Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
Speaker 1: bringing you an episode from the Vault. This is aunt
Speaker 1: War's Part two, originally aired June. Let's let the aunt
Speaker 1: Wars continue. Deliver thyself as a row from the hand
Speaker 1: of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand
Speaker 1: of the fowler. Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider
Speaker 1: her ways and be wise, which, having no guide, overseer,
Speaker 1: or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth
Speaker 1: her food in the harvest. Welcome to Stuff 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 mccorre mick. And that was a
Speaker 1: reading from the King James translation of the Bible. It's
Speaker 1: from the Book of Proverbs, chapter six. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: was looking right before we started. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: let me check my Scholarly Oxford annotated addition to the
Speaker 1: Bible to see if it's got any insights on how
Speaker 1: the author of this passage knew that all of the
Speaker 1: worker ants in the colony were female and no it
Speaker 1: just says this passage appeals to the natural world. I
Speaker 1: love that. Yeah, because I had questions about this one.
Speaker 1: I was not familiar with this passage. We just kind
Speaker 1: of we're looking for for fun things to read at
Speaker 1: the at the top of our our second Ant War episode,
Speaker 1: and I was like, Oh, I wonder what the what
Speaker 1: what the old King James version had to say about ants?
Speaker 1: And here we are a verse that at once seems
Speaker 1: to to get the gender of the vast majority of
Speaker 1: an Ant colony correct and also doesn't get hung up
Speaker 1: on the idea of a central ruler like in In
Speaker 1: a couple of ways, this is a very um accurate
Speaker 1: reading of Ant civilization. You know, I didn't even think
Speaker 1: about it, but I'm sure that means this is one
Speaker 1: of those verses that's been employed by a Christian apologists
Speaker 1: to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because it
Speaker 1: But but I gotta say this versus is pretty dead
Speaker 1: on right. Uh. There is no guide overseer or ruler.
Speaker 1: It's just the swarm intelligence that emerges from the ants
Speaker 1: evolved instinct. And uh. And it's true the Ants are
Speaker 1: not lazy, like I think that's the point of the passage.
Speaker 1: It's like, look, the ant doesn't wait around try, you know,
Speaker 1: wait around to be told what to do. It just
Speaker 1: knows what to do and does it right. And of
Speaker 1: course then there's this bit about the gathering of food
Speaker 1: and the storing of food, which, depending on which species
Speaker 1: you're looking at, is also really accurate. Of course, as
Speaker 1: we continue to look at examples of of ant civilization
Speaker 1: and ant warfare, we're gonna get into some examples that
Speaker 1: they are a bit more barbaric and uh ravageing. I
Speaker 1: guess yeah, for a biblical parallels, some of these aunt
Speaker 1: stories are going to be closer to the conquest of
Speaker 1: Canaan than the Wisdom of Proverbs. But this is funny
Speaker 1: because it also brings up the idea of you know,
Speaker 1: in the last episode we were talking about obviously ancient
Speaker 1: people had been looking at ants and trying to understand
Speaker 1: their behavior long before there was a unified scientific study.
Speaker 1: You know, a field known as entomology and the comparison
Speaker 1: to military forces and armies has been there since ancient times.
Speaker 1: But I think this is definitely not the only case
Speaker 1: where people read spiritual significance into ant behavior. No, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was I was reading about this, and ants have
Speaker 1: a sacred role in a number of different religions. In
Speaker 1: some African traditions, they are considered messengers of the gods.
Speaker 1: And throughout India you'll find various customs that involve protecting
Speaker 1: antlines and ant hills, even uh, leaving out food for
Speaker 1: the ant hills or decorating them in some slight fashion,
Speaker 1: like you know, the sprinkling of of you know, some
Speaker 1: sort of colored or that sort of thing, and and
Speaker 1: likewise it's considered heinous to disturb an ant hill. Especially.
Speaker 1: I was reading about all this in a book titled
Speaker 1: The Sacred Animals of India by Nandita Krishna, which is
Speaker 1: an excellent little book from Penguin Press. You can pick
Speaker 1: it up like most most places. I think I picked
Speaker 1: it up at a yoga studio once while I was
Speaker 1: waiting and waiting for my wife to get her shoes on,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, oh, what's this a book about animals.
Speaker 1: I started leaving through it, and it's just animal by animal, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, some some some fascinating facts about how it
Speaker 1: ties into Hindu traditions. But then also sometimes there's a
Speaker 1: little science as well, so like there's a bit about
Speaker 1: the ant and they also touch on some of the
Speaker 1: basic facts about ants and their role in ecology that
Speaker 1: we've been discussing here. But in this book the author
Speaker 1: describes a couple of cool details. First of all, a
Speaker 1: tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace. So
Speaker 1: Vishnu comes to him and points out a line of
Speaker 1: ants in the dirt and tells him that each and
Speaker 1: every one of them is an Indra that rose to
Speaker 1: the highest level of existence and then fell down again
Speaker 1: via pride. So there's a you know, this recurring idea
Speaker 1: that ants, like all these other animals, are part of
Speaker 1: the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that Valmiki,
Speaker 1: the author of the Ramayana, emerged from an ant hill
Speaker 1: or a Valmika after ten years of meditation. So in
Speaker 1: this case, the the author um of the Hindu epic
Speaker 1: ends up taking on the name of the ant hill
Speaker 1: as part of their new emerged identity. That's interesting and
Speaker 1: counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as a place
Speaker 1: that would be appropriate for meditation, solitude, you know, like
Speaker 1: quiet contemplation, Whereas when I think of an ant hill,
Speaker 1: I would think of the exact opposite something that is
Speaker 1: certainly organized from from the ant's own genetic point of view,
Speaker 1: but us looking down at it, it's so chaotic and frenzied,
Speaker 1: it seemed like it would be impossible to focus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then I guess you could also look at it
Speaker 1: as a place of just pure order or to really
Speaker 1: get into I guess some more of a you know,
Speaker 1: a topic that's important in Hindu epics, a place of
Speaker 1: pure duty, Like there's just there's you know, absolute duty
Speaker 1: uh youth, social duty to the colony, and there's no
Speaker 1: there's no room for aunt despair or aunt ambition. You know,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be pulled in either of those directions.
Speaker 1: It's just pure absolute duty. So really it's it's an
Speaker 1: ideal place to fall um if you you know, you
Speaker 1: achieve some demigotic state of pride and UH and then
Speaker 1: have to you know, fall back down to a lower
Speaker 1: life form and then work your way back up. And
Speaker 1: it's a good place to start. Kind of a form
Speaker 1: of contrapostito, right, like the idea that the divine punishment
Speaker 1: or not necessarily punishment either, but the the divine justice
Speaker 1: somehow fits the UH fits the original offense that brought
Speaker 1: it on. Yeah, So if you're joining us in this
Speaker 1: so do you've probably figured out that we're talking about
Speaker 1: ants and uh. And this is indeed the second in
Speaker 1: our aunt wars Um series. So if you didn't listen
Speaker 1: to the last episode, we would recommend you go back
Speaker 1: and give it a listen. We discussed the empire, the ants,
Speaker 1: and and very broadly the endless wars that formed the
Speaker 1: boundaries of their individual kingdoms. I want to go back
Speaker 1: again to the writings of Mark W. Moffatt Uh and
Speaker 1: this is from that Scientific American article that I previously
Speaker 1: mentioned that's also hosted on his website at dr bugs
Speaker 1: dot com. He writes, quote, in Ghana, I witness deceiving
Speaker 1: carpet of workers of the army ants species Dori lists
Speaker 1: Nigricans searching together across an area hundred feet wide. These
Speaker 1: African army ants, which in species such as D niger
Speaker 1: Kans that move and broad swaths, are called driver ants,
Speaker 1: slice the flesh off their enemy or quarry with blade
Speaker 1: like jaws and can make short work of victims thousands
Speaker 1: of times their size, Although vertebrate creatures can usually outrun ants.
Speaker 1: In Gabon, I once saw an antelope caught in a snare,
Speaker 1: eaten alive by a colony of driver ants. That highlights
Speaker 1: something that I was planning on talking about in just
Speaker 1: a little bit when we get to one particular species
Speaker 1: of army and that I was finding really fascinating. But uh,
Speaker 1: but I guess we can address it now. So, you know,
Speaker 1: the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull vision, which goes back
Speaker 1: to earlier movies and stuff where the the army ants
Speaker 1: essentially are terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the
Speaker 1: You've got the Hollywood acid that that strips the human
Speaker 1: to the bone in in seconds. You've got the Hollywood
Speaker 1: piranha that stripped the human to the bone in seconds.
Speaker 1: I don't know if either of those are really very
Speaker 1: accurately reflective of stuff that happens in the real world.
Speaker 1: And then the answer the next thing, the Hollywood army
Speaker 1: ants that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be something that happens in reality. Certainly not.
Speaker 1: I would say, with a with a large animal that
Speaker 1: can move, a lot of army ants are are going
Speaker 1: to be absolutely apocalyptic in their implications for smaller animals,
Speaker 1: for insects, arachnids, centipedes, and even small vertebrates like little
Speaker 1: frogs and snakes and stuff. But larger animals they don't
Speaker 1: actually represent a threat like that, Like you can easily
Speaker 1: get away from them. The only case I would imagine
Speaker 1: where army ants might represent a real threat to larger
Speaker 1: animals would be if you are totally immobilized, right, so
Speaker 1: if you're caught in a snare, buried up to your
Speaker 1: neck in the sand, that sort of thing. Right, And
Speaker 1: even then I don't know if they would necessarily kill you,
Speaker 1: because they're they're looking for their their main prey species,
Speaker 1: which are going to be all kinds of invertebrates. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're probably going after something like termites or other ants. Uh,
Speaker 1: heads sticking out of the ground not really on the
Speaker 1: menu usually, But but I wouldn't want to try it.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying necessarily safe. That could be the next
Speaker 1: big Hollywood magician act though, right, David Blame, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'd be surprised if he hasn't done it already. Well, no,
Speaker 1: it's the next big confidence game, you know. So they
Speaker 1: got to walk across the hot coals. That's like the
Speaker 1: confidence building exercise. But the next stage is the bury
Speaker 1: yourself up to the neck and let the army ants
Speaker 1: come now. Well, another a little piece of health cleaning
Speaker 1: from the last episode I want to throw in here.
Speaker 1: In the last episode, I briefly mentioned pheromones as being
Speaker 1: essential to aunt communication. And I don't want to gloss
Speaker 1: over this too much because I imagine many of you
Speaker 1: have have seen videos of pheromonal demonstrations, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the the the ant Overlord. EO. Wilson himself does this
Speaker 1: at times, in which a pheromone is painted like a
Speaker 1: paintbrush or a Q tip or something across the surface
Speaker 1: and then ants follow it and is informative as as
Speaker 1: a demonstration like this can be, don't take it to
Speaker 1: mean that there's just there's a real blunt simplicity to it.
Speaker 1: As as Wilson himself stresses, there is a pheromonal language
Speaker 1: for ants. Uh. Any given ant species us as a
Speaker 1: whole palette of pheromones and chemical signals to communicate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it can be very complex, though there are also very
Speaker 1: simple ways to see it in action and like creating
Speaker 1: the pheromone trails that are like. EO. Wilson was involved
Speaker 1: in research that discovered one of the main glands in
Speaker 1: the ants gaster that deposits the pheromone that creates the
Speaker 1: trail leading to food. And generally if you deposit this
Speaker 1: pheromone as you will see, you know, humans can extract
Speaker 1: it and put it in the bottle like you're saying.
Speaker 1: To these demonstrations where you just put a line of
Speaker 1: it down on a table and suddenly the ants form
Speaker 1: up and follow the line, those can be striking direct demonstrations,
Speaker 1: even though the full web of pheromonal interactions can be
Speaker 1: much more complex, and you can also is easily do
Speaker 1: this yourself, even without um the extraction of that kind
Speaker 1: of pheromone simply by if you've ever tried dragging your
Speaker 1: finger across an ant trail, where like you know, if
Speaker 1: you can smudge the chemicals away and maybe disrupt it
Speaker 1: with some of the oils from your own finger, suddenly
Speaker 1: the movement of the ants becomes chaotic, gets all confused
Speaker 1: because the deposition of chemicals that has created this trail
Speaker 1: has been broken. I've been I've been noticing these antrei
Speaker 1: an trails a lot more on my walks recently. Uh,
Speaker 1: my family and I will go out to some various
Speaker 1: nature walking by trails in the area that they're not
Speaker 1: that populated, and some of them haply you know, slabs
Speaker 1: of concrete, and they'll be these little, essentially a little
Speaker 1: trenches that stretch across them where one slab meets the other.
Speaker 1: And invariably those are the trenches through which the ants moved,
Speaker 1: not over the top where they're going to potentially get
Speaker 1: smashed by a by bicycle tires are stepped on more easily. No,
Speaker 1: they're in the trenches, moving across from one side to
Speaker 1: the other. It almost makes me wonder if we've unintentionally
Speaker 1: created little bridges or tunnels for the ants, the same
Speaker 1: way that on Christmas Island they have to create these
Speaker 1: crab bridges and tunnels for crabs to let their migration
Speaker 1: get across the roads. Yeah, it does seem like that,
Speaker 1: like accidental um pro ant design. Uh. Now, speaking of
Speaker 1: E O. Wilson, I want to point out to everybody
Speaker 1: we talked about EO. Wilson on the show before Anio.
Speaker 1: Wilson has of course authored a number of books, uh,
Speaker 1: many of which are are ideal for a general audience.
Speaker 1: But if you want to watch a documentary about him,
Speaker 1: there is a wonderful PBS documentary that came out several
Speaker 1: years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and Men. You
Speaker 1: can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I
Speaker 1: know that at least in the United States you can
Speaker 1: get it on Prime. Uh. It's really good. Yeah, it's so.
Speaker 1: I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I watched
Speaker 1: the first half and it's just a delight. There's a
Speaker 1: great moment where so EO. Wilson, you know, one of
Speaker 1: the world authorities on ants, revolutionary biologist for the world
Speaker 1: of youth social insects, and he says at one point,
Speaker 1: he says, the question people want to know the answer
Speaker 1: to most often about ants is what do I do
Speaker 1: about the ones in my kitchen? And then he says, uh,
Speaker 1: and here's what I tell them. You get a little
Speaker 1: piece of a cookie and you put it down near
Speaker 1: the ants, and then you watch what they do. I
Speaker 1: love that answer because, on one hand, it feels like
Speaker 1: maybe he's trying to teach us something like, Oh, he's
Speaker 1: trying to teach me a lesson about why the answer
Speaker 1: there to begin with, you know, I need to watch
Speaker 1: I need to make sure my kitchen is clean. I
Speaker 1: mean to make sure there's no there's no food product,
Speaker 1: or I need to think about why they've invaded my kitchen.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, it seems just as likely
Speaker 1: that he's saying, you're not going to do anything about
Speaker 1: these ants. You're going to enjoy them. You're going to
Speaker 1: you're going to feed them and watch how they work.
Speaker 1: There there's a beautiful stoicism and enjoy in the way
Speaker 1: that he observes ants even as they are, you know,
Speaker 1: doing things that most people would regard as an offense
Speaker 1: or an irritation. You know, we talked several times now
Speaker 1: about like the scene where he's just letting all the
Speaker 1: fire ants sting his hand and he's watching it with
Speaker 1: with such fascination and talking about what's going on is
Speaker 1: they're all attacking his skin at the same time. And
Speaker 1: uh and then yeah, and this is basically the same attitude,
Speaker 1: but with the kitchen instead of your hand. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: don't get upset, just take pleasure in watching nature work.
Speaker 1: Oh and by the way, Wilson has a new book
Speaker 1: on ants coming out this fall. I noticed, called Tales
Speaker 1: from the Ant World. Alright, on that note, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take one quick break but we'll be right back, and
Speaker 1: we'll return to the world of the ants and the
Speaker 1: wars that they rage. Thank alright, we're back. One of
Speaker 1: the other sources that I was using in reading about
Speaker 1: ants for these episodes is the excellent book Animal Weapons
Speaker 1: by Douglas J. Mlin, And in it the author has
Speaker 1: has a whole bit where he's describing basically, the whole
Speaker 1: book has to do with with bioweapons and the evolution
Speaker 1: of bioweapons and organisms and then comparing them to human warfare.
Speaker 1: But there's a whole bit where he's talking about the
Speaker 1: quote giant jaws and thick distinct heads of the army
Speaker 1: ants that allow them in mass to topple so many opponents,
Speaker 1: and he shares a fun bit of experience that really
Speaker 1: underlies just how you know, powerful the design is on
Speaker 1: these little guys, uh, little gals rather um. Basically, he
Speaker 1: was an outdoing field of some field experiments in Belize,
Speaker 1: and he accidentally sliced his thumb with a machete, and
Speaker 1: without anything else to stitch up the wound, this is
Speaker 1: what they did. First of all, they did have some
Speaker 1: rum on them, so they stailized the wound with rum.
Speaker 1: But then they suitured the wound with ants. They simply
Speaker 1: placed the ants live ants allow along the line of
Speaker 1: the cut while someone held the cut together and allowed
Speaker 1: their little jaws to snap into place. And then they
Speaker 1: tore the body away from the head and the heads
Speaker 1: of which they only required five or six, kept their
Speaker 1: jaws latch tight and this held the wound together and
Speaker 1: allowed them to eventually get proper medical attention for the cut.
Speaker 1: I would say, uh, if I just heard this story
Speaker 1: in isolation, I would be inclined to doubt it. It
Speaker 1: seems so hard to believe. But I mean, obviously I
Speaker 1: don't think England's lying about this. But that's just that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, this is it's also a great illustration
Speaker 1: of like of a scientist, you know, thinking about about
Speaker 1: how to solve a problem. I would never have thought, oh,
Speaker 1: i'm cut, I really need to let's get some ants
Speaker 1: attached to this wound. But but it's it's also just
Speaker 1: a wonderful um uh, you know the description of just
Speaker 1: how powerful these little jaws are. Now army and marauder
Speaker 1: ants wage their war for food uh and resources. They
Speaker 1: will battle other forces for control of food resources and
Speaker 1: will also invade other ants societies in order to claim
Speaker 1: their larva and their pupa as food. Yeah, and these
Speaker 1: are some of the most striking types of ants that
Speaker 1: we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with aunt
Speaker 1: warfare that we've discussed before, say between h different types
Speaker 1: of fire ants, even here in the in the Southern
Speaker 1: United States. But seeing ants that forage on the scale
Speaker 1: and with the tenacity of army ants or marauder ants,
Speaker 1: is is a different kind of thing. This might be
Speaker 1: a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel of
Speaker 1: this one species of army ant that I've been reading
Speaker 1: into a lot. Uh. And this is the species known
Speaker 1: as eston Bercelli. I Uh. There are there are a
Speaker 1: lot of actually different species of ant that are commonly
Speaker 1: referred to as army ants, but seton Bricelli i is
Speaker 1: I think the one species that people are most often
Speaker 1: talking about with that general title. They're very charismatic, well
Speaker 1: observed and distributed species. They live in the humid equatorial
Speaker 1: regions of Central and South America, especially in the Amazon rainforest,
Speaker 1: but with the range extending up through Mexico and down
Speaker 1: south of Brazil into Argentina. Uh. But they're primarily in
Speaker 1: the equatorial rainforest, and these ants will form colonies of
Speaker 1: several hundred thousand adults at a time. With this rapacious
Speaker 1: foraging behavior, you're satisfying the energy needs of the colony
Speaker 1: with raids that cover hundreds of meters. According to one estimate,
Speaker 1: I believe this was cited by Carl and Marion rhetton Meyer,
Speaker 1: who I'll mention again in a moment. They're aunt experts.
Speaker 1: But the figure is that on average, each colony of
Speaker 1: Seton Bricelli I kills and eats about thirty thousand small
Speaker 1: animals every day, wow, thirty every single day. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so they have this carnivorous diet, this enormous carnivorous diet
Speaker 1: that is especially important because they're trying to supply the
Speaker 1: developing larvae of their colony with a high fat diet
Speaker 1: that the larvae need in order to grow, so that
Speaker 1: the babies need animal fat and the adults go out rating.
Speaker 1: So there's another really interesting thing about this species to me,
Speaker 1: which is that they do not make permanent nests. Seton
Speaker 1: Bricelli I do not make permanent nests. We often think
Speaker 1: of ant colonies as defined by their nests right the
Speaker 1: ant hills. Ants are environmental engineers, but due to the
Speaker 1: energy needs of this species, they can't be tied down
Speaker 1: to one place for too long. Imagine them trying to
Speaker 1: form a permanent nest while their larvae are growing, and
Speaker 1: they have these huge requirements for animal fat, you know,
Speaker 1: other insects to bring in and all that. Within a
Speaker 1: day or two they probably would have cleared out all
Speaker 1: of the food sources within I don't know, maybe a
Speaker 1: few hundred square meters of wherever they are. So instead,
Speaker 1: Esset and Bricelli I builds a mobile fortress known as
Speaker 1: a bivouac. This is a moving fortress that protects the
Speaker 1: queen and the developing larvae. But the fortress is made
Speaker 1: not out of structures or materials from the environment. It
Speaker 1: is made out of ants. Do you see Do you understand?
Speaker 1: It is a war rig for ants, made out of
Speaker 1: the interlocked bodies of living ants, like a cage of
Speaker 1: millions of legs, antennae, and mandibles. I want to quote
Speaker 1: from Peter Tyson, writing for Nova in an article about
Speaker 1: these things. Quote this elliptical mass talking about the bivouac.
Speaker 1: This elliptical mass maybe three feet across and hold up
Speaker 1: to seven hundred thousand ants. When they need to move
Speaker 1: to a new site, where they bivouac on the surface
Speaker 1: rather than build a nest. Eber Chellii workers go first
Speaker 1: ferrying food and larvae. Only after nightfall does the queen follow,
Speaker 1: escorted by a mass of soldier ants that completely surround
Speaker 1: her and will defend her with their lives. So the
Speaker 1: bivouac again, is this moving fortress. The queen is inside
Speaker 1: and the cage cannot be breached. Uh. This this was
Speaker 1: just so captivating to me. And so if you're looking
Speaker 1: for these things in the forest, the bivouac can sometimes
Speaker 1: be found inside a hollow log or just on the
Speaker 1: forest floor, but also sometimes it can be found hanging
Speaker 1: suspended from tree limbs. So imagine that like a dangling
Speaker 1: fortress for ants made out of ants, and it falls
Speaker 1: in line with a more general tendency of some ant species,
Speaker 1: including this one, toward body based engineering projects. These army
Speaker 1: ants are also known to say assist the mobility of
Speaker 1: their forces by filling in potholes along the foraging route
Speaker 1: with plugs made out of live ants. So you just
Speaker 1: smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants, or also
Speaker 1: for building bridges out of themselves to allow the rest
Speaker 1: of the army to cross gaps. And apparently these big
Speaker 1: wax also emit an other worldly stinch, this amazing smell
Speaker 1: that allows you to locate them by smell alone within
Speaker 1: the rainforest. I would love to know what this smells like.
Speaker 1: You know, all of this is a wonderful example two
Speaker 1: of the super organism aspects of ants. How with other creatures,
Speaker 1: we we we we talk about the individual, you know,
Speaker 1: and in terms of understanding the species. But but with ants,
Speaker 1: you look at behaviors like this, and you see there's
Speaker 1: such cohesion, there's there's there's such you social um perfection
Speaker 1: that you can't look at an individual aunt to understand,
Speaker 1: and you have to look at what the colony itself
Speaker 1: is doing. But there's another thing I was thinking about
Speaker 1: with this model of ant life, the fact that these
Speaker 1: ants create no permanent nests. It sort of reminds me
Speaker 1: of the idea of the strategic advantage of offense. You know,
Speaker 1: the old saying that the best defense is a good offense.
Speaker 1: This is actually considered true in some cases in military theory,
Speaker 1: because the reasoning goes that when you're on the attack,
Speaker 1: you have freedom. Basically, you like, as you're on the attack,
Speaker 1: you are creating options for yourself, versus when you're defending,
Speaker 1: you have constraints, you have limited options. This is often
Speaker 1: true just for example in chess. Uh. You know the
Speaker 1: chess players talk about the initiative that you gain when
Speaker 1: you're on the attack. You're constantly limiting the options for
Speaker 1: your opponents next move if they have to defend their
Speaker 1: pieces against an attack that you just set up. And
Speaker 1: this is obviously true across multiple context It's known as
Speaker 1: maintaining the initiative. Now, obviously there are there are many uh,
Speaker 1: there are many advantages you can get from having a
Speaker 1: defensive structure like a nest that's buried down in the ground.
Speaker 1: You know, the queen is very well protected, but that
Speaker 1: also limits your options, right and and this is sort
Speaker 1: of the all offense strategy of the ant world. Well,
Speaker 1: it seems to be working well for them. I mean
Speaker 1: it's not like they busted this strategy out of on
Speaker 1: a test basis. This is this has been honed over
Speaker 1: for millions of years. So there's another thing that I
Speaker 1: was thinking about because I was thinking about warfare and
Speaker 1: game of thrones. And one thing I like that's acknowledged
Speaker 1: in those books is sort of like the real resource
Speaker 1: needs of moving armies. You know, It's not like a
Speaker 1: lot of fantasy where it's just sort of like uh,
Speaker 1: almost ethereal warriors just ranging limitlessly to do their heroic deeds.
Speaker 1: You know, I mean, like you get the idea in
Speaker 1: those books that, like, our armies need supplies and all that.
Speaker 1: And and also it's acknowledged that there are huge numbers
Speaker 1: of people that accompany armies that are not themselves warriors.
Speaker 1: These are known as camp followers, and this is absolutely
Speaker 1: something that that happens in real warfare. Large armies don't
Speaker 1: operate in a vacuum. They have material needs that are
Speaker 1: not necessarily related to battle, and they also create needs
Speaker 1: and opportunities for resource capture as they move and fight.
Speaker 1: And this this is why armies on campaign or historically
Speaker 1: a company both by camp followers that you know might
Speaker 1: like sell things to soldiers, or might be family members
Speaker 1: of soldiers, or sell services to soldiers, um that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But they are also often bandits that follow
Speaker 1: around moving armies. As you know, when an army comes
Speaker 1: in and attacks somewhere disturbs the existing order, that creates
Speaker 1: a lot of opportunities to exploit. Yeah. I mean it's
Speaker 1: an absolute disruption, so it makes sense that opportunists would
Speaker 1: be there to take advantage of it. And I agree.
Speaker 1: I think this is something that that that that is
Speaker 1: well explored in the Song of Ice and Fire books,
Speaker 1: the idea of of war that just you know, ravages
Speaker 1: the countryside in so many ways, like it just just
Speaker 1: totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um. I
Speaker 1: think I think they probably, I think they probably brought
Speaker 1: this out well in this series to to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: especially early on. Yeah, I mean towards the end of
Speaker 1: that those human wars like West Ross is just decimated
Speaker 1: and just tired and exhausted. Yeah, that's true. I mean
Speaker 1: it reflects reality that that the war is not just
Speaker 1: a clash between armies, but it's the sort of the
Speaker 1: army versus the entire environment and everyone living within it. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think this is in some ways very true
Speaker 1: uh for ants as well. I was reading a really
Speaker 1: good article. Uh it was a short article, but a
Speaker 1: good one in nat Geo by the always great Ed
Speaker 1: young Um that was focused on work by Carl and
Speaker 1: Marian rhetten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago. These
Speaker 1: are ant experts who created a nearly exhaustive catalog of
Speaker 1: all of the animals that follow the army ant species
Speaker 1: seton Bercellii. So these are the camp followers in the
Speaker 1: bandits that accompany this army uh, ed writes quote there's
Speaker 1: no doubting their success as predators, but army ants also
Speaker 1: bring life wherever they march. They have an entourage of
Speaker 1: over five hundred and fifty species that hang around their legions,
Speaker 1: of which three hundred or so depend on the ants
Speaker 1: for their survival. So in their disruption of of the
Speaker 1: environment around them, they are also creating enough opportunities for
Speaker 1: the exploitation of resources that a full like three hundred
Speaker 1: or so species couldn't live without these ants, and another
Speaker 1: two hundred something or so uh depend on them in
Speaker 1: large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I hadn't really
Speaker 1: thought about it. We talked about the ecological importance of
Speaker 1: the hants, um and UH and this is just another
Speaker 1: example of that. Yeah, So this includes like two hundred
Speaker 1: or so species of bird. One example is the oscillated
Speaker 1: ant bird. There are a number of antbirds ants as
Speaker 1: they As they move along the army, ants will flush
Speaker 1: insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids, small invertebrates,
Speaker 1: and and so the ant birds will watch this happen
Speaker 1: and swoop in and take advantage of the fleeing animals. Uh.
Speaker 1: They actually almost never prey on the ants themselves. And
Speaker 1: so the antbirds will fly around the forest checking in
Speaker 1: on seething bivouacs. Right they perform a bivouac check, They're like, okay,
Speaker 1: is this bivouac about to march? And if it looks
Speaker 1: like one is about to get the war rig ready
Speaker 1: and send its workers out on raids, the birds will
Speaker 1: converge here and start looking for opportunities. Apparently, the ant
Speaker 1: birds will fight amongst each other for the best spots.
Speaker 1: Of course, the best spot would basically be positioned just
Speaker 1: beyond the advancing front to catch all of the panic
Speaker 1: pray animals as soon as they're driven out of hiding. Interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, I wonder if anyone's ever tackled this from
Speaker 1: a sci fi perspective. You know, we're always encountering situations
Speaker 1: in sci fi where humanity is locked in an epic
Speaker 1: strup will struggle against some alien adversary or there or
Speaker 1: they've been partially wiped out by an alien adversary. I
Speaker 1: wonder if anyone's ever explored the idea of of, you know,
Speaker 1: the alien force comes that decimates the planet. You end
Speaker 1: up with like a post apocalyptic scenario. But then the
Speaker 1: primary antagonist is not the destroyer, because the destroyers moved on.
Speaker 1: It's the opportunists to come in their wake, right, the
Speaker 1: ant birds and the scavengers that come in after Earth
Speaker 1: has been Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that would be
Speaker 1: an interesting thing. I've never read anything like that, but
Speaker 1: I bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if
Speaker 1: they have, someone tell me what it is. And if
Speaker 1: it doesn't exist, somebody write it so I can read it.
Speaker 1: You know. Another interesting thing about these ant birds at
Speaker 1: Young points out is that on top of them existing
Speaker 1: as as sort of opportunists in what the ants do,
Speaker 1: there are secondary opportunists. And these are a lot of
Speaker 1: species of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed
Speaker 1: off of their droppings after they have preyed on the
Speaker 1: insects and other animals that are fleshed out by the ants.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, that there are a lot of other species,
Speaker 1: and there's not just species looking for food resources. Apparently
Speaker 1: parasitic wasps and flies that reproduced by implanting larvae in
Speaker 1: the bodies of other invertebrates. They also follow army ants warms,
Speaker 1: watching for the ants to drive crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches and
Speaker 1: other critters out of hiding, and then the parasites take
Speaker 1: immediate advantage at young sites caladoxia flies, but also quote
Speaker 1: stylo gaster flies which shoot harpoon like eggs at fleeing cockroaches,
Speaker 1: and and flesh flies that lay their eggs in the
Speaker 1: open wounds of animals that have been injured but not
Speaker 1: dismembered by the ants. So in some cases, not being
Speaker 1: killed by the ant horde um is worse than actually
Speaker 1: being decimated by it. Well, I guess it depends on
Speaker 1: what you think is worse. I mean, is it worse
Speaker 1: to be injured by ants and then get maggots implanted
Speaker 1: in you, or just to be killed just to be
Speaker 1: disassembled outright? Yeah. Even more amazingly, some parasites actually live
Speaker 1: within the ant bivouax themselves, having various adaptations. We've talked
Speaker 1: about aunt mimics before. There are apparently some species like this,
Speaker 1: like beetles that survived by mimicking ants and just sort
Speaker 1: of like hanging out among the ants trying to be undetected.
Speaker 1: But this was my favorite part. Ed Young writes that
Speaker 1: some parasites quote use the ants as mobile restaurants, jumping
Speaker 1: onto workers that are carrying food and eating their booty
Speaker 1: right under or over their very jaws. So they hang
Speaker 1: out on the ant head eating the food that the
Speaker 1: ant is carrying. Oh wow, again, I think for a
Speaker 1: lot of species this would require very special adaptations or
Speaker 1: you know, you would immediately become prey yourself. But it's
Speaker 1: just amazing to imagine the tiny, like full ecosystems basically
Speaker 1: that are made possible by the opportunities created by the
Speaker 1: chaos of a rating army. Yeah, in a way, you
Speaker 1: kind of have to come back to that that analogy
Speaker 1: of the superorganism, right, that the the ant colony is,
Speaker 1: well we might think of as the individual, like the
Speaker 1: ant colony is the body, and so it is going
Speaker 1: to have its own parasite. It's going to have its
Speaker 1: own symbiotic relationships and uh and and that's kind of
Speaker 1: what we're seeing here. Absolutely, I think this is just
Speaker 1: the most astonishing species. I feel like maybe we're not
Speaker 1: even done with with with Ston. We can move on
Speaker 1: in this episode, but but we may have to come
Speaker 1: back to them in the future. All right, and that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will consider the marauder ants. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've already talked some about ant species
Speaker 1: that are referred to as the marauder ants. You read
Speaker 1: a passage from one of those articles by Martin W.
Speaker 1: Moffatt about marauder ants. Yeah, Moffatt points out that marauder
Speaker 1: ants excel in deploying troops in ways that increase efficiency
Speaker 1: and reduce the cost to a colony. And one thing
Speaker 1: that really makes them interesting, uh, is their variety in
Speaker 1: sizes among the workers. They vary in size more than
Speaker 1: workers in any other ant colony. So this is where
Speaker 1: it gets interesting in a sort of war game point
Speaker 1: of view manner, because essentially we're getting into different unit
Speaker 1: types here. So if you're fielding droids, for instance, on
Speaker 1: on on a battle, yeah, we're doing clone wars here.
Speaker 1: You're not. You're not just busting out a ton of
Speaker 1: standard B one battle droids, right, you're also busting out
Speaker 1: B two super heavy battle droids or heavy weapon uh
Speaker 1: droid deca, droidica um roly poly. Guys, if you're playing
Speaker 1: something like Warhammer forty thousand, it's not just space marines.
Speaker 1: You're also busting out specialized assault marines or heavy terminators,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. And so Moffatt points out that
Speaker 1: the marauders deploy smaller miners, uh you know, that's what
Speaker 1: we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front line,
Speaker 1: and there these are just weak and hopeless uh individuals
Speaker 1: against adversaries, but there are tons of them, so they
Speaker 1: work as a kind of barricade. They bogged down the
Speaker 1: enemy long enough for larger ants to move in the
Speaker 1: media's and the majors. So again, same species, same essentially
Speaker 1: um ver itty of this ant, but it's like it's
Speaker 1: a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some of
Speaker 1: these individuals, the majors, compared to the miners, they are
Speaker 1: five hundred times as heavy as the smaller version. So
Speaker 1: these are real bruisers, I mean, these are these are monsters. Uh.
Speaker 1: My initial impulse would be to compare these like strictly
Speaker 1: to larger um, you know, bruiser heavy class fighters and
Speaker 1: fantasy armies, Like I'm thinking about some of the big
Speaker 1: specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor. But but then
Speaker 1: I was thinking about it. I was like, looking at
Speaker 1: the size deferential here, and Okay, let's assume that an orc,
Speaker 1: or say a stormtrooper, uh is roughly the average weight
Speaker 1: of a human. Okay, we're to multiply that by five
Speaker 1: hundred you're talking thirty four tons. So in the real world,
Speaker 1: that's essentially the difference between a human and a humpback whale. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that's crazy. Even even the troll would not really
Speaker 1: capture the size difference appropriately. Yeah, Like I ended up
Speaker 1: going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: heavy different fantasy and sci fi army vehicles and units were.
Speaker 1: And it's best I can tell based on some fan estimates.
Speaker 1: You might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial
Speaker 1: stormtrooper and one of those two legged A T S
Speaker 1: T walkers. That would be the difference between a Marauder
Speaker 1: minor ant and a Marauder major ant. This is what
Speaker 1: Mofata writes. Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Rhymes
Speaker 1: assure a low mortality for the media's and the majors,
Speaker 1: which require far more resources for the colony to raise
Speaker 1: and men maintain. Putting the easily replaced fighters at greatest
Speaker 1: risk is a time honored battle technique. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: stormtroopers are notoriously bad shots, and they are apparently easily replaced,
Speaker 1: But your A. T. S. T S. Those are far
Speaker 1: more precious. Yeah, that will they cost more to make? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ma Fata also points out at the marauders tactics here
Speaker 1: line up with the example one season armies throughout history
Speaker 1: the use of conscripted farmers and laborers alongside elite professional soldiers,
Speaker 1: with the common soldiers absorbing the worst of it while
Speaker 1: the elite units are protected and move in at strategic intervals.
Speaker 1: He also points out that marauders use what is known
Speaker 1: in military strategy as defeat in detail tactics, defeating an
Speaker 1: enemy unit by unit, rather than engaging in enemy's full strength. Now,
Speaker 1: marauder ants also battle their own kind, pitting colony against colony,
Speaker 1: and in these contests, the majors and the media's also
Speaker 1: hang back and let the miners do most of the fighting.
Speaker 1: Tearing each other apart, and in contests that tend to
Speaker 1: be even more brutal than the interspecies conflicts that also
Speaker 1: take place. I'm gonna get to some of the logic
Speaker 1: behind the differences and strategy here in just a minute.
Speaker 1: By the way, yeah, because Moffatt refers to the work
Speaker 1: of University of Bristol's Nigel Franks, who found that the
Speaker 1: hactics of these ants in particular is consistent with Lanchester's
Speaker 1: square law, an equation developed in World War One by
Speaker 1: engineer Frederick Lanchester, who also devised Lanchester's linear law, which
Speaker 1: will also touch based on here. Yeah, I keep wanting
Speaker 1: to say, Lanister, so don't let me say that you're
Speaker 1: coming back to the fantasy warfare analogy. So Lanchester's laws
Speaker 1: are a set of mathematical models trying to explain outcomes
Speaker 1: in battle based on various kinds of initial force disparity
Speaker 1: is generally the main disparities are going to be individual
Speaker 1: unit effectiveness, so like how much damage each unit can do,
Speaker 1: and then also the numbers of combatants on either side.
Speaker 1: Lanchester's square law in particular shows that in some types
Speaker 1: of combat this is not all conflicts, but in some
Speaker 1: types of combat, for example shooting wars involving masses of
Speaker 1: soldiers armed with rifles that can aim in any direction.
Speaker 1: In these types of combat, there are ways of organizing
Speaker 1: confrontations majorly to your advantage, just just based on the
Speaker 1: numbers of forces and how they're grouped specifically that the
Speaker 1: main takeaway is don't split your forces. Um So, to
Speaker 1: illustrate this, you can imagine, say you've got battle droids
Speaker 1: in in star wars, and say maybe one side has
Speaker 1: a hundred battle droids and the other side has exactly
Speaker 1: a hundred battle droids as well. If you imagine each
Speaker 1: of the battle droids can shoot its blaster one time
Speaker 1: every second, and each shot has a chance of destroying
Speaker 1: its target, you can work out that after one second
Speaker 1: of battle, both forces will be reduced equally by about
Speaker 1: maybe after another second, et cetera. And it just goes
Speaker 1: on as the two sides decreased by attrition at roughly
Speaker 1: the same rate, until both armies are mostly are fully
Speaker 1: vanquished at around the same time, unless for some reason
Speaker 1: one side gets an advantage early on. But that kind
Speaker 1: of process does not scale in a linear way. So
Speaker 1: if you have say a hundred droids versus an opponents
Speaker 1: at general grievous is your opposing army and he's just
Speaker 1: got fifty droids you you probably can assume that the
Speaker 1: larger force will win, but you might not understand how
Speaker 1: much of an advantage the larger force has. So if
Speaker 1: if you have you know, the same kind of thing working.
Speaker 1: After the first second, your hundred droids will probably have
Speaker 1: destroyed roughly half of your opponents fifty droids, but they
Speaker 1: really will not have destroyed many of yours at all,
Speaker 1: maybe only like twelve or so. And as each second
Speaker 1: of battle goes on, you reduce their fighting effectiveness more
Speaker 1: and more, until what you're left with in the end
Speaker 1: is very little casualties to the larger army and total
Speaker 1: decimation of the smaller one. And so this shows, for example,
Speaker 1: that if you have a force of a hundred battle droids,
Speaker 1: it would be much easier for that those one hundred
Speaker 1: battle droids to win two consecutive battles against fifty battle
Speaker 1: droids than to win one single battle against a force
Speaker 1: of one hundred. And this is exactly why divide and
Speaker 1: conquer is such an important principle of warfare. If you
Speaker 1: break your enemy up into smaller groupings. With these certain
Speaker 1: types of combat, your advantage over them does not increase linearly.
Speaker 1: It multiplies by the square. In fact, if you choose
Speaker 1: your battles wisely, you can even use this to allow
Speaker 1: a smaller force to beat a bigger one. So if
Speaker 1: you've got a hundred battle droids, General Graves has two hundred,
Speaker 1: you could still potentially beat him overall by keeping your
Speaker 1: forces together and peeling off small segments of like ten
Speaker 1: or twenty at a time to face sequentially, with negligible
Speaker 1: losses to your own forces each time. So this is
Speaker 1: again where we come back to defeat in detail exactly right. So,
Speaker 1: in mathematical terms, what Lanchester predicted was that in these
Speaker 1: certain types of scenarios, uh, the strength of a group
Speaker 1: on the battlefield is the product of two things. The
Speaker 1: effectiveness of each fighting unit not times the number of units,
Speaker 1: but times the square of the number of units. And
Speaker 1: that's why it's known as the square law. And it
Speaker 1: tells you that for certain types of combat, sheer numbers
Speaker 1: can easily overwhelm differences in the effectiveness of individual fighting units.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting how this tends to go against what
Speaker 1: seems to be people's desire to understand, like dramatic violent
Speaker 1: conflict in narratives like in you know, epic poetry and
Speaker 1: action movies and all that, where it seems like what people,
Speaker 1: or at least what authors think people want to see, uh,
Speaker 1: is the idea that a single highly effective combatant you know,
Speaker 1: your John Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective
Speaker 1: enemies ganging up on them. And for many types of combat,
Speaker 1: this is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are
Speaker 1: significantly more important than skills, Like better to have five
Speaker 1: off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it it certainly does run run counter to our our
Speaker 1: our epic storytelling. Yeah, where it's like a one rag
Speaker 1: tag group of talented individuals can can can turn the
Speaker 1: tide of battle against against the faceless lord. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And we should know again that the square law is
Speaker 1: not supposed to apply to all types of combat. For example,
Speaker 1: in situations where combatants have to face one another in
Speaker 1: one on one duels, one at a time, they're the
Speaker 1: advantages of superior numbers are reduced to something closer to
Speaker 1: a pure linear function, and the individual effectiveness of of
Speaker 1: each unit becomes a lot more relevant. And so the
Speaker 1: way this works out in the real world is that,
Speaker 1: like in situations where your forces do not have numerical superiority,
Speaker 1: military leaders who are conscious of these issues will try
Speaker 1: to engineer battle conditions to avoid square law scenarios and
Speaker 1: enforced linear laws in areas instead. One example would be
Speaker 1: like using natural terrain or fortifications to create choke points
Speaker 1: where the majority of the enemy forces are held back
Speaker 1: from the action. That can't all fight you at once.
Speaker 1: The number of them that can fight you at the
Speaker 1: same time is limited by topography, and thus the battle
Speaker 1: becomes it starts to resemble something more like a series
Speaker 1: of sequential duels instead of a simultaneous war of all
Speaker 1: against all. And of course examples of this in history
Speaker 1: or you know the way the thing about the way
Speaker 1: castles are constructed, narrow passageways, uh, you know, natural ravines, bridges, gates,
Speaker 1: a spiral staircase in the castle tower. These tend to
Speaker 1: reduce the salience of the square law advantage and help
Speaker 1: you out, especially if you've got a smaller number of
Speaker 1: more effective fighters. So, to bring this back to ants,
Speaker 1: the question here is which of these models is better
Speaker 1: at predicting the outcomes of ant wars. Is it the
Speaker 1: linear model where there's this direct linear relationship between size
Speaker 1: of forces in the outcome, or is it the square
Speaker 1: model where the larger numbers of concentrated forces just easily
Speaker 1: overwhelm other concerns like the like individual fighting unit effectiveness. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was a paper that was published in the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties and the journal Animal Behavior. This was in nine
Speaker 1: by Mary E. A. White House and Klaus Jaffa called
Speaker 1: ant wars combat strategies territory and nest defense in the
Speaker 1: leaf cutting ant Atta leave Agatta And according to their research,
Speaker 1: they found quote the leaf cutting ant atta leave Agatta
Speaker 1: responded to a simulated vertebrate threat by recruiting many soldiers,
Speaker 1: and the soldiers would be a special special fighters large workers,
Speaker 1: but responded to con specific and interspecific ant threats by
Speaker 1: recruiting mainly small ants. So the vertebrate attack here was
Speaker 1: simulated pretty much by poking a stick. And you know,
Speaker 1: as they poke a stick into the entrance of the
Speaker 1: colony nest and then shake it for twenty seconds. And
Speaker 1: this was meant to mimic the mechanical disturbance that would
Speaker 1: be caused by an ants by the ant's main predator,
Speaker 1: the armadillo. In these attacks, what the ants would tend
Speaker 1: to do is they would bring more of their elite
Speaker 1: fighters to defend the nest. So in this situation it
Speaker 1: appears evolution maybe favoring the linear reasoning in this case. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: when the ants are attacked by other ants, they tended
Speaker 1: to respond instead with overwhelming numbers of less dedicated fighters.
Speaker 1: So a threat from arrival ant colony seems to have
Speaker 1: been solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated
Speaker 1: by the square law. Along these lines, Mofat also points
Speaker 1: out the quote a fighter's value to its colony bears
Speaker 1: on the risks the ant takes. The more expendable she is,
Speaker 1: the more likely she is to end up in harm's way.
Speaker 1: As such, marauder ants, he writes, they guard their foraging
Speaker 1: trails with old and or maimed workers, and in fire ants,
Speaker 1: it's been observed the old stay and fight, while the
Speaker 1: very young runaway and en fireman's more in their prime
Speaker 1: will actually uh fake their own deaths. Wow, we'll fake
Speaker 1: their own deaths. I mean. This is again something that
Speaker 1: makes more sense if you think about the ant Colony
Speaker 1: as a single super organism. It's like it's it's putting
Speaker 1: the the already damaged or less effective parts of itself
Speaker 1: out in front to absorb the brunt of the of
Speaker 1: the violence. Yeah, alright, So at this point you're you're
Speaker 1: you're probably thinking, oh my goodness, they're out of time,
Speaker 1: and you you would be right, just as the ant
Speaker 1: War is heating up. Uh, we're gonna have to close
Speaker 1: out this episode, but fear not, we're gonna be back
Speaker 1: with a third ant War episode that will more or
Speaker 1: less round everything out. Though a word of warning, if
Speaker 1: I am, if I'm looking at the schedule correctly, there
Speaker 1: will be another episode that will publish before the third
Speaker 1: ant War episode publishes, So just bear with us. The
Speaker 1: third ant War installment is on its way in the meantime.
Speaker 1: If you like to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, you can find us anywhere you
Speaker 1: get your podcast and wherever that happens to be. Just
Speaker 1: make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as
Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, or just to say hello. You
Speaker 1: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
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