was reading a two thousand
Speaker 1: tin paper published in the Classical World by Matthew Sears
Speaker 1: titled Warrior Ants Elite Troops in the Iliad, and he
Speaker 1: points out that masked fighting was probably the norm in
Speaker 1: the days of Homer, but that in this we get
Speaker 1: into scholarly conflict over the idea of the hop Light
Speaker 1: revolution and the prin pre hop light and Hoplight warfare.
Speaker 1: Now this refers to the Greek use of spears and
Speaker 1: shields and the phalanx formation, so this is kind of
Speaker 1: like an ant level um of of of cooperation that
Speaker 1: stands in contrast to mass fighting and the dramatic single
Speaker 1: combat episodes of the Iliad. So the basic idea here
Speaker 1: is that the Myrmidons as well as you know opposing
Speaker 1: soldiers under Ajax, might be understood as specialized warriors, professional
Speaker 1: soldiers who use UH this type of tight formation with
Speaker 1: the shields providing you know, absolute support for the unit
Speaker 1: and UH and the offensive spears used in a very
Speaker 1: deliberate manner, as opposed to just a bunch of warriors
Speaker 1: running out and going at it. So definitely keep the
Speaker 1: phalanx in mind, because we'll come back to it and
Speaker 1: discuss it more when we get into anti tactics a bit.
Speaker 1: But basically, on both sides of the conflict described in
Speaker 1: the Iliad, the ideas that you would have had a
Speaker 1: mix of such professional, highly trained fighters alongside more generalized,
Speaker 1: generalized troops, and of course this would remain a reality
Speaker 1: in warfare for a long time, the professional soldiers fighting
Speaker 1: alongside the uh you know, basically common commoners, common men
Speaker 1: who have just been given arms or have taken up
Speaker 1: arms in the conquest. Now in this series goes and
Speaker 1: of course into a great deal more detail because it
Speaker 1: is primarily concerned with the ancient world, but he actually
Speaker 1: poses the question of whether ancient people's without special lenses
Speaker 1: would have been able to mark the similarities between human
Speaker 1: and ant organized conflict, and based on the work of others,
Speaker 1: he says, yeah, you know, we look at the traditions
Speaker 1: in Africa, Australia and New Guinea, uh, in cases where
Speaker 1: you have people who are know, who have not used
Speaker 1: specialized gear to analyze ants, and they have long made
Speaker 1: these comparisons. Quote the warlike characteristics of ants would have
Speaker 1: been just as apparent to the eyes of the ancient
Speaker 1: Greeks as they were to throw and McCook. In short,
Speaker 1: the description of achilles men as aunt people maybe due
Speaker 1: to their resemblance in terms of ferocity, uh, tactical ingenuity,
Speaker 1: unit cohesion, and general belicocity to these insects as as
Speaker 1: as observed by the ancients. Okay, so what makes them
Speaker 1: like ants? It's that they are fierce, that they execute
Speaker 1: tactics effectively, that they stick together and don't break up
Speaker 1: into individuals, and that they're very aggressive. Yeah they're not.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, I think the sticking together and like working
Speaker 1: as a as a unit is keyty Here, it's not
Speaker 1: the warfare of sort of you know, random battle. It's
Speaker 1: not the warfare of like the one hero fighting the
Speaker 1: other hero at the at the at the walls of Troy. No,
Speaker 1: it is about tactics and in uniform performance exactly, and
Speaker 1: that is the advantage of the phalanx. Alright, So the
Speaker 1: next question folks might wonder is how long have aunt's
Speaker 1: waged these wars or maybe you haven't, maybe you're not
Speaker 1: asking that question, but let me go and tell you
Speaker 1: it's an interesting question with an interesting answer. Tell us
Speaker 1: the answer, Robert, All right, well, well, first of all,
Speaker 1: let's let's consider the big picture. First, we have to
Speaker 1: really stop and realize that we live in the world
Speaker 1: of the ant. Because today the world is home to
Speaker 1: an estimated twenty two thousand species of a ant. And
Speaker 1: of those, only I've seen two different numbers for this, uh,
Speaker 1: twelve thousand, five hundred or perhaps thirteen thousand have been
Speaker 1: classified or described. So we're still talking thousands of ant
Speaker 1: species out there that we just you know, don't have
Speaker 1: a good handle on, maybe don't even have names for
Speaker 1: um now. According to ted Our Shooltz in a n
Speaker 1: paper on ant ancestors, ants probably account for fifteen to
Speaker 1: of the terrestrial animal biomass today. So that means if
Speaker 1: you take all of the animals that live on land,
Speaker 1: and of course this doesn't include plants and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but all the animals that live on land, you weigh
Speaker 1: them all together, this estimate would say fifteen of that
Speaker 1: is just ants. Yeah, and apparently in areas where they're
Speaker 1: especially prominent, you could maybe be looking at they because
Speaker 1: they and they thrive everywhere, Like certainly they're they're you know,
Speaker 1: around the you know, the the equatorial belt, they're going
Speaker 1: to be especially active. But they thrive everywhere except Antarctica
Speaker 1: and UH, as well as the occasional far flung and
Speaker 1: inhospitable island. Otherwise, the ants just have it all locked down. Now,
Speaker 1: that's an amazing estimate, and I do want to be fair.
Speaker 1: I've been reading around and I think there are some
Speaker 1: disputes about exactly how much biomass ants account for. The
Speaker 1: Different people have different estimates UM. But one other estimate
Speaker 1: I came across that was very interesting. It was quoted
Speaker 1: in a in a BBC article I was reading about
Speaker 1: aunt biomass. It quotes Francis Ratniqus, who is a professor
Speaker 1: of apriculture at the University of Sussex, and Ratnius was
Speaker 1: trying to address the question of what ways more all
Speaker 1: the ants or all the humans UH. And there have
Speaker 1: been different answers to this question. Ratnix thinks that well, now,
Speaker 1: probably if you weigh up all the humans, the humans
Speaker 1: way more than the ants UM. But that hasn't always
Speaker 1: been the case. Definitely, Ratnie says, if you went back
Speaker 1: a few thousand years, ants would have far outweighed the humans.
Speaker 1: But as human populations have grown exponentially, especially in recent centuries,
Speaker 1: that changed. Ratnius thinks it was probably right around the
Speaker 1: late seventeen hundreds or maybe a little bit before that,
Speaker 1: that the total weight of humans on Earth suddenly became
Speaker 1: larger than the total weight of ants. So around the
Speaker 1: time of American independence, the humans overtook the ants. Wow,
Speaker 1: here's another figure. And again these are all estimates, so
Speaker 1: you know, don't you know, have any particular um factor
Speaker 1: like tattoo in your body regarding this. But the Field
Speaker 1: Museum has a wonderful ant page uh ants section of
Speaker 1: their website, and they they point they make the claim
Speaker 1: that in the tropics, ant biomass outweighs all vertebrate life
Speaker 1: two to one. Yeah, and that that emphasizes that, like
Speaker 1: the percentage of ants as biomass is going to be
Speaker 1: heavily dependent on environment. Right, so around the equatorial regions,
Speaker 1: where they're even more abundant, they might they might massively
Speaker 1: outweigh humans. I mean, the take home is that that basically,
Speaker 1: no matter how often we fail to notice ants in
Speaker 1: our environment, they are an extremely successful species by you know,
Speaker 1: by some accounts, they are the most successful insect on
Speaker 1: the planet, which really puts them, uh, you know, in
Speaker 1: consideration for the most successful animal on the planet. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, insects dominate the animal world and especially especially
Speaker 1: the terrestrial animal world, and if ants dominate the insects,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you could absolutely make a good
Speaker 1: case there. But the funny thing is you have to imagine,
Speaker 1: like all other organisms or families of organisms on Earth,
Speaker 1: there was a time when ants were newcomers on the
Speaker 1: evolutionary scene. And they can't always have had this this
Speaker 1: uh you know, occupied this elevated station. That's right. They
Speaker 1: were not an overnight success. Uh. Ants evolved and estimated
Speaker 1: one forty two one hundred and sixty eight million years ago,
Speaker 1: so they are ultimately a product of the Jurassic But
Speaker 1: but yeah, they were not an instant hit. Uh. I
Speaker 1: was reading that. You know, scientists consider that they're probably
Speaker 1: like a modest success. At first, you know, um ants
Speaker 1: were doing their thing, but they weren't just blowing up.
Speaker 1: But then something changed, flowering and fruiting plants evolved and
Speaker 1: estimated one hundred million years ago. And what this did
Speaker 1: is it transformed the energy economy. Insects suddenly had in
Speaker 1: it were not suddenly, but insects progressively had an entirely
Speaker 1: new food source to adapt to a whole slew of
Speaker 1: new food sources, and so they did. And ants, which
Speaker 1: were again probably just a modestly successful life form at
Speaker 1: best earlier, suddenly exploded filling out these these various niches
Speaker 1: in the in the ecosystem. They adapted to a host
Speaker 1: of evolutionary niches and then spread across the two supercontinents
Speaker 1: of Eurasia and Gondwana. I'm trying to imagine the scene
Speaker 1: of the first time some ants discovered a fallen fruit.
Speaker 1: What a small moment that would have been. Almost it's
Speaker 1: almost like an ant garden of Eden's story. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and it's like it's just basically like all levels of
Speaker 1: this new fruit flower economy, Like the ants are there
Speaker 1: to figure out how to make it work, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and of course steadily evolve into these various species
Speaker 1: that um that take advantage of it in various ways. Now,
Speaker 1: as Schiltz points out, we don't have much evidence of
Speaker 1: ants from the first half of their existence. Not until
Speaker 1: the mid Cretaceous do we see their fossil remains. But
Speaker 1: the evidence we have is pretty incredible. In nineteen six
Speaker 1: e O. Wilson and others identified the fossil remains of
Speaker 1: a cretaceous ant species that was trapped in amber from
Speaker 1: ninety two million years ago. But then there there there
Speaker 1: have been some more recent exciting findings. Ancient Burmese amber
Speaker 1: from Myanmar gives us even older evidence. I was reading
Speaker 1: about a two thousand sixteen study from Rutgers that was
Speaker 1: at the time of that study dated to nine million
Speaker 1: years ago. And according to Philip Bardon of the Insect
Speaker 1: and Evolution Lab and Jessica l Where of the Department
Speaker 1: of Biological Sciences at Rutgers University, Newark, what what the
Speaker 1: contents of this chunk of amber show us? Is a
Speaker 1: frozen act of ant warfare. Oh, I see it. They're
Speaker 1: in a tangle. Yeah, it's it's two ants battling it out,
Speaker 1: duking it out, trapped forever in this, uh, this droplet
Speaker 1: of amber. Well, I'm imagining a scene where the scientists
Speaker 1: from Jurassic Park drill into this amber and they use
Speaker 1: it to clone dangerous Jurassic fruit, right, they get the
Speaker 1: stomach content. I don't know if that joke connected. Okay, whatever,
Speaker 1: Um no, no, I give it to your your cooking. There.
Speaker 1: So the researchers, though that they do not go in
Speaker 1: that direction. What the What they say is that the
Speaker 1: ants trapped here belonged to early Aunt lineages that are
Speaker 1: ultimately distinct from modern ants, so they're not really direct
Speaker 1: ancestors of modern ants. But in their study they present
Speaker 1: evidence that that these ancient ants were social and and
Speaker 1: they were you know, engaging in this kind of uh
Speaker 1: you know, collective conflict. Another bit of amber they point out,
Speaker 1: contains some twenty one worker ants, and this is from
Speaker 1: a time period in which again Aunt fossil evidence is
Speaker 1: super rare, so they say, to get twenty one in
Speaker 1: one blow suggested they were already you know, very social,
Speaker 1: working together. So we're looking at a good one million
Speaker 1: years of ant warfare based on this, you know, at
Speaker 1: least memo or less, lining up with the advent of
Speaker 1: flowering and fruiting plants, with true dominance of the ants
Speaker 1: being reached some sixty million years ago. Now, other things,
Speaker 1: of course evolved as well, uh, including some of their
Speaker 1: various features. Uh uh. Interestingly enough, some of the ancient
Speaker 1: ants were rather brutal, looking even more brutal looking than
Speaker 1: they look today. For instance, there were the hell ants
Speaker 1: uh so named because they feature many characteristics that some
Speaker 1: might you know, consider unusual or hellish. Um. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: found out because because you linked it to this one
Speaker 1: called lingua Irmax Vladdie, And I was looking at that
Speaker 1: name for a second thinking, wait, Vladdie, that that can't
Speaker 1: be Is it? Is it vlad? Is it vladium Paler?
Speaker 1: It is named for vladium paler because it has this
Speaker 1: um unique head structure where it has um um Uh.
Speaker 1: It's kind of difficult to describe because it's it has
Speaker 1: like this paddle like projection on it and uh and
Speaker 1: X ray uh. Imaging reveals that it was most probably
Speaker 1: filled with sequestered metals to make it like you know,
Speaker 1: fortified uh, and that it would have worked in tandem
Speaker 1: with scithelike mandibles to in and potentially puncture soft bodied prey.
Speaker 1: So it was you know, there's this real you know,
Speaker 1: bear trap of a head on this thing. I'm looking
Speaker 1: at images of it now. It is a brutal spike
Speaker 1: coming out of the head. Yeah. Now this isn't to
Speaker 1: say there aren't some really gnarly ant heads around today.
Speaker 1: We'll get back to some of those later on. But
Speaker 1: one of the important tacoms from all of this, and
Speaker 1: this is something that Sean O'Donnell points out in that
Speaker 1: that serious science article on ant wars. He points out
Speaker 1: that there's an important shift in the weaponry of ants
Speaker 1: across time. So long ago, vertebrates were probably the biggest
Speaker 1: threat to ants, so they were more equipped to deal
Speaker 1: with them via things like a powerful sting. But as
Speaker 1: time passed and they spread her across the world, they
Speaker 1: become more and more successful. Pressure on each other becomes
Speaker 1: more prevalent. In other words, the endless ant wars become
Speaker 1: more important for shaping their evolution than the dinosaurs, the birds,
Speaker 1: in the various mammals that preyed on them. So they
Speaker 1: used to be they used to have to be more
Speaker 1: worried about and eaters and armadillos getting in there and
Speaker 1: and vacuum them up with the snout. But over time
Speaker 1: their real adversaries become the rival i'm an opter in
Speaker 1: colonies exactly. So ultimately some aunt lineages end up keeping
Speaker 1: their sting. For example, the bullet ant whose bite ranks
Speaker 1: as a four that's the maximum score on Schmidt's sting
Speaker 1: pain index UM there I was reading a description is
Speaker 1: by Justin Oschmidt, the entomologist who came up with this
Speaker 1: system of measuring uh the stings. He described it as
Speaker 1: quote pure intense, brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoil
Speaker 1: with a three inch nail embedded in your heel. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've read descriptions of this one as well. The only
Speaker 1: other thing that I recall being compared to this level
Speaker 1: of pain with the sting was the tarantula hawk, which
Speaker 1: is a type of stinging wasp. But apparently it is
Speaker 1: just like unimaginable in terms of an insect thing. So
Speaker 1: that's an example of of ants that have kept their
Speaker 1: impressive bioweapon um, but others lost it entirely, and in
Speaker 1: some cases, UH these systems adapted into chemical weapons systems
Speaker 1: to be used against other ants, and we'll discuss those
Speaker 1: later on in this UH. This look at ant warfare
Speaker 1: because the end of it is up taking a different
Speaker 1: form because ultimately you're trying to solve different problems at
Speaker 1: different scales with different enemies. Okay, it looks like it's
Speaker 1: time for us to take a break, but we'll be
Speaker 1: right back with more than all right, we're back so
Speaker 1: we've now come to the portion of our our episodes
Speaker 1: here where we're going to really get into the endless
Speaker 1: wars of ant kind and the sorts of tactics they
Speaker 1: employ on the battlefield. And we're probably not going to
Speaker 1: be able to to to make it all the way
Speaker 1: through the this next section without having to stop the
Speaker 1: episode and come back in part two. But if everything
Speaker 1: goes according to and you're only gonna have to wait
Speaker 1: like a day for the ant wars to continue. Now,
Speaker 1: the most important fact to drive home first is that
Speaker 1: naturally there are so many species of ants to consider,
Speaker 1: and that will you know, a specific species. Tactics are
Speaker 1: then also going to change depending on circumstances, and this
Speaker 1: is just going to be the nature of war. Moffett
Speaker 1: rights that some ants succeed in battle by being on
Speaker 1: constant offensive, and he draws an interest in comparison here
Speaker 1: to a sixth century BC Chinese military general Son Zoo,
Speaker 1: who also noted that quote rapidity is the essence of war. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, so much depends on your ability to not
Speaker 1: give your opponent time to react effectively. Right, And so
Speaker 1: like the key a variety of ant to draw a
Speaker 1: comparison here to uh, he says, would be the army
Speaker 1: ants that inhabit a warm regions around the world, as
Speaker 1: well as AGAs marauder ants as prime examples here. Uh.
Speaker 1: For these ant legions, hundreds or even millions of these
Speaker 1: warriors will advance in a tight phalanx against their aunt adversaries. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess we should try to examine what that would
Speaker 1: mean for ants as opposed to human warriors. So, if
Speaker 1: you're like an ancient Greek phalanx, this would involve, say,
Speaker 1: staying together in a tight formation with a wall of
Speaker 1: shields out in front that's sort of like prevents the
Speaker 1: enemy from reaching you, and that you would have trained
Speaker 1: to be able to move forward and thrust with spears
Speaker 1: in an organized fashion, all altogether minimizing the chances for
Speaker 1: the enemy to to break into you while you're pushing
Speaker 1: into them. Yeah. Like basically the difference between like just
Speaker 1: two hordes like just slamming into each other and having
Speaker 1: something more and more in keeping with really what we've
Speaker 1: seen in their tradition of tabletop war gaming. Uh. For
Speaker 1: anyone out here there is actually played any of these games,
Speaker 1: you can certainly relate. But even if you've looked at one.
Speaker 1: You get the sense of order, and I think that's
Speaker 1: what draws players into it. Right. You have all these
Speaker 1: these unit these little individual soul jeers that are part
Speaker 1: of different units, and these units are working together. You're
Speaker 1: having to employ a strategy to deploy them and then
Speaker 1: move them around and counter the movements of your adversary.
Speaker 1: And again, for a human this is done by you know,
Speaker 1: either the godlike figure that looms over the gaming table
Speaker 1: or it's it is the domain of a commander. But
Speaker 1: for the ants it is it is just that pure
Speaker 1: swarm intelligence that allows it to take place. Now, Moffett
Speaker 1: points out for that for for human forces just advancing
Speaker 1: in a phalanx, part of the issue here is you
Speaker 1: need to know where you're going, right, which is obvious.
Speaker 1: Your your your your your PHALONX needs to have a
Speaker 1: target or goal or purpose, like cutting its way through
Speaker 1: the defenses in order to get to the gates of Troy,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But some hands ants, however, just
Speaker 1: kind of stick to this roving PHALONX tactic, just a
Speaker 1: roving decimating horde that this brings to mind. Oh, I'd say,
Speaker 1: like the Tira the Tyrant are I mean from forty
Speaker 1: Warhammer forty thou Ide an example of this, you know,
Speaker 1: or various sort of alien bio adversaries in science fiction
Speaker 1: where it's just it's just this massive hord that's working
Speaker 1: in unity and uh, it's difficult to stop. Right. However,
Speaker 1: human forces you know, tend not to go this route.
Speaker 1: They tend to depend on scouts as well to determine
Speaker 1: where to apply that offensive pressure, where to send your phalanx.
Speaker 1: And some ants do this as well. Some species will
Speaker 1: send out a small team of workers to serve as scouts.
Speaker 1: But this too is risky. Is this risky strategy for
Speaker 1: ants because a team of scouts they have to report
Speaker 1: back to the colony in order for a larger force too,
Speaker 1: then return to obtain that food source that they just scouted.
Speaker 1: And this is true of human scouts as well. In
Speaker 1: a military scenario, we might well consider the case of
Speaker 1: imperial probe droids for example, right, and empire strikes back.
Speaker 1: You send out these droids, and yet one may discover
Speaker 1: a revel based on hoth, but it actually needs to
Speaker 1: survive have and then it's and then get word back
Speaker 1: to the empire so they can deploy their their a
Speaker 1: t eighties, you know, their their massive army. Likewise, the
Speaker 1: Empire would find this to be a better method send
Speaker 1: out the probe droids, because we can't send the A. T.
Speaker 1: Eighties to every world just in case there's a rebel
Speaker 1: base there. So basically for the for the Empire, for
Speaker 1: the ants as well, it basically means that you can
Speaker 1: depend on you can send out fewer ants and cover
Speaker 1: a larger area in order to scout out potential targets.
Speaker 1: In the case of the ants, potential food. Now I
Speaker 1: can imagine though, there are a lot of considerations that
Speaker 1: must be built into ant behavior based on not wasting
Speaker 1: resources on like you know, on you know, going somewhere
Speaker 1: where there's no longer anything useful to be done, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there's always the risk that the enemy will move
Speaker 1: before a larger force can arrive, or that that food
Speaker 1: source that was scouted out it's just not going to
Speaker 1: be there when your your aunt troops roll in and uh.
Speaker 1: In all of this for the for the ants, pheromones
Speaker 1: are key for their communication. Here. The scouts use this
Speaker 1: to tag the food source for the larger force to find.
Speaker 1: So so the pheromones of the ants here would be
Speaker 1: the Imperial probe droids a day about kind of message
Speaker 1: that it sends out. Yeah, basically like the pheromones end
Speaker 1: up serving as communication lines mofit rights that uh quote,
Speaker 1: the workers of the army ants or marauder ants can
Speaker 1: immediately summon any help they require because a slew of
Speaker 1: assistance are marching directly behind them. The result is maximal
Speaker 1: shock and awe. So much like in more large scale conflicts,
Speaker 1: you would have to you'd have to in some way
Speaker 1: ensure that communication lines are able to remain open for
Speaker 1: forces to be effective exactly. And again here you know,
Speaker 1: the for the ants that is is largely this realm
Speaker 1: of of touch and smell. It's the pheromonal information that's
Speaker 1: so key. So really I feel like this at this
Speaker 1: point in the podcast, I think we do have a
Speaker 1: pretty broad view of like what's going on with on
Speaker 1: with the ant war effort, about how how troops are distributed,
Speaker 1: how communication is taking place, and then how offensive pressure
Speaker 1: can be applied to different areas depending on the need. Oh,
Speaker 1: but there is so much more ant battle to talk about. Yes,
Speaker 1: indeed there is. Uh yeah, we we were only able
Speaker 1: to get through like the first half of our material
Speaker 1: here because there's a lot more about well just about
Speaker 1: like the at the individual level, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: about like the how like aunt jaws work, the power
Speaker 1: of ant bioweapons, it's etcetera. But then also when you
Speaker 1: get into the Marauder ants specifically, there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of wonderful work regarding just how they carry out their
Speaker 1: campaigns and to what extent we can compare uh these
Speaker 1: these acts of ant conquests to actual human battles. Well,
Speaker 1: I can't wait to come back next time and fight
Speaker 1: on with the Myrmidons. Yeah, more ants, more allusions to
Speaker 1: UH star Wars and various tabletop gaming scenarios. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be gonna be a lot of fun. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: If you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your mind, you know where to find us,
Speaker 1: and that is wherever you get your podcast, wherever that
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Speaker 1: subscribe because that really helps us out in the long run.
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 a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff
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