Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking. The
Speaker 1: podcast then looks at the future and says, I spend
Speaker 1: my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren back Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, guys,
Speaker 1: we we've tackled on this podcast some pretty heavy topics
Speaker 1: in the past. Spiders was a big one. Bees, bees
Speaker 1: another big one. Mosquitoes. You know, a lot of these
Speaker 1: I was not present for. I think, I think, actually
Speaker 1: were you present for any of them? But they're not
Speaker 1: an insect, that's true, they're creepy crawley. Yeah, for a while,
Speaker 1: every time you were out of the office, Jonathan, Lauren
Speaker 1: and I would record a podcast about some insect. And
Speaker 1: to be fair, you chose this topic when it looked
Speaker 1: like I wasn't going to be in the office. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: And then for Chin smiled upon me, and it turns
Speaker 1: out I am here to talk about ants. Yes, the
Speaker 1: future of ants? Why, I mean, come on, guys, can
Speaker 1: we talk about like, I don't know the future of
Speaker 1: of of slow slow lorries or or the future the
Speaker 1: future of Koalas or I'll do that episode. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess we gotta get through this one. For next time,
Speaker 1: we'll do a sloth tech. I'm a big fan of sloths.
Speaker 1: I love slots. They are adorable, they're pretty creepy. My
Speaker 1: favorite sloth is Extinct, the one that's like big bear. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: terror comes for you slowly and just set creeping up. No,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about ants. Ants are actually fascinating and
Speaker 1: they may inspire some really interesting technologies of the future.
Speaker 1: So first, let's just talk about ants in general. So
Speaker 1: did you guys know that there are more than ten
Speaker 1: thousand ant species already identified by us the human beings,
Speaker 1: as in, there might be plenty more out there. Sure,
Speaker 1: there could be species that we have had limited or
Speaker 1: no contact with that we have yet to identify. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's one ant we're gonna be talking about later in
Speaker 1: this podcast that for a long time had been misidentified
Speaker 1: and as a result, um the handling of that ant
Speaker 1: never really went into action. But I'm getting ahead of
Speaker 1: myself anyway. Yeah, there are a lot of different types
Speaker 1: of ants out there, and in fact, they can be
Speaker 1: found just about everywhere on Earth. There are a few
Speaker 1: exceptions where there are no native species of ants. Antarctica,
Speaker 1: for example, you don't get any snow ants up there,
Speaker 1: or ice ants ants in Antarctica, And I know it's
Speaker 1: it's anti Antarctica. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, Antarctica, ironically
Speaker 1: is the is one of the places where you're not
Speaker 1: gonna really old places, so near the North Pole you
Speaker 1: probably don't. Yeah, Greenland, Iceland, they don't have native species
Speaker 1: of ants. Uh. Parts of Polynesia do not have any
Speaker 1: native species of ants. And there are a few remote
Speaker 1: islands in say the Indian Ocean or that don't have
Speaker 1: them either. But otherwise you can pretty much find them everywhere.
Speaker 1: They're really prevalent in tropical regions and can make up
Speaker 1: more than half of all the insects within a tropical forest.
Speaker 1: For example, where where to ants fit in the sort
Speaker 1: of the family tree of insects, They belong to the
Speaker 1: same order as wasps and bees, so uh, they're very similar.
Speaker 1: If you, by the way, are ever wondering if perhaps
Speaker 1: a little insect you have encountered is either an ant
Speaker 1: or a termite, look to see if they have a
Speaker 1: very thin waste. Essentially is what you're you're looking between
Speaker 1: the thorax and the abdomen. If they don't, it's a termite.
Speaker 1: If they do, it's nand simple rule of thumb there. Uh.
Speaker 1: Most pecs of ant live in permanent colonies that they
Speaker 1: establish in some location. It might be tunnels under the ground,
Speaker 1: it might be a mound that's on top of the ground,
Speaker 1: could be in trees or would carpenter ants are famous
Speaker 1: for being really destructive around houses. Most ants do live
Speaker 1: in these colonies, these permanent colonies, but there are some exceptions.
Speaker 1: Army ants, for example, do not have a permanent nest.
Speaker 1: They migrate, so their colony actually will move from place
Speaker 1: to place, and you will get these massive army ant
Speaker 1: migrations which are the stuff of nightmares. Uh. Then you
Speaker 1: also have the fact that ant colonies are centered around
Speaker 1: a queen ant. So this sounds very familiar to anyone
Speaker 1: who's studied bees, I mean queen bee ideas very similar. Um,
Speaker 1: the queen ant lays eggs. Those eggs will develop into
Speaker 1: either female ants, which are the worker ants. They do
Speaker 1: all the hard work, including building the colonies, gathering food,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff, taking care of the lar Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then you know the male ants whose job it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: their their job is to knock up the queen. That's
Speaker 1: all they do. That's it. And most, not most, but
Speaker 1: in several ant species, lots of them. Uh. The males
Speaker 1: will die after meeting with the queen. And that's pretty
Speaker 1: much the you know, fairly standard, that's pretty much it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not not being terribly Uh, you're not really exaggerating there, Joe.
Speaker 1: So normally, you know, ants communicate chemically with each other
Speaker 1: through pheromones. Yeah, and a little bit by touch, I believe. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: mainly it's through chemicals. Like most ant species, if they
Speaker 1: are traveling someplace, they laid down a pheromone trail, So
Speaker 1: this tells other ants that this is the pathway that
Speaker 1: was taken to get to some location, usually like food.
Speaker 1: This is actually interesting. You can disrupt the pheromone trail
Speaker 1: with your finger. If you ever see ants moving along
Speaker 1: the line, uh, and you just drag your finger across
Speaker 1: the line of ants. Watch what happens. It totally breaks
Speaker 1: their their concentration. The ones in in behind that are
Speaker 1: about to move across where you've just dragged your finger,
Speaker 1: they start acting confused. Where do I go? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a several visual gags in a bug's life that
Speaker 1: kind of play on that, except of course it's not
Speaker 1: a pheromone trail. They do it where it's just like
Speaker 1: a a sudden obstacle moves in the way and that
Speaker 1: disrupts everything, which is a little simplification, but hey, it's
Speaker 1: a Pixar movie and it's adorable. Uh. Then there are
Speaker 1: specific the specific type of ant that we wanted to
Speaker 1: refer to that are just kind of interesting that relate
Speaker 1: to technology but not in a good way. No. Well,
Speaker 1: so you've heard about the fire ant invasion of the
Speaker 1: United States again, which are scary and painful and terrible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we got a new one now. Yeah, crazy ants, specifically
Speaker 1: tawny crazy ants or raspberry crazy ants. Raspberry named after
Speaker 1: the the UH fruit. No, not the fruit A lot
Speaker 1: of people think that. No, it's actually named after the
Speaker 1: UH exterminator who discovered these ants living in Texas. So
Speaker 1: in two thousand and two, there was this this guy
Speaker 1: who UH encountered these particular types of ants that people
Speaker 1: were really kind of um getting perturbed over because one
Speaker 1: the ants, the reason why they're called crazy ants is
Speaker 1: when they are running around like on your kitchen floor
Speaker 1: or something. They seem to be going every which way.
Speaker 1: There's no apparent rhyme or reason to it. It's not
Speaker 1: that ants go marching one by one kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It's like they're just going all over the place. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and their pathway is not like a straight line to
Speaker 1: wherever they're going. They're going left, right everywhere. Also, they
Speaker 1: seemed to be infesting electronics. Yeah. Really, the there was
Speaker 1: a theory for a while that perhaps the ants were
Speaker 1: attracted to either electric fields or magnetic fields. Science does
Speaker 1: not seem to bear that out. Experiments have not beared
Speaker 1: that out. What they what the current hypothesis is is
Speaker 1: that they just love to find places to nest and
Speaker 1: they will go anywhere that's kind of an enclosure to
Speaker 1: nest in them. And if an ant, one of these
Speaker 1: crazy ants, encounters something that harms it, like say electricity,
Speaker 1: it gives off a pheromone that's an alarm pheromone, which
Speaker 1: is essentially a signal to say, hey, I need some
Speaker 1: help over here, and then other crazy ants will zoom
Speaker 1: in and go straight to try and help them. Now,
Speaker 1: in the case of electronics, those ants may in turn
Speaker 1: get hurt and then they give off these pheromones and
Speaker 1: then more and more ants come. So what you end
Speaker 1: up with is a device that shorts out because the
Speaker 1: ants short circuiting. Yeah. Yeah, that the ant bodies are
Speaker 1: literally disrupting the circuit and frying themselves. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: you'll have stories about their stories about things like there
Speaker 1: was a story about a guy who is using an iron,
Speaker 1: the iron shorts out, uh sparks fly out and then
Speaker 1: ants just pour out of the iron. Or someone is
Speaker 1: watching television and the television ends up flickering and then
Speaker 1: going out, and so they go and look at and
Speaker 1: they remove the backpedal of the television and it's just
Speaker 1: ants everywhere. And we're talking thousands upon thousands of these ants. Now,
Speaker 1: when I told you earlier about the misidentification of ants,
Speaker 1: this is the species I was talking about when scientists
Speaker 1: were first looking at these ants. See See Raspberry was
Speaker 1: trying to tell people, we need to figure out a
Speaker 1: strategy to handle this now because this is a thing.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that's happening, and it's going to
Speaker 1: get worse before he gets better, because if we don't
Speaker 1: address it, we're going to have a full on infestation
Speaker 1: of like a plague level event here. And meanwhile you
Speaker 1: had the government saying, well, you don't know anything about
Speaker 1: these ants, so we can't We're not gonna give you
Speaker 1: any money. And the science they're saying, well, without any money,
Speaker 1: we can't learn anything about these ants, and it begin
Speaker 1: this catch Twain too. Meanwhile, the scientists also misidentified, or
Speaker 1: at least one entomologist um misidentified the ant as being
Speaker 1: the same species as one that had become entrenched in
Speaker 1: Florida in the nineteen fifties. But Raspberry said, hey, I
Speaker 1: don't think so, because those ants in Florida we have
Speaker 1: never heard of any problems like the ones we're experiencing
Speaker 1: in Texas. And ultimately he ended up doing a lot
Speaker 1: of research on his own, which there's a great article
Speaker 1: about his research where its about crazy ants. It reveals
Speaker 1: it reveals that he hates reading, he didn't go to college. Um,
Speaker 1: he's not big on research, but he was obsessed with
Speaker 1: this idea and so he really looked into it. And
Speaker 1: then eventually they were able to identify the ant as
Speaker 1: actually belonging to a species native to Brazil and Argentina,
Speaker 1: not to Florida, and they suspect that bringing in soil
Speaker 1: or perhaps building materials were what introduced the ants to
Speaker 1: Texas and the cell eastern United States the Gulf States essentially,
Speaker 1: so these things do end up clogging up a lot
Speaker 1: of electronics. There were there were lots of reports. I
Speaker 1: remember when this first started happening, when people started talking
Speaker 1: about it, where everyone said, oh, they actually crave electricity,
Speaker 1: But that's not what happening. Although they're they're interesting in
Speaker 1: other ways as well. They're basically the xenomorphs of the
Speaker 1: ant world. Yeah. So fire ants are also an invasive
Speaker 1: species in the United States, specifically in the areas that
Speaker 1: crazy ants tend to be found in, like Texas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and here in Georgia as well. Crazy ants are also
Speaker 1: in Georgia. Guys, I don't know if you knew that
Speaker 1: fire ants have a pretty nasty sting. They clamp onto
Speaker 1: you with their jaws and then stab repeatedly with their stinger,
Speaker 1: and it has a tough venom. Yeah. I react poorly
Speaker 1: to fire ants stings. Um I get. I get nasty
Speaker 1: little bumps everywhere where there was a sting, and I
Speaker 1: used to encounter them quite a bit when I was
Speaker 1: mowing my lawn. I now have someone else doing that
Speaker 1: for me. But at any rate, you know, normally, fire ants,
Speaker 1: as big of a nuisance as they are, don't cause
Speaker 1: the kind of problems that crazy ants do. They don't.
Speaker 1: They aren't as invasive into the human home as crazy
Speaker 1: ants are. However, crazy ants have a couple of abilities
Speaker 1: that really make them formidable opponents of the fire ant.
Speaker 1: One is that they can coat themselves with chemicals that
Speaker 1: counteract fire ant venom, which means they can fight longer
Speaker 1: against the fire end. They also, instead of a stinger,
Speaker 1: have a little appendage that allows them to spray acid
Speaker 1: against other ants. Yeah, so xeno morph was pretty accurate.
Speaker 1: They are able to spew acid on their opponents. And
Speaker 1: I read a report where that said something along the
Speaker 1: lines of in UH encounters between fire ants and crazy ants,
Speaker 1: crazy ants when something like nine of the time, and
Speaker 1: that even in an experiment where scientists covered up the
Speaker 1: the the glands essentially that the ants were using to
Speaker 1: cover themselves in the anti venom UH, they won fifty
Speaker 1: three percent of the time. So wow, even when your
Speaker 1: chief defense has been removed, you're still winning more. Who's
Speaker 1: been arranging these scientific bug fights? There's there's an ant
Speaker 1: thunderdome in Texas, UM, where they do these experiments. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so the crazy ants are the master and the blaster
Speaker 1: in this thunderdome world. So very interesting creatures. Um. Obviously
Speaker 1: when we want we wanted to talk about specifically because
Speaker 1: of their relationship with electronics and the misunderstanding that they
Speaker 1: crave electricity. Also they're they're just really cool. But but right,
Speaker 1: so so let us transition here by saying that ants
Speaker 1: do more than just really mess up electronics. As it
Speaker 1: turns out, they might inspire new electronics in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: specifically things like computer algorithms and artificial intelligence algorithms. Uh.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to talk about navigation specifically this idea.
Speaker 1: You know, ants exhibit some interesting behaviors, including with certain species,
Speaker 1: the ability to range out really far, like two meters
Speaker 1: away from their nest, which when you're only like three
Speaker 1: point five millimeters long, is not that that's a quite
Speaker 1: a great distance. Uh. What's really interesting is not only
Speaker 1: are they able to do that, but they can visit
Speaker 1: various locations while foraging for food. When they find a
Speaker 1: place that has food and they're ready to return to
Speaker 1: the nest, they don't retrace their steps right, they don't.
Speaker 1: Let's say they go to three different points and it's
Speaker 1: not in a straight line. So they venture out from
Speaker 1: the nest. They go to point one, then they maybe
Speaker 1: take a left turn and go forward for a while,
Speaker 1: and they visit point too, and they make another left turn,
Speaker 1: and they visit point three. Well, once they found point
Speaker 1: three and they said this is the place we want
Speaker 1: to go, I need to go back to the nest.
Speaker 1: They don't retrace their steps back two points two and
Speaker 1: one and then go back home. They plot a course
Speaker 1: that essentially goes in a straight line back to the nest,
Speaker 1: as much of a straight line as they possibly can manage,
Speaker 1: which raises the question, how do they do that thing?
Speaker 1: That's odd? So when it comes down to navigation, scientists
Speaker 1: have pretty much identified there being some combination of elements
Speaker 1: going into effect here. One is path integration, one is
Speaker 1: visual piloting or you know, seeing landmarks, and one is
Speaker 1: called systematic search. And so here's how this breaks down. First,
Speaker 1: you've got path integration. Now, this is that idea that
Speaker 1: was just talking about the ability to visit multiple locations
Speaker 1: and then find your way back home. So, as an
Speaker 1: example I gave for the humans, because I think this
Speaker 1: is helpful. If you're having trouble visualizing this, Imagine that
Speaker 1: you have errands to run and you have to go
Speaker 1: to multiple places to run these errands. And so you
Speaker 1: leave your house. You have to go to the store
Speaker 1: to pick up some non perishable stuff that you've just
Speaker 1: gotta thrown into the car. So you go and you
Speaker 1: store and you pick that up. Then you gotta go
Speaker 1: and you gotta pick up some dry cleaning that you
Speaker 1: had over at a totally different locations. So you drive
Speaker 1: from the store to the dry cleaning pace. Then you decide, oh,
Speaker 1: wait that I've also got my copy of the two
Speaker 1: thousand six version of wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage uh,
Speaker 1: and I need to return that to Video Drome, which
Speaker 1: is in a totally different location from the dry cleaners.
Speaker 1: Video Drome is a video store here in Atlanta. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty fabulous one. It's pretty amazing. So anyway, you
Speaker 1: go to video, You got to Video Drome and you
Speaker 1: return the wicker Man um and they say thank you.
Speaker 1: But at that point you're ready to go home. Now
Speaker 1: you would not if you you know your way around,
Speaker 1: you would not drive from Video Drome back to the
Speaker 1: dry cleaners, and from the dry cleaners back to the store,
Speaker 1: and from the store to your home. You would go
Speaker 1: from video drume to your home. Same sort of thing
Speaker 1: with animals, but they don't have the kind of of
Speaker 1: pro sessing power that we have. Aunt brains are like
Speaker 1: a milligram. I mean, we're talking super small. So how
Speaker 1: can a creature this tiny, this with with this limited
Speaker 1: number of neurological resources, be able to do something so
Speaker 1: seemingly complex as plot a straight line path from a
Speaker 1: distant destination rather than retracing steps to get back to
Speaker 1: the starting point. And Uh, there's some disagreement or at
Speaker 1: least some debate on what's going on. A lot of
Speaker 1: it is just based upon the fact that we don't
Speaker 1: definitively know um. But there's a specific type of desert
Speaker 1: ant that really displays this behavior that's been under a
Speaker 1: lot of scrutiny for years. In fact, if you look
Speaker 1: up path integration and ants, you're going to see multiple
Speaker 1: scientific papers written on the subject. So one of the
Speaker 1: hypotheses about this is that it's all based on an
Speaker 1: egocentric methodology rather than g e centric. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: ant is sort of relating itself to its previous self
Speaker 1: rather than itself to its surroundings. Yeah. Yeah, Essentially, it's
Speaker 1: it's remembers its own position rather than having to look
Speaker 1: and see where it is. Right, it's not making like
Speaker 1: a mental map of its surroundings. It's thinking of where
Speaker 1: it is in relation to its nest. But it's not
Speaker 1: it's not mapping things out, thinking, oh, to the east
Speaker 1: of me is a puddle and to the west of
Speaker 1: you know, it's not like that. It's very very u
Speaker 1: egocentrics centered upon the ant itself. It would be almost
Speaker 1: like if you ran your errands by remembering how exactly
Speaker 1: how far you drove and at what degree angles you
Speaker 1: turned at each leg of the trip. That's part of it. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's so ants have an odometer. It is not a
Speaker 1: little dial tells it how far it went. Essentially, this
Speaker 1: is information that relates to the distance and grade that
Speaker 1: the ant has traveled. So whether it's a down slope,
Speaker 1: up slope, whether it was to the left the right,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, how far it went. Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: bees contract the same kind of information, and we talked
Speaker 1: about that at length during our b episode. Right, So
Speaker 1: this is all part of path integration, Right, you're being
Speaker 1: able to integrate that information, but you integrate it with
Speaker 1: something else, and in this case it's with polarized light,
Speaker 1: which bees do as well. Yeah, so the ants are
Speaker 1: able to sense polarized light. They use it as a
Speaker 1: compass essentially, which is really nifty because the light of
Speaker 1: the sun is polarized in such a way that that
Speaker 1: if you can detect that polarization, you can navigate by
Speaker 1: the sun even when it's cloudy. Right, Yeah, you just
Speaker 1: through the polarization of the light itself. So essentially you're saying, oh,
Speaker 1: the light is polarized in this way when I'm going
Speaker 1: in this direction, so when I'm coming from this other direction,
Speaker 1: it should look this other way. So that's part of it.
Speaker 1: Then you've got the landmark navigation, which is just what
Speaker 1: it sounds like that the ants identify specific geographic landmarks
Speaker 1: and are able to relate that as a point along
Speaker 1: their travels. It seems to be the major way that
Speaker 1: I think humans navigate. Yeah, that's well, there's that in
Speaker 1: Google maps. But yes, um so this in a I
Speaker 1: would relate back to image processing being able to not
Speaker 1: just uh detect an image, but to be able to
Speaker 1: recognize it, particularly being able to recognize it from different angles. So, uh,
Speaker 1: we talked about this a lot. Image processing is huge.
Speaker 1: You know. It's not just that you're able to show
Speaker 1: it a picture of let's say a coffee cup, and
Speaker 1: then you show it a picture of that same coffee
Speaker 1: cup in the same position and it says that's the
Speaker 1: same thing. Well, what if you take the picture from
Speaker 1: the opposite side, so that the handle is on the
Speaker 1: opposite side of the coffee cup. Can it's still uh,
Speaker 1: Can it's still identify that? What if you're closer so
Speaker 1: the coffee cup is larger. These are all things that
Speaker 1: have to be taken into account with artificial intelligence and
Speaker 1: being able to build a system that's able to recognize
Speaker 1: an object and understand or iritation distance, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Then there's just systematic search. This is just that idea
Speaker 1: of being able to go through an area and uh
Speaker 1: and figure out where you are in relation to some
Speaker 1: other point that you know, which is obviously useful for
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence in lots of ways. Obviously, Yes, Uh, It's
Speaker 1: it's also useful when searching for something to forage. So
Speaker 1: if ant is looking for food sources, this would be
Speaker 1: an appropriate method. But also sometimes ants will lose their
Speaker 1: way when they're trying to come back, like they'll uh.
Speaker 1: Some experiments have shown that ants can tend to underestimate
Speaker 1: how far they have traveled, and so that can cause
Speaker 1: some issues when they are coming back. They don't always
Speaker 1: have like a comp I hate to use bline of
Speaker 1: the term. They don't always they don't always have a
Speaker 1: completely accurate return home. And sometimes they get to the
Speaker 1: general area of where their nest is and they have
Speaker 1: to do a systematic search in order to nail down Oh,
Speaker 1: this is specifically the way I need to go. So yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty cool stuff. Now, if you were to incorporate these
Speaker 1: sort of strategies in AI, you could easily see the
Speaker 1: benefits specifically for something like a robot. Right, you would
Speaker 1: have this ability to have robots have a centralized headquarter
Speaker 1: type location. They could travel outward from that explore, go
Speaker 1: to multiple other locations, and then return back to headquarters
Speaker 1: without retracing their steps and wasting energy. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: already see some of these types of search strategies that
Speaker 1: we see in animals showing up in robots that are
Speaker 1: very simple like maybe the room BA Sure if you
Speaker 1: just think about the way a room BA navigates the room. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it tries to vacuum all the different parts of
Speaker 1: the floor in the room. How does it do that? Well,
Speaker 1: it has to have a system. Uh, of course, that's
Speaker 1: a very simple application, right. Think about a robot that
Speaker 1: needs to navigate an area in a much more complex way,
Speaker 1: like it needs to reach different nodes in a different order,
Speaker 1: or do it with a different time frame or something
Speaker 1: like that. In the ease cases, studying the way ants
Speaker 1: and other swarming insects move can be really important in
Speaker 1: coming up with the most efficient ways to tell a
Speaker 1: robot how to navigate its surroundings, especially with limited computational
Speaker 1: power like these insects have. Sure. Sure, the limited computational
Speaker 1: power is important because that means that you need less
Speaker 1: energy to operate the robot, and they can be smaller, right,
Speaker 1: so these you know, less energy is good, especially if
Speaker 1: you're talking about sending robots to really distant places like Mars. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in this case, we're looking more at ant colonies
Speaker 1: than than individual ants. Yeah right, Well sorry, yeah, I
Speaker 1: may have made the jump there. We were just talking
Speaker 1: about an individual ant. But what about the swarm as
Speaker 1: a whole. Sure, if you take this same sort of approach,
Speaker 1: where you have the individual robot going out and doing
Speaker 1: this kind of work, you can already see how that
Speaker 1: would be beneficial in applications like establishing a colony. You know,
Speaker 1: Mars one talks about having robots sent up to establish
Speaker 1: all the hard work that would be required for the
Speaker 1: colonists to be able to just sort of land on
Speaker 1: Mars and then move in. This is the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that would be necessary for the robot to be
Speaker 1: able to to go around an entire area autonomously, because
Speaker 1: controlling a robot live is impossible. I mean, you're talking
Speaker 1: about at least ten or twelve minute delay at the
Speaker 1: best of times between Mars and Earth. So you would
Speaker 1: want something that's at least semi autonomous. But then if
Speaker 1: you add in the idea of an entire group of robots,
Speaker 1: a swarm of robots, all using the sort of behavior
Speaker 1: and all interconnected, you really see how a colony works,
Speaker 1: and you see how it could be really beneficial for AI.
Speaker 1: Of course, studying how ant colonies work might be good
Speaker 1: for more than just actual movement. Sure, yeah, so specifically,
Speaker 1: when you look at how ant colonies operate, and you
Speaker 1: see how ants go out and forage for food. Ants
Speaker 1: may go out, individual ants may go out in various directions.
Speaker 1: You've got lots of different potential sources of food and
Speaker 1: potential paths to get there exactly. And so then you
Speaker 1: have ants returning to the nest and they may be
Speaker 1: laying down a pheromone trail to say, this is the
Speaker 1: pathway we need to take because food is back behind me,
Speaker 1: and other ants when they encounter the pheromone trail no
Speaker 1: to follow that trail, and then they will eventually get
Speaker 1: to whatever the The first the exploratory aunt has found
Speaker 1: well with the way these pheromone trails work, the longer ones,
Speaker 1: they they evaporate over time, so the longer ones will
Speaker 1: evaporate faster than the shorter ones. Like if it's long enough,
Speaker 1: it might evaporate before another aunt is able to go
Speaker 1: the entire length of it. And like you were saying, Joe,
Speaker 1: when you get to the end of that pheromone trail
Speaker 1: and there's nothing left, the ant doesn't know where else
Speaker 1: to go, so essentially turns around and goes back. Shorter
Speaker 1: pheromone trails are more likely to be followed by ants,
Speaker 1: they tend to be established and made more permanent, and
Speaker 1: so the ants really focus on the short path. Now,
Speaker 1: short path for ants means less time and energy spent
Speaker 1: trying to get food from a distant location back to
Speaker 1: the nest. Now take all that that's very useful for
Speaker 1: ants in the physical real world and turn that into
Speaker 1: an abstraction. Just think about the abstract version of trying
Speaker 1: to find something. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a
Speaker 1: thing in a place. It could be a solution to
Speaker 1: a problem. Sure, you could have a problem that could
Speaker 1: have multiple potential solutions, like a mathematical problem for example,
Speaker 1: and using an algorithm that is in effect aping the
Speaker 1: behavior of an ant colony, you could end up having
Speaker 1: a similar behavior where the algorithm directs the focus of
Speaker 1: the computer. It's I'm using very vague terms here to
Speaker 1: to kind of explain the point on whichever solution is
Speaker 1: revealing itself first, so that way it does not waste
Speaker 1: time and energy pursuing other potential solutions that are further off,
Speaker 1: you know, in a figurative sense. So it is a
Speaker 1: way of increasing efficiency, reducing the amount of energy consumption.
Speaker 1: All these are obviously really important, uh, concepts. No matter
Speaker 1: you're whether you're talking about like the distant Martian exploration
Speaker 1: I was just mentioning, or you're talking about an application
Speaker 1: here on Earth. Obviously, limiting the amount of energy that
Speaker 1: you have to expend to get to an outcome is
Speaker 1: a positive thing. So yeah, it's really kind of a
Speaker 1: cool idea of adapting this behavior we find in nature
Speaker 1: to a more abstract application within the computer world. Share. Okay,
Speaker 1: but I want to talk about fire ants again. All right.
Speaker 1: See Lauren has a jar here and Jonathan she wants
Speaker 1: you to close your eyes. I'm already look we you know,
Speaker 1: you guys got me with the blood episode when you
Speaker 1: made me do that, so I'm not doing it again.
Speaker 1: For ants. Forget it. We're just kidding. We would never
Speaker 1: cover Jonathan and ants, especially not fire ants. No, thank you.
Speaker 1: I appreciate maybe crazy ants, because that would be Cray
Speaker 1: would be a little crazy. All right, Well what about
Speaker 1: fire ants? Did you want to know? I mean, they
Speaker 1: they're nasty, they bite, they staying, They're amazing at biting
Speaker 1: and stinging, the very effective editiring the future of biting. Alright,
Speaker 1: but no, they also do a lot of other really
Speaker 1: interesting things. Their swarming behavior might teach us all kinds
Speaker 1: of lessons that could be potentially applied to technology. One
Speaker 1: of the things we want to talk about here is
Speaker 1: some research about fire ant tunneling, yeahavior, and how that
Speaker 1: might apply to technology. So, uh, fire ants when they
Speaker 1: make their tunnels, they make these underground tunnels, they do
Speaker 1: so in such a way where they are not going
Speaker 1: to to fall down the tunnel. That would obviously be
Speaker 1: a bad, uh, a bad way for them to evolve.
Speaker 1: So they're really effective at making tunnels that allow them
Speaker 1: to travel at full speed underground with very little chance
Speaker 1: of them falling. And it's interesting because their tunnels are
Speaker 1: actually built to a size that's essentially the width of
Speaker 1: the tunnel is about the same as the length of
Speaker 1: the ant It's also really interesting it does not matter
Speaker 1: what kind of soil they're going through, whether it's really
Speaker 1: finely powdered soil or large grains of soil, it's still
Speaker 1: that same ratio, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: they texture their tunnels to provide natural footholds, so so
Speaker 1: in case of emergency, they can use their entire bodies
Speaker 1: basically antenna included, to stop themselves from falling yeah. The
Speaker 1: antenna revelation was one that really surprised the researchers because
Speaker 1: it was an adaptive use of antenna that they had
Speaker 1: not expected. They just figured that the antenna was going
Speaker 1: to be used to help sense the environment and communicate,
Speaker 1: but not to actually help in the case of an
Speaker 1: ant losing it's it's footing. They shook these ants like crazy.
Speaker 1: By the way, it reminded me of yeah, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: we should say the research is being done out of
Speaker 1: the fire ant lab, so to speak, at Georgia Tech.
Speaker 1: They've got a lot of interesting fire ant research going on.
Speaker 1: They have robots and fire ants. I am terrified. Also,
Speaker 1: I went to I went to the rival school to
Speaker 1: Georgia Tech, so I'm sure it's only a matter of
Speaker 1: time before robot fire ants chase me down. It's pretty likely.
Speaker 1: I think they forgive and forget, unlike you. So, so
Speaker 1: this research was published in It was called Climbing, falling
Speaker 1: and jamming during ant look emotion in confined environments. And
Speaker 1: the reason that it's being done at Georgia Tech is
Speaker 1: that they're really hoping that it will transfer into research
Speaker 1: about how to how to get robots to tunnel around
Speaker 1: and maybe do search and rescue. Yeah, that would be
Speaker 1: a big one. Like imagine, imagine a disaster, like a
Speaker 1: mining disaster. We've seen lots of building, Yeah, anything anything
Speaker 1: where people could potentially be trapped underground, and you need
Speaker 1: to have the ability to quickly respond in a safe
Speaker 1: way that's not going to compromise the area and also
Speaker 1: will allow your responding team to be able to concentrate
Speaker 1: on the areas they need to as quickly as possible. Sure,
Speaker 1: I could also see just for exploration in general, for
Speaker 1: having this kind of robot would would be very useful.
Speaker 1: But in fourteen they published another paper out of the
Speaker 1: same labs I believe, called fire ants actively control spacing
Speaker 1: and orientation within self assemblages. Okay, so I love this.
Speaker 1: Fire Ants it turns out can make things like rafts
Speaker 1: and bridges out of what miss out of themselves as
Speaker 1: incredible swarms of fire ants actually exhibit many of the
Speaker 1: properties we imagine in future self assembling and self healing
Speaker 1: robots and materials. Uh. You have a really great quote
Speaker 1: in here from from one David who who is one
Speaker 1: of the researchers he's working on this. Yeah, he's a
Speaker 1: Georgia Tech researcher. He There are several great quotes I've
Speaker 1: lifted from videos of him talking about his aunt research.
Speaker 1: One of the things he says about fire ances you
Speaker 1: can consider them as both a fluid and a solid. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so so like if you take this big old ball
Speaker 1: of fire ants like they do, if you compress it,
Speaker 1: it can bounce back to its original shape like an
Speaker 1: elastic solid. But if you say, toss a stick through
Speaker 1: the middle of this ball of ants, they'll flow around
Speaker 1: it like a liquid. It's fascinating. They have to be stopped, No,
Speaker 1: they don't know. They must be encouraged. Have you ever
Speaker 1: stepped a pile of fire ants? I think this is amazing.
Speaker 1: Another thing that David who said in a video about
Speaker 1: his fire ant research was that answer opaque, you can't
Speaker 1: see through them. That's accurate that he said. No, okay,
Speaker 1: that makes it sound like he's crazy. No. The reason
Speaker 1: he said that was he was explaining why you might
Speaker 1: need to use something like computerized tomography scanning to understand
Speaker 1: what's happening when these ants linked together and form these
Speaker 1: sort of fluid or solid structures out of many of
Speaker 1: their bodies. Why would you why would you even do that.
Speaker 1: Why would you analyze ants with CT scanning. Oh well,
Speaker 1: because we were hoping to figure out how exactly they
Speaker 1: form these structures that are so interesting that can react
Speaker 1: like a like a fluid or a solid. Yea. So
Speaker 1: imagine you've got a kiddie pool getting there, and on
Speaker 1: top of the water are ants, but not individual ants
Speaker 1: and not sinking. Instead, you have a grafted together, floating
Speaker 1: buoy of ants. This raft of ants is sort of
Speaker 1: an arc of ants made by ants for ants out
Speaker 1: of ants. You just never want me to stop screaming. Nope, okay,
Speaker 1: uh no, this is amazing. And so what these researchers
Speaker 1: at Georgie Tech we're looking into was how these ants
Speaker 1: linked together. And what who said was that we might
Speaker 1: have expected the ants to fall together sort of and parallel.
Speaker 1: The thing he compares that to his like grains of rice.
Speaker 1: But what did they do know? They did not link
Speaker 1: together in parallel. Yeah, they linked together perpendicularly in these
Speaker 1: these T junctions, which is a lot stronger of a configuration.
Speaker 1: Um and and it's a lot of junctions in in
Speaker 1: this one experiment, he flash froze and ant raft okay,
Speaker 1: and scanned it with with this microscale computerized tomography or
Speaker 1: CT scanner and observed that on average, each ant was
Speaker 1: connected to four point eight of its neighbors, using an
Speaker 1: average of fourteen connection points and up to twenty one
Speaker 1: connection points in the case of bigger ants. This was
Speaker 1: including their the claws on the edges of their legs
Speaker 1: and also their mandibles. And he observed that of the
Speaker 1: four hundred and forty ants that were scanned in within
Speaker 1: this raft, of them had all of their legs connected
Speaker 1: to their neighbors, so they were doing this really efficiently,
Speaker 1: and and most of them, furthermore, had their legs outstretched
Speaker 1: in order to increase the distance between each other ant
Speaker 1: and thus improve the rafts buoyancy. Furthermore, smaller ants tended
Speaker 1: to surround each larger ant to help kind of fill
Speaker 1: in the gaps so that there wouldn't be too many
Speaker 1: holes where water could get in. Uh So, in other words,
Speaker 1: they're really good at doing this. They're like creepy, awesome
Speaker 1: good at making this go. And furthermore, when they're you know,
Speaker 1: like alive and not frozen, they're continually reacting to changes
Speaker 1: in their environment and the reactions of their neighbors to
Speaker 1: the environment that's moving around in the mass and forming
Speaker 1: and reforming their little anti connections. Why would they Why
Speaker 1: did we allow this to happen? Why what possible purpose?
Speaker 1: Does it? Actually does provide a survival advantage? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and in most of their native environments there's pretty frequent flooding,
Speaker 1: and so you know, also individual at my drown yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And and furthermore, you know, when they're on the move,
Speaker 1: they they're or don't need to find ways around obstacles,
Speaker 1: and they can survive heavy rainfalls and get to safe
Speaker 1: ground over a period of months if they have to,
Speaker 1: by forming these little ant rafts. Yeah, months on the
Speaker 1: ant months on the ant raft Yeah. Made out of ants,
Speaker 1: by ants for ants. Yeah. Um. So so it's pretty cool,
Speaker 1: um and not only really gross, but could lead to
Speaker 1: maybe like self healing structures. Sure, yeah, they've talked about
Speaker 1: that sort of like that if you imagine the tiny
Speaker 1: robotics of the future, robotics that are so tiny there
Speaker 1: they become sort of the constituents of a changeable piece
Speaker 1: of matter. Yeah, a material that is self healing in
Speaker 1: order to create infrastructure, which we've talked about before, or
Speaker 1: even regular structures, you know, like like a self healing
Speaker 1: car would be pretty cool. Yeah, for example, um or
Speaker 1: you know, just for creating modular robots that are able
Speaker 1: to to join up Vultron style without how to to
Speaker 1: be you know, perfectly formed together, you know, less like
Speaker 1: Tetris blocks and more like that. And then I can
Speaker 1: easily see that being really important. Uh, you know, going
Speaker 1: back to the Mars example, it's a it's an easy
Speaker 1: one to make because that's an environment that we ourselves
Speaker 1: are incapable of exploring right now for various reasons. And
Speaker 1: if we were able to send a hive, like a
Speaker 1: colony essentially of robots that had this sort of capability
Speaker 1: and they were essentially traveling in a swarm, they would
Speaker 1: be able to encounter multiple types of environments and be
Speaker 1: able to adapt to whatever the needs were at the
Speaker 1: time to be able to overcome them. So they came
Speaker 1: up to like a small ledge, they might be able
Speaker 1: to build a ladder out of themselves, and then enough
Speaker 1: of them climb the ladder and then pull the rest
Speaker 1: back up behind them, and then you've continue on. So
Speaker 1: these ants actually do things like that. I mean they
Speaker 1: not only build rafts out of themselves, they build bridges
Speaker 1: out of themselves, so you can easily see that as
Speaker 1: being an important thing for robotics as well. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or you know, if they fall off of a ledge,
Speaker 1: being able to recover from that kind of damage. I
Speaker 1: still do not approve of this in ants, but I
Speaker 1: do approve of it in robots. So I'm just making
Speaker 1: a stand. What if they're biting stinging robots, Well, would
Speaker 1: you create that show? I wouldn't create it. I'm loking
Speaker 1: at this, this ball villain across the table. I'm the
Speaker 1: one doesn't want to get eaten by ants. There's nothing villainous.
Speaker 1: I'm saying, you'd create the ants to use against other people.
Speaker 1: I totally do that, that's true. I mean I could
Speaker 1: also see myself with a magnifying glass and these ants
Speaker 1: are saying, no, Mr Aunt, I expect you to die.
Speaker 1: But I would never do that. You know. I almost
Speaker 1: made a pun when I was describing this episode about
Speaker 1: how we're going to take a magnifying glass to the
Speaker 1: subject of ant futures. But that's just too cruel. I
Speaker 1: I honestly, as much as I've been grousing about ants,
Speaker 1: I do find this kind of behavior to be absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: It is a little unnerving to watch videos of it.
Speaker 1: It's a little it just looks weird. I didn't watch
Speaker 1: any of these videos on purpose because I was terrifically
Speaker 1: creeped out by the concept. It's it's a little creepy
Speaker 1: when they're they're pretty amazing to watch these ants building
Speaker 1: physical structures out of their own bodies so that the
Speaker 1: colony can continue on whatever course. It's on my favorite.
Speaker 1: I don't think that you guys could probably hear it,
Speaker 1: but I was just shaking my head really vigorously. We're done.
Speaker 1: We're going to watch the video where they've got the
Speaker 1: ant raft. They got the fire raft floating in the water,
Speaker 1: and you just see a researcher poking it with four steps,
Speaker 1: just dipping it under the water. They dip the raft
Speaker 1: and it just bobs right back up to the top.
Speaker 1: It has some hydrophobic qualities to the raft, which is
Speaker 1: that it's actually repelling water off the surface of it,
Speaker 1: which is pretty phenomenal. So, yeah, this there's not only
Speaker 1: is it a fascinating behavior from a biological standpoint, but
Speaker 1: like we said, it does in fact a service inspiration,
Speaker 1: as so many elements of nature have served before for
Speaker 1: people who are working in the field of robotics and
Speaker 1: other fields as well in the world of technology. So
Speaker 1: in the future we may very well have much more
Speaker 1: technology that's based upon this this ant behavior and be
Speaker 1: able to take advantage of it in ways we can't
Speaker 1: even anticipate. Right now, this podcast has basically turned into
Speaker 1: about a quarter of it is the bio mimicry Show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: biomree is great. Animals are fascinating, and robots are pretty cool.
Speaker 1: So so my plan is next time, when I'm not
Speaker 1: feeling well and you guys have planned yet another episode
Speaker 1: about some form of creepy crawley, I will continue to
Speaker 1: stay out until you have recorded it. Um No, I
Speaker 1: I really as much as I'm putting on an act here,
Speaker 1: I really do think it's pretty pretty awesome. I still
Speaker 1: don't like fire ants, but that's for because I get
Speaker 1: stung by them and I don't like that. But um yeah,
Speaker 1: neat stuff. If you guys out there have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics that we can tackles or anything, or about
Speaker 1: anything else, yes, if you have anything mostly about insects,
Speaker 1: you have any cute cuddly animals that you want us
Speaker 1: to talk about, let us know, or insects, or anything
Speaker 1: else about the future you are curious about. Let us know.
Speaker 1: You can send us I'm fine with snakes. You can
Speaker 1: send us a message with going to Twitter or Facebook
Speaker 1: or Google Plus or handle at all. Three is FW thinking.
Speaker 1: We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
Speaker 1: from us again really soon. For more on this topic
Speaker 1: in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
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