Speaker 1: Deliver thyself as a row from the hand of the hunter,
Speaker 1: and as a bird from the hand of the fowler.
Speaker 1: Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and
Speaker 1: be wise, which, having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth
Speaker 1: her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in
Speaker 1: the harvest. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And that was a reading from the King
Speaker 1: James translation of the Bible. It's from the Book of Proverbs,
Speaker 1: chapter six. Uh. And I was looking right before we started.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, let me check my scholarly Oxford
Speaker 1: Annotated edition to the Bible to see if it's got
Speaker 1: any insights on how the author of this passage knew
Speaker 1: that all of the worker ants in the colony were female.
Speaker 1: And no, it just says this passage appeals to the
Speaker 1: natural world. 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 aunt colony correct and also, uh, doesn't get hung
Speaker 1: up on the idea of a central ruler like in
Speaker 1: In a couple of ways, this is a very um
Speaker 1: accurate reading of ant civilization. You know, I didn't even
Speaker 1: think about it, but I'm sure that means this is
Speaker 1: one of those verses that's been employed by a Christian
Speaker 1: apologist to suggest the inherancy of the Bible, right because
Speaker 1: it But but I gotta say this versus is pretty
Speaker 1: dead 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 trying, 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 uh.
Speaker 1: Of course, then there's this bit about the gathering of
Speaker 1: food and the storing of food, which, depending on which
Speaker 1: species you're looking at is also really accurate. Of course,
Speaker 1: as we continue to look at examples of of ant
Speaker 1: civilization and ant warfare, we're gonna get into some examples
Speaker 1: that they are a bit more barbaric and uh ravaging.
Speaker 1: I guess yeah. For a biblical parallels, some of these
Speaker 1: ants stories are going to be closer to the Conquest
Speaker 1: of Canaan than the Wisdom of Proverbs. But this is
Speaker 1: funny 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 uh,
Speaker 1: and 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 most most places. I think I picked it
Speaker 1: up at a yoga studio once while I was waiting
Speaker 1: waiting for my wife to get her shoes on, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, what's this a book about animals? I
Speaker 1: 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 but in this book, the
Speaker 1: author describes a couple of cool details. First of all,
Speaker 1: a tale in which in Indra desires a glorious palace.
Speaker 1: So Vishnu comes to him and points out a line
Speaker 1: of ants in the dirt and tells him that each
Speaker 1: and every one of them is an indra that rose
Speaker 1: to the highest level of existence and then fell down
Speaker 1: again via pride. So there's a, you know, this recurring
Speaker 1: idea that ants, like all these other animals, are part
Speaker 1: of the cycle of rebirth. The author also mentions that
Speaker 1: of al Niki, the author of the Ramayana, emerged from
Speaker 1: an ant hill or a valmika after ten years of meditation.
Speaker 1: So in this case, the the author um of the
Speaker 1: Hindu epic ends up taking on the name of the
Speaker 1: ant hill as part of their new emerged identity. That's
Speaker 1: interesting and counterintuitive because it imagines the ant hill as
Speaker 1: a place that would be appropriate for meditation, solitude, you know,
Speaker 1: like 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 seems 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 two to
Speaker 1: really 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 an
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 episode,
Speaker 1: you've probably figured out that we're talking about aunts and UH.
Speaker 1: And this is indeed the second in our Aunt Wars
Speaker 1: UH series. So if you didn't listen to the last episode,
Speaker 1: we would recommend you go back and give it a listen.
Speaker 1: We discussed the empire, the ants, and and very broadly
Speaker 1: the endless wars that form the boundaries of their individual kingdoms.
Speaker 1: I want to go back again to the writings of
Speaker 1: Mark W. Moffatt Uh, and this is from that Scientific
Speaker 1: American article that I previously mentioned that's also hosted on
Speaker 1: his website at dor bugs dot com. He writes, quote,
Speaker 1: in Ghana, I witnessed aceeeving carpet of workers of the
Speaker 1: army ants species dorilyss Nigricans searching together across an area
Speaker 1: hundred feet wide. These African army ants, which in species
Speaker 1: such as de Nigricans that move and broad swaths, are
Speaker 1: called driver ants, slice the flesh off their enemy or
Speaker 1: quarry with blade like jaws, and can make short work
Speaker 1: of victims thousands of times their size, although vertebrate creatures
Speaker 1: can usually outrun ants. In Gabon, I once saw an
Speaker 1: antelope caught in a snare, eaten alive by a colony
Speaker 1: of driver ants. That highlights something that I was planning
Speaker 1: on talking about in just a little bit. When we
Speaker 1: get to one particular or species of army end that
Speaker 1: I was finding really fascinating. But uh, but I guess
Speaker 1: we can address it now. So, you know the Kingdom
Speaker 1: of the Crystal Skull vision, which goes back to earlier
Speaker 1: movies and stuff where the the army ants essentially are
Speaker 1: terrestrial movie piranha. You know, you've got the You've got
Speaker 1: the Hollywood acid that that strips the human to the
Speaker 1: bone in in seconds. You've got the Hollywood piranha that
Speaker 1: stripped the human to the bone in seconds. I don't
Speaker 1: know if either of those are really very accurately reflective
Speaker 1: of stuff that happens in the real world. And then
Speaker 1: the ants are the next thing, the Hollywood army ants
Speaker 1: that just sterilize your skeleton. Uh, that that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be something that happens in reality. Certainly not. I
Speaker 1: would say with a with a large animal that can move,
Speaker 1: a lot of army ants are are going to be
Speaker 1: absolutely apocalyptic in their implications for smaller animals, for insects, arachnids, centipedes,
Speaker 1: and even small vertebrates like little frogs and snakes and stuff.
Speaker 1: But larger animals they don't actually represent a threat like that,
Speaker 1: like you can ease only get away from them. The
Speaker 1: only case I would imagine where army ants might represent
Speaker 1: a real threat to larger animals would be if you
Speaker 1: are totally immobilized, right, so if you're caught in a snare,
Speaker 1: buried up to your neck in the sand, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Right, And even then I don't know if
Speaker 1: they would necessarily kill you, because they're they're looking for
Speaker 1: their main prey species, which are going to be all
Speaker 1: kinds of invertebrates. Yeah, they're probably going after something like
Speaker 1: termites or other ants. Uh. Heads sticking out of the
Speaker 1: ground not really on the menu usually, But but I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to try it. I'm not saying necessarily safe.
Speaker 1: That could be the next big Hollywood magician act though,
Speaker 1: right David Blaine Bury's I mean, I'd be surprised if
Speaker 1: he hasn't done it already. Well, no, it's the next
Speaker 1: big confidence game, you know. So they got to walk
Speaker 1: across the hot coals. That's like the confidence building exercise.
Speaker 1: But but the next stage is the bury yourself up
Speaker 1: to the neck and let the army ants come. Well,
Speaker 1: another a little piece of health cleaning from the last
Speaker 1: episode I want to throw in here. In the last episode,
Speaker 1: I briefly mentioned pheromones as being essential to aunt communication.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to gloss over this too much
Speaker 1: because I imagine many of you have have seen videos
Speaker 1: of pheromonal demonstrations, uh, you know, the the the ant Overlord. EO.
Speaker 1: Wilson himself does this at times in which a pheromone
Speaker 1: is painted like a paintbrush or a qutap or something
Speaker 1: across the surface and then ants follow it and is
Speaker 1: informative as well as a demonstration like this can be.
Speaker 1: It don't take it to mean that there's just there's
Speaker 1: a real blunt simplicity to it. As as Wilson himself stresses,
Speaker 1: there is a pheromonal language for ants. Uh. Any given
Speaker 1: ant species uses a whole palide of pheromones and chemical
Speaker 1: signals to communicate. Yeah, it can be very complex, though
Speaker 1: there are also very simple ways to see it in
Speaker 1: action and like creating the pheromone trails that are like. EO.
Speaker 1: Wilson was involved in research that discovered one of the
Speaker 1: main glands in the ants gaster that deposits of pheromone
Speaker 1: that creates the trail leading to food. And generally if
Speaker 1: you deposit this pheromone, as you will see, you know,
Speaker 1: humans can extract it and put it in the bottle,
Speaker 1: like you're saying. To these demonstrations where you just put
Speaker 1: a line of it down on a table and suddenly
Speaker 1: the ants form up and follow the line. Those can
Speaker 1: be striking direct demonstrations, even though the full web of
Speaker 1: pheromonal interactions can be much more complex. And you can
Speaker 1: also easily do this yourself, even without um the extraction
Speaker 1: of that kind of pheromone, simply by if you've ever
Speaker 1: tried dragging your finger across an ant trail where like
Speaker 1: you know, if you can smudge the chemicals away and
Speaker 1: maybe disrupt it with some of the oils from your
Speaker 1: own finger, suddenly the movement of the ants becomes chaotic.
Speaker 1: It's all confused because the deposition of chemicals that has
Speaker 1: created this trail has been broken. I've been I've been
Speaker 1: noticing these ant trail ant trails a lot more on
Speaker 1: my walks recently. Uh, my family and I will go
Speaker 1: out to some various nature walking by trails in the
Speaker 1: area that they're not that populated it and some of
Speaker 1: them have lee you know, slabs of concrete, and they'll
Speaker 1: be these little essentially a little trenches that stretch across
Speaker 1: them where one slab meets the other, and invariably those
Speaker 1: are the trenches through which the ants moved, not over
Speaker 1: the top where they're going to potentially get smashed by
Speaker 1: 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, now, speaking
Speaker 1: of the Oh Wilson, I want to point out to
Speaker 1: everybody we've talked about Io Wilson on the show before,
Speaker 1: an EO. 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 them,
Speaker 1: there is a wonderful PBO documentary that came out several
Speaker 1: years ago titled EO. Wilson of Ants and NN. You
Speaker 1: can probably get it wherever you stream PBS content. I
Speaker 1: know that at least here in the United States. You
Speaker 1: can get it on Prime. It's really good. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: so I started watching it. I haven't finished yet. I
Speaker 1: watched the first half and it's just a delight. There's
Speaker 1: a great moment where so EO. Wilson, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the world authorities on ants, revolutionary biologist for the
Speaker 1: world 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, and
Speaker 1: I 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
Speaker 1: attitude 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 Tails
Speaker 1: from the Ant World. All right, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take one quick break, but we'll be right back
Speaker 1: and we'll return to the world of the ants and
Speaker 1: the wars that they rage. 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 Emlin, 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 distended 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 out doing 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 at 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 that. I mean, obviously I
Speaker 1: don't think Emland'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: the 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: they will battle other forces for control of food resources
Speaker 1: and will also invade other ants societies in order to
Speaker 1: claim their larva and their pupa as food. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: these are some of the most striking types of ants
Speaker 1: that we see. I mean, you know, we're familiar with
Speaker 1: the ant warfare that we've discussed before, say between uh
Speaker 1: different types of fire ants, even here in the in
Speaker 1: the southern United States. But seeing ants that forage on
Speaker 1: the scale and with the tenacity of army answer marauder
Speaker 1: ants is is a different kind of thing. This might
Speaker 1: be a good place to pause and appreciate the marvel
Speaker 1: of this one species of army ant that I've been
Speaker 1: reading into a lot. Uh. And this is the species
Speaker 1: known as eston Bercelli i. UH. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of actually different species event that are commonly referred to
Speaker 1: as army ants, but seton Bricellii is I think the
Speaker 1: one species that people are most often talking about with
Speaker 1: that general title. They're very charismatic, well observed and distributed species.
Speaker 1: They live in the humid equatorial regions of Central and
Speaker 1: South America, especially in the Amazon rainforest, but with the
Speaker 1: range extending up through Mexico and down south of Brazil
Speaker 1: into Argentina. Uh. But they're primarily in the equatorial rainforests,
Speaker 1: and these ants will form colonies of several hundred thousand
Speaker 1: adults at a time with this rapacious foraging behavior, satisfying
Speaker 1: the energy needs of the colony with raids that cover
Speaker 1: hundreds of meters according to one estimate. I believe this
Speaker 1: was cited by Carl and Marion rhetten Meyer, who'll I'll
Speaker 1: mention again in a moment their aunt experts. But the
Speaker 1: figure is that on average, each colony of Seton Bricelli
Speaker 1: i kills and eats about thirty thousands small animals every day. Wow,
Speaker 1: thirty every single day. Uh. And so they have this
Speaker 1: carnivorous diet, this enormous carnivorous diet that is especially important
Speaker 1: because they're trying to supply the developing larvae of their
Speaker 1: colony with a high fat diet that the larvae need
Speaker 1: in order to grow, so that the babies need animal
Speaker 1: fat and the adults go out rating. So there's another
Speaker 1: really interesting thing about this species to me, which is
Speaker 1: that they do not make permanent nests. Seton Brichelli I
Speaker 1: do not make permanent nests. We often think of ant
Speaker 1: colonies as defined by their nests, right the ant hills
Speaker 1: answer environmental engineers. But due to the energy needs of
Speaker 1: this species, they can't be tied down to one place
Speaker 1: for too long. Imagine them trying to form a permanent
Speaker 1: nest while their larvae are growing and they have these
Speaker 1: huge require months for animal fat, you know, other insects
Speaker 1: to bring in and all that. Within a day or
Speaker 1: two they probably would have cleared out all of the
Speaker 1: food sources within I don't know, maybe a few hundred
Speaker 1: square meters of wherever they are. So instead, Esseton Bricelli
Speaker 1: I builds a mobile fortress known as a bivouac. This
Speaker 1: is a moving fortress that protects the queen and the
Speaker 1: developing larvae. But the fortress is made not out of
Speaker 1: structures or materials from the environment. It is made out
Speaker 1: of ants. Do you see Do you understand? It is
Speaker 1: a war rig four ants made out of the interlocked
Speaker 1: bodies of living ants, like a cage of millions of legs, antennae,
Speaker 1: and mandibles. I want to quote from Peter Tyson, writing
Speaker 1: for Nova in an article about these things, quote this
Speaker 1: elliptical mass talking about the bivouac. This elliptical mass maybe
Speaker 1: three feet across and hold up to seven hundred thousand ants.
Speaker 1: When they need to move to a new site where
Speaker 1: they bivouac on the surface, rather than build a nest,
Speaker 1: eber Chellii workers go first ferrying food and larvae. Only
Speaker 1: after nightfall does the queen follow escorted by a massive
Speaker 1: soldier ants that completely surround her and will defend her
Speaker 1: with their lives. So the bivouac again, is this moving fortress.
Speaker 1: The queen is inside and the cage cannot be breached.
Speaker 1: Uh this this was just so captivating to me. And
Speaker 1: so if you're looking for these things in the forest,
Speaker 1: the bivouac can sometimes be found inside a hollow log
Speaker 1: or just on the forest floor, but also sometimes it
Speaker 1: can be found hanging suspended from tree limbs. Imagine that
Speaker 1: like a dangling fortress for ants made out of ants,
Speaker 1: and it falls in line with a more general tendency
Speaker 1: of some ant species, including this one, toward body based
Speaker 1: engineering projects. These army ants are also known to say,
Speaker 1: assist the mobility of their horses by filling in potholes
Speaker 1: along the foraging route with plugs made out of live ants,
Speaker 1: so you just smooth over, smooth over the surface with ants,
Speaker 1: or also for building bridges out of themselves to allow
Speaker 1: the rest of the army to cross gaps. And apparently
Speaker 1: these BiVO wax also uh emit an other worldly stinch,
Speaker 1: this amazing smell that allows you to locate them by
Speaker 1: smell alone. Within the rainforest. I would love to know
Speaker 1: what this smells like. You Now, all of this is
Speaker 1: a wonderful example two of the super organism aspects of ants.
Speaker 1: How with other creatures we we we we talk about
Speaker 1: the individual, you know, and in terms of understanding the species.
Speaker 1: But but with ants, you look at behaviors like this
Speaker 1: and you see there's such cohesion, there's there's there's such
Speaker 1: use social um perfection that you can't look at an
Speaker 1: individual ant to understand them. You have to look at
Speaker 1: what the pliny itself is doing. But there's another thing
Speaker 1: I was thinking about with this model of ant life,
Speaker 1: the fact that these ants create no permanent nests. It
Speaker 1: sort of reminds me of the idea of the strategic
Speaker 1: advantage of offense. You know, the old saying that the
Speaker 1: best defense is a good offense. This is actually considered
Speaker 1: true in some cases in military theory, because the reasoning
Speaker 1: goes that when you're on the attack, you have freedom. Basically,
Speaker 1: you like, as you're on the attack, you are creating
Speaker 1: options for yourself, versus when you're defending, you have constraints,
Speaker 1: you have limited options. This is often true just for
Speaker 1: example in chess. Uh you know the chess players talk
Speaker 1: about the initiative that you gain when you're on the attack.
Speaker 1: You're constantly limiting the options for your opponents next move
Speaker 1: if they have to defend their pieces against an attack
Speaker 1: that you just set up. And this is obviously true
Speaker 1: across multiple context It's known as maintaining the initiative. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously there are there are many uh, there are many
Speaker 1: advantages you can get from having a defensive structure, like
Speaker 1: a nest that's buried down in the ground. You know,
Speaker 1: the queen is very well protected, but that also limits
Speaker 1: your options, right and and this is sort of the
Speaker 1: all offense strategy of the ant world. Well, it seems
Speaker 1: to be working well for them. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: like they busted this strategy out of on a test basis.
Speaker 1: This has been honed over for millions of years. So
Speaker 1: there's another thing that I was thinking about because I
Speaker 1: was thinking about warfare and Game of Thrones, and one
Speaker 1: thing I like that's acknowledged in those books is sort
Speaker 1: of like the real resource needs of moving armies. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not like a lot of fantasy where it's just
Speaker 1: sort of like uh, almost ethereal warriors just ranging limitlessly
Speaker 1: to do their heroic deeds, you know, I mean, like
Speaker 1: you get the idea in those books that like, our
Speaker 1: armies need supplies and all that. And and also it's
Speaker 1: acknowledged that there are huge numbers of people that a
Speaker 1: company armies that are not themselves warriors. These are known
Speaker 1: as camp followers, and this is absolutely something that that
Speaker 1: happens in real warfare. Large armies don't operate in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: They have material needs that are not necessarily related to battle,
Speaker 1: and they also create needs and opportunities for resource capture
Speaker 1: as they move and fight. And this this is why
Speaker 1: armies on campaign or historically a company both by camp
Speaker 1: followers that you know, might like sell things to soldiers
Speaker 1: or might be family members of soldiers, or sell services
Speaker 1: to soldiers, um, that kind of thing. But there are
Speaker 1: also often bandits that follow around moving armies because you know,
Speaker 1: when an army comes in and attacks somewhere, disturbs the
Speaker 1: existing order, that creates a lot of opportunities to exploit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's an absolute disruption, so it makes sense
Speaker 1: that opportunists would be there to take advantage of it.
Speaker 1: And I agree, I think this is something that that
Speaker 1: that that is well explored in the Song of Ice
Speaker 1: and Fire books, the idea of of war that just
Speaker 1: you know, ravages the countryside in so many ways, like
Speaker 1: it just just totally destroys all the resources in the area. Um.
Speaker 1: I think I think they probably, I think they probably
Speaker 1: brought this out well in this series to to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, especially early one. Yeah, I mean towards the
Speaker 1: end of that those human wars like West Ross is
Speaker 1: just decimated and just tired and exhausted. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: And I mean it reflects reality that that the war
Speaker 1: is not just a clash between armies, but it's the
Speaker 1: sort of the army versus the entire environment and everyone
Speaker 1: living within it. And I think this is in some
Speaker 1: ways very true, Uh for ants as well. I was
Speaker 1: reading a really good article. Uh it was a short article,
Speaker 1: but a good one in that GEO by the always
Speaker 1: great ed young Um that was focused on work by
Speaker 1: Carl and Marian retten Meyer. I mentioned them a minute ago.
Speaker 1: These are ant experts who created it a nearly exhaustive
Speaker 1: catalog of all of the animals that follow the army
Speaker 1: ant species seton Bercellia. So these are the camp followers
Speaker 1: in the bandits that accompany this army uh, Ed writes, quote,
Speaker 1: there's no doubting their success as predators, but army ants
Speaker 1: also bring life wherever they march. They have an entourage
Speaker 1: of over five hundred and fifty species that hang around
Speaker 1: their legions, of which three hundred or so depend on
Speaker 1: the ants for their survival. So in their disruption of
Speaker 1: of the environment around them, they are also creating enough
Speaker 1: opportunities for the exploitation of resources that a full like
Speaker 1: three hundred or so species couldn't live without these ants,
Speaker 1: and another two hundred something or so uh depend on
Speaker 1: them in large ways. Wow, that's impressive. You know, I
Speaker 1: hadn't really thought about it. We talked about the ecological
Speaker 1: importance of the hants um and uh and this is
Speaker 1: just another example of that. Yeah, so this includes like
Speaker 1: two hundred or so species of bird. One example is
Speaker 1: the oscillated ant bird. There are a number of antbirds
Speaker 1: ants as they as they move along the army ants
Speaker 1: will flush insects out of hiding. They'll flush out insects, arachnids,
Speaker 1: small invertebrates, and and so the ant birds will watch
Speaker 1: this happen and swoop in and take advantage of the
Speaker 1: fleeing animals. Uh, they actually almost never prey on the
Speaker 1: ants themselves, And so the antbirds will fly around the
Speaker 1: forest checking in on seething bivouacs. Right they perform a
Speaker 1: bivouac check, they're like, okay, is this bivouac about to march?
Speaker 1: And if it looks like one is about to get
Speaker 1: the war rig ready and send its workers out on raids,
Speaker 1: and the birds will converge here and start looking for opportunities. Apparently,
Speaker 1: the ant birds will fight amongst each other for the
Speaker 1: best spots. Of course, the best spot would basically be
Speaker 1: positioned just beyond the advancing front to catch all of
Speaker 1: the panic prey animals as soon as they're driven out
Speaker 1: of hiding. Interesting. You know, I wonder if anyone's ever
Speaker 1: tackled this from a sci fi perspective. You know, we're
Speaker 1: we're always encountering situations in sci fi where humanity is
Speaker 1: locked in a you know, an epic strup will struggle
Speaker 1: against some alien adversary or there or they've been partially
Speaker 1: wiped out by an alien adversary. I wonder if anyone's
Speaker 1: ever explored the idea of of, you know, the alien
Speaker 1: force comes that decimates the planet. You end up with
Speaker 1: like a post apocalyptic scenario. But then the primary antagonist
Speaker 1: is not the destroyer because the destroyers moved on. It's
Speaker 1: the opportunists to come in their wake, right, the ant
Speaker 1: birds and the scavengers that come in after Earth has
Speaker 1: been Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that would be an
Speaker 1: interesting thing. I've never read anything like that, but I
Speaker 1: bet somebody has tried that idea. Yeah. Well, if they have,
Speaker 1: someone tell me what it is. And if it doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: somebody write it so I can read it. You know.
Speaker 1: Another interesting thing about these ant birds at young points
Speaker 1: out is that on top of them existing as as
Speaker 1: sort of opportunists in what the ants do, there are
Speaker 1: secondary opportunists. And these are are a lot of species
Speaker 1: of butterflies that follow the ant birds to feed off
Speaker 1: of their droppings after they have preyed on the insects
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: worms watching for the ants to drive crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches,
Speaker 1: and other critters out of hiding, and then the parasites
Speaker 1: take immediate advantage at young sites caladoxia flies, but also
Speaker 1: quote stylo gaster flies which shoot harpoon like eggs at
Speaker 1: fleeing cockroaches, and and flesh flies that lay their eggs
Speaker 1: in the open wounds of animals that have been injured
Speaker 1: but not dismembered by the ants. Oh wow, So in
Speaker 1: some cases, not being killed by the ant horde um
Speaker 1: is war worse than actually being decimated. About it, well,
Speaker 1: I guess it depends on what you think is worse.
Speaker 1: I mean, is it worse to be injured by ants
Speaker 1: and then get maggots implanted in you, or just to
Speaker 1: be killed just to be disassembled out right? Yeah? Even
Speaker 1: more amazingly, some parasites actually live within the ant bivouax themselves,
Speaker 1: having various adaptations. We've talked about aunt mimics before. There
Speaker 1: are apparently some species like this, like beetles, that survived
Speaker 1: by mimicking ants and just sort of like hanging out
Speaker 1: among the ants trying to be undetected. But this was
Speaker 1: my favorite part ed. Young writes that some parasites quote
Speaker 1: use the ants as mobile restaurants, jumping onto workers that
Speaker 1: are carrying food and eating their booty right under or
Speaker 1: over their very jaws. So they hang out on the
Speaker 1: ant head, eating the food that the ant is carrying. Again,
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of species this would require
Speaker 1: very special adaptations or you know, you would immediately become
Speaker 1: prey yourself. But it's just amazing to imagine the tiny,
Speaker 1: like full ecosystems basically that are made possible by the
Speaker 1: opportunities created by the chaos of a rating army. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in a way, you kind of have to come back
Speaker 1: to that that analogy of the superorganism, right, that the
Speaker 1: the ant colony is what we might think of as
Speaker 1: the individual, Like the ant colony is the body, and
Speaker 1: so it is going to have its own parasites, It's
Speaker 1: going to have its own uh symbiotic relationships and uh
Speaker 1: and and that's kind of what we're seeing here. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think this is just the most astonishing species. I
Speaker 1: feel like maybe we're not even done with with with Ston.
Speaker 1: We can move on in this episode, but but we
Speaker 1: may have to come back to them in the future.
Speaker 1: All right, and that note, we're going to take a
Speaker 1: quick break, but when we come back, we will consider
Speaker 1: the marauder ants. All Right, we're back. So we've already
Speaker 1: talked some about ant species that are referred to as
Speaker 1: the marauder ants. You read a passage from one of
Speaker 1: those articles by Martin W. Moffatt about marauder ants. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Moffatt points out that marauder ants excel in deploying troops
Speaker 1: in ways that increase efficiency and reduce the cost to
Speaker 1: a colony. And one thing that really makes them interesting, uh,
Speaker 1: is their variety in sizes among the workers. They vary
Speaker 1: in size more than workers in any other ant colony.
Speaker 1: So this is where it gets interesting in a sort
Speaker 1: of war game point of view manner, because essentially we're
Speaker 1: getting into different unit types here. So if you're fielding droids,
Speaker 1: for instance, on on on in a battle, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: doing clone wars here. You're not. You're not just busting
Speaker 1: out a ton of standard B one battle droids, right,
Speaker 1: you're also busting out B two super heavy battle droids
Speaker 1: or heavy weapon uh droid ecka droidka um roly poly guy.
Speaker 1: If you're playing something like Warhammer, forty thousand. It's not
Speaker 1: just space marines. You're also busting out specialized assault marines
Speaker 1: or heavy terminators, that sort of thing. And so Moffatt
Speaker 1: points out that the marauders deploy smaller miners, uh that's
Speaker 1: what we call them, or foot soldiers, to the front
Speaker 1: line and there these are just weak and hopeless, uh
Speaker 1: individuals against adversaries. But there are tons of them, so
Speaker 1: they work as a kind of barricade. They bogged down
Speaker 1: the enemy long enough for larger ants to move in
Speaker 1: the media's and the majors. So again, same species, same
Speaker 1: essentially um variety of this ant, but it's like a
Speaker 1: it's a different cast, radically different body forms. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: of these individuals print the majors compared to the miners.
Speaker 1: They are five hundred times as heavy as the smaller version.
Speaker 1: So these are real bruisers, I mean, these are these
Speaker 1: are monsters. Uh. My initial impulse would be to compare
Speaker 1: these like strictly to larger um you know, bruiser heavy
Speaker 1: class fighters and fantasy armies, like I'm thinking about some
Speaker 1: of the big specialized trolls and the armies of Mordor.
Speaker 1: But but then I was thinking about it. I was
Speaker 1: like looking at the size deferential here, and Okay, let's
Speaker 1: assume that an orc, or say a stormtrooper, uh is
Speaker 1: roughly the average weight of a human. If we're to
Speaker 1: multiply that by five hundred, you're talking thirty four tons.
Speaker 1: So in the real world, that's essentially the difference between
Speaker 1: a human and a humpback whale. Okay, so that's crazy.
Speaker 1: Even even the troll would not really capture the size
Speaker 1: difference appropriately. Yeah, Like I ended up going down a
Speaker 1: rabbit hole trying to figure out how heavy different fantasy
Speaker 1: and sci fi army vehicles and units were. And it's
Speaker 1: best I can tell based on some fan estimates. You
Speaker 1: might draw a comparison here between a single Imperial stormtrooper
Speaker 1: and one of those two legged a t ST walkers.
Speaker 1: That would be the difference between a Marauder minor aunt
Speaker 1: and a Marauder major aunt. This is what Mafata writes.
Speaker 1: Quote the miners sacrifices on the front. Ryans assure a
Speaker 1: low mortality for the media's and the majors, which require
Speaker 1: far more resources for the colony to raise and men maintain.
Speaker 1: Putting the easily replaced fighters at greatest risk is a
Speaker 1: time honored battle technique. So, in other words, stormtroopers are
Speaker 1: notoriously bad shots, and they are apparently easily replaced, But
Speaker 1: you'r a T S T S. Those are far more precious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that will they cost more to make? Yeah. Mafata also
Speaker 1: points out that the marauders tactics here line up with
Speaker 1: the example one season armies throughout history the use of
Speaker 1: conscripted farmers and laborers alongside elite professional soldiers, with the
Speaker 1: common soldiers absorbing the worst of it while the elite
Speaker 1: units are protected and move in at strategic intervals. He
Speaker 1: also points out that marauders use what is known in
Speaker 1: military strategy as defeat in detail tactics, defeating an enemy
Speaker 1: 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 in 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: tactics 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. Keep
Speaker 1: coming back to the fantasy warfare now. 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 disparities. Generally,
Speaker 1: the main disparities are going to be individual unit effectiveness,
Speaker 1: so like how much damage each unit can do, and
Speaker 1: then also the numbers of combatants on either side. Lanchester's
Speaker 1: square law in particular shows that in some types of combat.
Speaker 1: This is not all conflicts, but in some types of combat,
Speaker 1: for example shooting wars involving masses of soldiers armed with
Speaker 1: rifles that can aim in any direction. In these types
Speaker 1: of combat, there are ways of organizing confrontations majorly to
Speaker 1: your advantage. Just just based on the numbers of forces
Speaker 1: and how they're grouped specifically, that the main takeaway is
Speaker 1: don't split your forces. Um So to illustrate this, you
Speaker 1: can imagine, say you've got battle droids in in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: and say maybe one side has a hundred battle droids
Speaker 1: and the other side has exactly a hundred battle droids
Speaker 1: as well. If you imagine each of the battle droids
Speaker 1: can shoot its blaster one time every second, and each
Speaker 1: shot has a chance of destroying its target, you can
Speaker 1: work out that after one second of battle, both forces
Speaker 1: will be reduced equally by about maybe after another second, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And it just goes on as the two sides decreased
Speaker 1: by attrition at roughly the same rate, until both armies
Speaker 1: are mostly are fully vanquished at around the same time,
Speaker 1: unless for some reason one side gets an advantage early on.
Speaker 1: But that kind of process does not scale in a
Speaker 1: linear way. So if you have say a hundred droids
Speaker 1: versus an opponents at general grievous is your opposing army
Speaker 1: and he's just got fifty droids, you you probably can
Speaker 1: assume that the larger force will win, but you might
Speaker 1: not understand how much of an advantage the larger force has.
Speaker 1: So if if you have the know the same kind
Speaker 1: of thing working, after the first second, your hundred droids
Speaker 1: will probably have destroyed roughly half of your opponent's fifty droids,
Speaker 1: but they really will not have destroyed many of yours
Speaker 1: at all, maybe only like twelve or so. And as
Speaker 1: each second of battle goes on, you reduce their fighting
Speaker 1: effectiveness more and more, until what you're left with in
Speaker 1: the end is very little casualties to the larger army
Speaker 1: and total decimation of the smaller one. And so this shows,
Speaker 1: for example, that if you have a force of a
Speaker 1: hundred battle droids, it would be much easier for that
Speaker 1: those one hundred battle droids to win two consecutive battles
Speaker 1: against fifty battle droids than to win one single battle
Speaker 1: against a force of one hundred. And this is exactly
Speaker 1: why divide and conquer is such an important principle of warfare.
Speaker 1: If you break your enemy up into smaller groupings with
Speaker 1: these certain types of combat, your advantage over them does
Speaker 1: not increase linearly, it multiplied by the square uh. In fact,
Speaker 1: if you choose your battles wisely, you can even use
Speaker 1: this to allow a smaller force to beat a bigger one.
Speaker 1: So if you've got a hundred battle droids, general Grievas
Speaker 1: has two hundred, you could still potentially beat him overall
Speaker 1: by keeping your forces together and peeling off small segments
Speaker 1: of like ten or twenty at a time to face sequentially,
Speaker 1: with negligible losses to your own forces each time. So
Speaker 1: this is again where we come back to defeat in
Speaker 1: detail exactly right. So, in mathematical terms, what Lanchester predicted
Speaker 1: was that in these certain types of scenarios, uh, the
Speaker 1: strength of a group on the battlefield is the product
Speaker 1: of two things. The effectiveness of each fighting unit not
Speaker 1: times the number of units, but times the square of
Speaker 1: the number of units. And that's why it's known as
Speaker 1: the square law. And it tells you that for certain
Speaker 1: types of combat, sheer numbers can easily overwhelm differences in
Speaker 1: the effectiveness of individual fighting units. And it's interesting how
Speaker 1: this tends to go against what seems to be people's
Speaker 1: desire to understand like dramatic violent conflict in narratives like
Speaker 1: in you know, epic poetry and action movies and all that,
Speaker 1: where it seems like what people or at least what
Speaker 1: authors think people want to see. Uh is the idea
Speaker 1: that a single highly effective combatant you know, you're John
Speaker 1: Wick or whoever, can overcome many less effective enemies ganging
Speaker 1: up on them. And for many types of combat, this
Speaker 1: is not how real fighting actually works. Numbers are significantly
Speaker 1: more important than skills, Like better to have five hundred
Speaker 1: off brand discount battle droids than fifty elite i G units. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it it. It certainly does run run counter to our
Speaker 1: our our epic storytelling. Yeah, where it's like a one
Speaker 1: rag tag group of talented individuals can can can turn
Speaker 1: the tide of battle against against the faceless hord. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And we should not 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 law scenarios instead. One example would be like
Speaker 1: using natural terrain or fortifications to create choke points where
Speaker 1: the majority of the enemy forces are held back from
Speaker 1: the action. That can't all fight you at once, the
Speaker 1: number of them that can fight you at the same
Speaker 1: time is limited by topography, and thus the battle becomes
Speaker 1: it starts to resemble something more like a series of
Speaker 1: sequential duels instead of a simultaneous war of all against all.
Speaker 1: And of course examples of this in history. Or you
Speaker 1: know the way the thing about the way castles are constructed,
Speaker 1: narrow passageways, uh, you know, natural ravines, bridges, gates, a
Speaker 1: spiral staircase in the castle tower. These tend to reduce
Speaker 1: the salience of the square law advantage and help you out,
Speaker 1: especially if you've got a smaller number of more effective fighters. So,
Speaker 1: to bring this back to ants, the question here is
Speaker 1: which of these models is better at predicting the outcomes
Speaker 1: of ant wars. Is it the linear model where there's
Speaker 1: this direct linear relationship between the size of forces and
Speaker 1: the outcome, or is it the square model where the
Speaker 1: larger numbers of concentrated forces just easily overwhelm other concerns
Speaker 1: like the like individual fighting unit effectiveness. UH. There was
Speaker 1: a paper that was published in the nineteen nineties and
Speaker 1: the journal Animal Behavior. This was in nine by Mary E. A.
Speaker 1: White how House in Klaus Jaffa called ant Wars Combat
Speaker 1: Strategies Territory and Nest Defense in the leaf cutting ant
Speaker 1: Atta leave Agatta And according to their research, they found
Speaker 1: quote the leaf cutting ant atta leave Agata responded to
Speaker 1: a simulated vertebrate threat by recruiting many soldiers, and the
Speaker 1: soldiers would be a special special fighters large workers, but
Speaker 1: responded to con specific and interspecific ant threats by recruiting
Speaker 1: mainly small ants. So the vertebrate attack here was simulated
Speaker 1: pretty much by poking a stick and you know, as
Speaker 1: they poke a stick into the entrance of the colony
Speaker 1: nest and then shake it for twenty seconds. And this
Speaker 1: was meant to mimic the mechanical disturbance that would be
Speaker 1: caused by an ants by the ant's main predator, the armadillo.
Speaker 1: In these attacks, what the ants would tend to do
Speaker 1: is they would bring more of their elite fighters to
Speaker 1: defend the nest, So in this situation it appears evolution
Speaker 1: maybe favoring the linear reasoning in this case. Meanwhile, when
Speaker 1: the ants are attacked by other ants, they tended to
Speaker 1: respond instead with overwhelming numbers of less dedicated fighters. So
Speaker 1: a threat from arrival ant colony seems to have been
Speaker 1: solved by natural selection to select for behaviors motivated by
Speaker 1: the square law. Along these lines, Mofa also points out
Speaker 1: the quote a fighter's value to its colony bears on
Speaker 1: 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 that the old stay and fight, while
Speaker 1: the very young runaway and and firemants more in their
Speaker 1: prime will actually uh fake their own deaths. Wow, we'll
Speaker 1: fake their own deaths. I mean, this is again something
Speaker 1: that makes more sense if you think about the ant
Speaker 1: colony as a single superorganism. It's like it's it's putting
Speaker 1: the the already day imaged or less effective parts of
Speaker 1: itself out in front to absorb the brunt of the
Speaker 1: of the violence. Yeah, alright, So at this point you're
Speaker 1: you're you're probably thinking, oh my goodness, they're out of time,
Speaker 1: and you you would be right, just as the Aunt
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
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