Ologies with Alie Ward - Myrmecology (ANTS) Encore with Dr. Terry McGlynn

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

You have ants. We all have ants, but do we KNOW ants? Get ready for cult-leader queens, bullet ant stings, kitchen pest hacks, the dynamics of a billion-sister megacolony. Dr. Terry McGlynn sits down to have a BIG discussion about itty-bitty creatures in this encore because I was out of town seeing my family and just needed a week off. Learn about tropical ants, urban ants, how they walk on water, which ones are picky eaters, which ones make weird sounds, what ant movies are bunk, and some help-help takeaways. Also: sniffing your relatives before deciding to kill them. Ooooh, it’s a classic. Dr. Terry McGlynn's website and TwitterA donation went to the SEEDS Field Trip fundMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, okay, quick heads up, this is an Encore episode because I went to visit my parents this weekend, had a lovely time, and I just straight up needed to put up an Encore because I'm still working hilariously on the ADHD episode. And you know what, we've done 250 episodes and maybe like five or six Encore's. So there's plenty to choose from, and ants.

Oh, let's do it. I love this one. I love thisologist, and everyone has ants, but now you'll know the ants that you have. Also, the most swearing done by anyologist, perhaps ever, but in an educational way. Okay. Oh, hey, it's your grandma's new boyfriend who just wants to show you some magic tricks.

Allie Ward, back with another episode. Apologies. So it's Tuesday, man. Let's learn about some ants. They're tiny, they're mighty, they're harmless, sometimes not. And they're more organized than all of the clowns on your slack thread. But you know what, maybe you don't want to see thousands of tiny ladies having an all-night rave

in your cereal pantry, but to quote common parlance, can a bitch live? Let's learn about these little creatures, and more importantly, let's suck some self-help and organizational strategies out of them with a miraclecologist, which is a word you only know about if you're a miraclecologist. But first, pre-usual, you know the drill,

I say thank you to people who let me keep the podcast going. All the patrons at patreon.com slash oligies who pay a buck or more a month. And as always, thank you to the folks who say, you know what, this pod is worth mashing the star button on the iTunes app and maybe leaving a review for Dad Ward to creep in the night when she feels lonesome and then read aloud to you to prove that I read them.

And I picked a brand new fresh one, February 1st, 2022, people. I went in and I put it in here. I don't slack even when I'm slacking. So thank you HBXCS for leaving this review titled The Metric. I frequently compare new podcasts to oligies to determine how good they are. This podcast is simply the best. Thank you for saying that,

which reminds me that we do need a metrology episode about measurements. So thank you to everyone who left a review, though, including you, the amazing Hufflepuff, I read all of yours. Okay, mermicology. I said that all strung out like a line of ants. Did you like it? Good. Okay, so I'm writing this before looking up the etymology.

I'm just going to say, I wrote this before I looked it up. I took a wild guess that it was Greek for ant. Hold on, I googled it. Damn it, I'm right. But it wasn't coined until 1906 when naturalist William Morton Wheeler was like, dang it, I love ants. I need a title that sounds like a wizard.

So he took Merma and put mecologist. There you go, mermicologist done. Now, thisologist, I had followed on Twitter for months and months and months and months, and our schedules never quite aligned to do an episode. And finally, he was back from the rainforest on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was so excited to sit down and chat.

So he spends part of his time in the rainforest of Costa Rica studying tropical ants and is also a biology professor at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills, which has over 10,000 students, 70% of whom are first generation college students. I think that is awesome. Now, the result of this is a whole nest of facts

about invasive species and colony communications and the bizarre genetics of queen ants and why army ants are your new squad and what it really, really, really feels like, like for real, to get stung by a bullet ant. Is it that bad? And what we can learn about our own strength and work ethic from these lovely ladies and some dudes

we call ants. So get ready, make a beeline, make an ant line for this chat with mere macologist Dr. Terry McGlynn. Yes. Did I say it right? Mermicologist. Mermicologist. I think, well, like all these words,

there's no proper way of saying it. It's just the ones that are socially acceptable among people who do. So you can't say a word wrong, you just say a word different than other people say. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. How long have you been a mermicologist?

I started working on ants in 1994 when I started grad school. So a minute. Yeah, so that's a couple decades, right? Couple decades of ants not literally under your belt in your pants, but just in your life. So what was it about ants? So I realized, okay, this is the one question

that I knew you're going to ask. Why did you work on ants? Right. When I was in college, I started as a psychology, philosophy, double major. And then I ended up being like pre-med, although I mean, I even interviewed at med school, took the MCAT, the whole thing.

I have no idea why. But then I had this epiphany when I was flying home for my first med school interview and I'm like, this is not what I want to do. These people are not my people. I don't want to do that for a living. And the whole time in college, I was taking all these courses about organizational biology,

ecology, evolution, conservation. I was auditing a class in insect biology. And I was like, well, that's what I think is really cool, actually. So before getting his PhD in Colorado, Terry majored in biology for undergrad at Occidental College, Obama's alma mater here in LA. And when he was thinking about grad school,

he was considering Europe and he ended up interviewing with a Swiss professor who studied ants. He even flew out to interview the first time he'd ever left the country. Now, in the end, he didn't study at that lab, but the experience of emailing back and forth with this Swiss dude unveiled the tiny, wonderful world of mermicology.

And it seemed really, really, really cool. And so after that, I decided, wow, I want to work on the evolution of social behavior in insects and answer, you know, use social insects, ants that have this colonial lifestyle. Now, let's unpack this really quick. Do you think having an interest in social science and philosophy plus a little biology interest,

like those were married perfectly in a social insect? Maybe, because I think my interest originally, like, you know, the angsty teenager that just went to college or interested in, well, what makes us human? I was wondering, and I still wonder, like, how is it that we are, wait, we are, that we, you know, they think we feel, we love, we perceive,

but we are just mere meat. Like, we are just somehow this tissue of our brain is what we are. I mean, that's just amazing to me that everything that we experience is that meat. And it still is amazing to me. And I think I wanted to study that and I realized I don't think neurobiology was there

or is there yet to do that. So, quick aside, at first, I thought he was saying mere me as in, like, merely myself, but I think he's saying mere meat, like, that we're meat, which is so much more metal. What a metal way to look at our delicate existence, I approve. And so, I think what fascinates me about ants is if you just look at it at a different level of organization,

like, what is an organism? What is a super organism? What is an ant colony? How do you have something which is so, well, organized out of small pieces that are really, really dumb? So many ants right now are sipping oat milk cartados over the Economist, just being like, wow, wow, really? Right.

Ants are really stupid, but colonies often do complex tasks really well. I mean, they have small little brains. Walk me through a little bit of a colony because we had an episode on malatology bees, and so we've covered some social insects, but what are those similarities between bees and ants? Are they all mostly women?

Are they all, like, driven by pheromones or behavior or vision? Like, what's going on down there? Yeah, so all kinds of bees are complex, just like all kinds of ants are complex. So the way that honey bees organize the division of labor, and so that thing where you do one task, then you get promoted to another task, then you get promoted to another task,

that's called the temporal polyethism. So that means at different times you do different things, like your chores as a kid may have gone from feeding the cat to doing the laundry, to driving your siblings to school. Now, if your kids don't think you're enough of a douche, tell them that it's imperative that they engage in temporal polytheism to acquire their weekly stipend. That way they can talk about you to a therapist later in life.

However, some ants might be more inclined to perform some tasks rather than others. Some ants are more generalist, some are highly specialized. Whoa, so there's, like, engineer ants and, like, architect ants, and once they're like, you know what, guys? I'm, like, pretty good at finding seeds, so I'm just gonna do that. Sorta.

But if you were to remove some ants from the colony or add some from ants in the colony, they might change their tasks. So some ants have broad variety in body sizes. So, for instance, in leaf cutter ants, you have these huge, huge ones with these big heads. They're used for chopping stems and defending the colony for, like, when vertebrates attack.

And you have these tiny, tiny little ants that might tend the fungal garden and ride on the leaves. And so the way that the polymorphic ants divide labor and the way that monomorphic ants divide labor is different. Is a little different? Yeah. Now, what is your work like day to day? Do you, here's what I picture.

Tell me if I'm wrong. I picture that you work in a lab and it's full of aquariums that are just big, writhing balls of ants. And you also have a clipboard and maybe a lab coat. And then sometimes you're in the fields with a magnifying glass. Is any of that correct? No. Okay, just checking.

So I think my average workday is probably not that different from yours, which is like I'm sitting in front of a laptop. Okay. Or I'm standing at my desk or whatever. And so in the lab, I have a bunch of ants, a ton of ants, but they're all dead. Oh my God. Okay.

Are they organized into like a little tiny pins or are they just in like shoeboxes? So I have them in vials and these vials would be packaged in racks and these racks are on shelves. Okay. And so, so like if, you know, visiting a museum, then there's all these ants that are, you know, mounting in collections in pins.

And so we, when we mount ants in museum collections, you glue them onto the tip of a little point and put the pin through that. So you can look at them because if you put the pin through the ant, then it messes them up. So you, yeah, that'd be like, that'd be like, oh, we just put a missile through alley. Like that's not, you can't do that to an ant, they're too tiny.

Yeah. Well, even the really, really big chunky ants that you could kind of do that to by convention, we don't. Okay. I keep most of mine just sitting in alcohol from the way I collected them. And most of the ants that I've collected are whole colonies. Oh.

But these whole colonies are really, really tiny ones. They, like the, they would easily fit inside a thimble. Like they would occupy like a two milliliter tube with tons of space available. You mean a whole colony is like 200 rows or ladies? Yeah. Like, well, it depends. I mean, so some colonies will just have like 10 or 20 or 30 ants.

And some might have hundreds, but even for these tiny little ones that I work with on the leaf litter of the rainforest floor, the ants themselves are so tiny that a colony of a couple hundred ants will still fit into a tiny little tube. That's crazy. Because these are unspeakably tiny. How did you get involved with the tiniest ants? Were you like, I have great vision.

Ergo, I will work with the tiny ants. No? Uh, well, no, as actually, and so now I just started wearing like the progressive lenses. Hey. Uh, so it's like, uh, so when I'm out in the field with students, like they're seeing things that I literally cannot see. Microscopic micro machine.

Micro machines, a micro machine pocket place that's sold separately from Golube. The smaller they are, the better they are. So for his dissertation, Terry worked with Huasmenia aropunctata. I don't know if I'm saying that right. So let's just call them little fire ants because that's their name. Unless you're from Downanda. Although in Australia, they call it the electric ant. And these ants are like a couple of millimeters long.

And so really, really tiny. And if they sting you, it feels like a little pink prick. And, um, which is amazing. Something that tall can actually smoke and hurt you. I know. Most ants are really tiny. A lot of them are just that small. I'm so little.

Like smaller than the ones that we see, uh, trying to eat like a watermelon rind on the countertop. Right. Yeah. So here in LA, the ones that you have, I don't know if you get them in your place, but, uh, the Argentine ants, people think of the, that's a common invasive species found in Mediterranean climates or whatnot. The one that was taking over my kitchen last week. Oh no.

Oh my God. What did you do because you're like a godfather to them? Did you commit mass anticide? Yeah. Well, actually, uh, I wiped off the ones off the counter. No. How dare you. But, but then I just blocked the entrance off. So it's not like I need to, I wasn't trying to kill them all off.

I just kept them from getting in. So like, I have like, you know, the cock gun ready to go and I keep finding a new space where they, so it's like the evolutionary arms race is them finding new ways to get in me caulking that spot. So now that is one thing you can do if you don't want to just like send in a poisoned cake and be like, kill off your whole colony. That's a nice thing to do. So side note, as a college sophomore, I lived in my first house with friends.

Everyone was pretty goth and got along, but one of my roommates was very, very stony baloney, like a lot, which was so endearing. And we had an ant infestation and he told me all about these things called grants ant sticks. They're these baits that you soak in hot water and then you set out. And he explained to me like this. Like, all right, okay, like if you were so hungry, right, and you found like 20 pizzas and you took them to your friends

and you were like, shit, you guys pizzas, this rules. Never was like, was best. And then put the pizzas like poisoned everyone. It's like so tight. I've never forgotten this tutorial and I'll be honest. I have used these ant baits every time I've had an infestation and I felt so bad about it. Like I'm the villain in their action movie, but it does work for a while.

Tight. Yeah, but it's also really, really, that's only going to be a short-term solution anyway. Because even if you get the toxic bait that they'll take and bring back, which, you know, could be effective. But the thing is, that's going to kill them off for a while. But eventually there's going to be some that are just moving back because you can't eliminate ants from the entire neighborhood. And the way these, it's essentially, you know, for the most part,

it's like one big whole colony, super colony all throughout the LA area. No. Yeah. Wait a minute. Okay. So these Argentinian ants, which are invasive and they're the tiny, like not tiny, but they're the small little black ones that invade your kitchen. Yeah.

I know that they kind of have outpaced harvester ants, which are the bigger kind of like a amber-y color ones that live in the hills, right? Yeah, which people call red ants. Yeah, the harvester ants, yeah. But they're, it just kind of spans one big colony under the city. For the most part, or occupying the whole city. This blew my mind. If your friend moves 10 miles away in LA, you will never see each other again.

Like Burbank to WeHo, that is a forever goodbye. Just move on. But for ants, they're all essentially roommates. The Argentine ants, the little ones that are invasive species, but have like pretty lax dietary tastes, they'll eat almost anything. They have a California colony that stretches 560 miles, which is nothing compared to one colony in Southern Europe. 3700 miles big, billions of sisters.

So it's no wonder that the harvester ants, with their kind of picky diet of locally harvested seeds, are getting smoked by their Argentine relatives. The last I know, there's one big super colony. So if we were to get ants in one part of LA, and move them to another part of LA, they'll be like, hey, sister, how's it going? And accept them just like the members of the same colony.

Wow, that's so weird. And so if you were to grab ants and put them in a vial, and then go like 100 miles, 200 miles, either they'll get along or they don't. And if they don't, that means that you've hit a new super colony. And you can tell where the border between the super colonies is, because there's like a line of dead ants on the ground where they just go to war. No.

Cold libanas. Yeah. Are you kidding me? And they're just constantly fighting. But there's one large super colony that has taken over most of LA. And they're all in the same family. So now, even if they're the same species, they'll have a battleground.

There'll be like a line of death. Well, yeah. So in general, for ants, their biggest enemy is another colony of the same species. Oh, it's like humans. Yeah, exactly. Is that like a lot of social animals? Like they operate as such one massive super organism that like

their biggest predator really is their own species? Well, I would say their biggest predator, but their biggest competitor. Yeah. Right. Because the thing is, I mean, so if they're, you know, because if the species has a niche and they're nesting in a particular environment and they're consuming the same kind of food

and they need the same environmental requirements, then of course, if there's another colony that's just like you that has the same environmental requirements, then they're your biggest competition. Oh, how many species of ants are there? I think described, we might be up to 12,000 dish. I think the estimates of people say there's probably about 20,000, but maybe about half of them aren't described.

Like we haven't put names to them yet. So if you want to be a mermicologist, just know that 8,000 species of ants are like, notice me, please, I'm right here. They're begging you to be an ant scientist, but they probably don't know the part about putting some of their friends in jars. Even though it's to identify and save ant kind, it seems like a difficult task for ant lovers.

Like I love you, I kill you, but I love you, but I kill you. Do you have a favorite species of ant, be honest? Oh, it's hard. I mean, I guess one of my favorites are the bulldog ants in Australia, the mermicia. What are they? I have to say. Well, so they're really big and they have these bulging eyes, but they're one of the few ants, they almost act like a vertebrate.

Like most ants, if you mess with their colony, even like the big bullet ants that I work with and whatnot, they sort of just run around and get upset and like, oh, I might sting you. Oh, look, I'm fierce, or they'll freak out or run away. But the bulldog ants, they'll just send a few ants up out of their nest and they'll look at you and just open their mandibles and be like, I see you. It's like, they're just, yeah, they just stand up.

And it's like, it's like an intimidation thing. And also they have a really painful sting. So I mean, they're actually, you know, honestly advertising how badass they are. So bulldog ants, actually, mad dog. Now, okay, explain to me a little bit about the social behavior, because I think that's one thing that people are just like, mesmerized by ants, because they have this social behavior.

They have these tiny little brains. How do they do it? Is it all through hormones? Like, is it just innate? What's like, what is even happening here? I mean, so clearly ants communicate with chemicals a lot. Chemicals are a huge big part of their communication. I mean, visual inputs, for the most part,

there are some blind ants, the ones that live underground, usually don't advise or don't use them or whatever. But we're still working out in detail, like which chemicals are used in what circumstances. So some will have a very discrete signal. Like for example, in a famous circumstance, it's like, if you put this one chemical on an ant, that commutes to other ants that they're dead.

So they'll pick it up and drag them into the waste pile. Even if they're kicking and screaming, being like, what's up? Hey, assholes, I'm fully alive. And they're like, sorry, you smell like a corpse, so you're out. Yeah, that's totally the story. Yeah, like, you know, Wilson did, it's like that was the comical thing.

He would paint a live ant with a chemical that says that they're a dead ant, and then they'd answer be dragged living over to the dead pile. That's so rough. The concept is, is that the way that colonies divide labor, essentially, that some ants will do some things, other ants will do other things. And we're not even close to understanding the details

of how one species does things differently from another species and why. So friends, if you take ants, a colony of ants, and you put them like in an area there, dirt, and let's say, and you give them a chance to excavate a nest. Like, so different species will have different nest architectures. And so you can look at the structure of a nest

or a structure of a nest entrance, or you could do a casting of a nest and be like, oh, I think I know what species it is just on the shape of the nest that they dig. And so how is it that a species is socially organized to do something like that repetitively? I mean, there's still so much to learn. But in general, it's thought that the way

that colonies organize complex behavior is based on interactions with one another. So if you interact with an individual, then that communicates different kinds of information. Depending on what chemicals you share, what body posture you have, like in honey bees, for example, what orientation your body is. So from all of these small little pieces of behavior,

and then we have a complex colony emerge. So a lot of small, simple computers can make a big, complex computer. And yes, of course, this is being studied by the military. Imagine a million tiny robot soldiers, or maybe don't. Do you get optimistic about solving future problems with maybe some themes or things we learn from ant behavior? Or are you like, oh, shit, we're going to learn from ants

and we're all going to kill each other? I'm terrified at the concept that we could use learning, education, and technology to do bad things, regardless. And so I think if we study how social insects work, there's a lot of power in understanding how the world works. And so I think by studying insects, then we can tap into lots of new knowledge.

And then it's up to us to use that wisely. Now, can you give me some hot goss? Can you like spill the tea on some of ants' crazy behaviors? What kind of real housewife shit happens in those colonies? Also, are they mostly ladies? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So this we mentioned before. So just like in almost all social insects,

except for social cockroaches, for really known as termites, wait, what? Yeah, yeah. Termites are now called social cockroaches. What did that happen? Well, it happened like 10 years ago, but now people are getting their heads around this. So another detail to get your head around. I'll say this fast, because A, it's unrelated to ants,

and B, it's disgusting. So termites eat wood and cockroaches are coprophages, which means they're feces eaters. And scientists think that being friendly and eating each other's snacky waste could have set the stage for good gut biomes that are able to digest wood. So that's how cockroaches turn into termites.

Thank you. I'm sorry. Let's get back to ants, specifically the dames. Ants and bees, we're looking at a bunch of ladies. Yeah, yeah. So all workers are female. And so in pretty much almost all colonies, if you're seeing an ant that has no wings, then it's going to be a female worker. Do boy ants have wings?

Yeah. So almost, almost all the time, the boy ants will have wings. And their job is to have sex and then die. I mean. And that's it. So boy ant to-do list is like be born, have wings, have a nuptial flight, mate, and then die. You're done.

And P.S. the male ants, who are not called uncles, but rather drones. And the queens will usually mate when it's humid out or after it rains so that she can get laid and then rip off her own wings casually and then pump her babies into a hole in the earth. Thus starting one big happy kind of overworked family. And now remember the family that sniffs and rubs

their bodily secretions on each other together stays together. So what kind of behaviors, what kind of actions and behaviors do they have in terms of communicating with each other? They meaning the ants? The ants, yeah. I mean, sometimes they'll actually perform physical movements on one another to communicate things,

but it's pretty much, that's all chemical for the most part. Or do they say things like, hey, there's a fruit loop over there or hey, watch out, there's a weird ant eater lurchin about. Like what kind of, what are they chatting about? Well, I mean, so there's big categories that you can put pheromones into. And so then there's recruitment pheromones,

which is like, hey, the food's over there. And then there's trail pheromones saying, well, this is the trail. And so there are different kinds of trail pheromones, like some are long-term trail pheromones that will last for a long time, saying this is our big long-term trail. Or a couple, sometimes you'll have trail pheromones

that evaporate really quickly or that are short-term trail pheromones. Whoa. So they know, is this, pardon this question, is it just coming out of their butt? Where is it coming from? So they have different glands in different parts of their bodies.

Okay. And so some of the glands, like for instance, the alarm pheromones are in the mandibles, the mandibular glands. And so once in a long while, we're still discovering new glands. But there's a few key glands in the head or in the middle part of the butt that, yeah.

So they're like, this is just a short-term trail. We're not going to hang here for too long. So they're just going to like squirt some stuff out of their thorax and then that evaporates. Then the, wow, the alarm ones near their mandibles is really interesting. Yeah, which means like attack what's near there. Yeah.

You know, but there's also just like for instance, with like we were talking about with the Argentine ants in their super colonies. So one of the things that we find is the reason the ants will accept or reject someone into the colony, the pheromones. So the ants have to really physically rub up against one another to smell these.

Like, but once you touch, then you would come in contact with this pheromone, which is like a long chain carbon, which is not volatile. And so if that matches their own, then they recognize them as colony mates. But if those compounds are different enough, they recognize them as different.

So if you were to give ants the same coat them with these chemicals, then they'll recognize one another's colony mates. Oh my God. So you can almost trick them into being like, no, no, no. You guys are cool because you just coated them with the same kind of perfume. Yeah, to some extent.

Yeah. But also if you were to take a colony and then split it apart and give them different kinds of food that have different kinds of chemicals, then they'll stop getting along with one another. So side note, I had a boyfriend years ago who ate one bowl of epically pungent garlic soup

one fateful day. And I thought maybe we were going to break up. I thought that was the end. I considered it. I just did not know how to cope politely. I mean, how do you approach invasive species? Because clearly you marvel at ants. Are you like, I'm pissed off at you guys

because you are maybe outpacing native species or do you just say, let nature be nature? So I studied invasive species from my dissertation. I've gotten past that. I'm doing other things now. But I mean, it's a problem. It's a problem because especially in ants, it seems for at least 50 to 100 years after they arrive,

they really reduce the abundance of other native ants. But also just pragmatically speaking, it's an economic problem because most of these invasive species cause problems that disrupt trade could be human health problems or cause problems for endangered species with red imported fire ants.

They'll eat ground-nesting birds. What? Yeah. They'll eat a bird? Like the little baby birds. I think they have trouble getting it to the eggs, but as soon as they hatch, then they'll swarm over the nest, for example.

Oh, my God. So like so, so in ground-nesting birds in the southeastern U.S. are really at risk because of this invasive species. Why do some ants want to eat an apple core and others are like? Well, I mean, so species are different, right? And so, I mean, so all different kinds of ants have all different kinds of diet.

But I mean, some ants primarily eat other ants, like army ants. Army ants eat other ants? So most army ant species are specialists on other social insects. So other ant colonies and like wasp colonies and termites. And yeah. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. What are, okay, because there are some, there are some species of ants that have reputations. Fire ants, army ants, bullet ants. What is it about those species that are just like more ferocious or more threatening to people? And should we be marveling at that instead of being like, hey, ants, knock it off?

Oh, I think we totally should be marvelized. Yeah, ants are either amazing. Yeah. Well, army ants aren't really a threat. I guess if you were to put a baby in a bassinet and let it sit there as army ants went through, well, then that probably would not be good news because it would get stung a lot, right? But, but otherwise, like army ants are great.

Well, if they come to your house, you step outside for a couple hours, you come back and they've cleaned out all the insect pests. Have they really, they've just marched through and been like, I ate a cockroach. I ate them off. Yeah, seriously. And so it's normal.

So I think there's this notion that they're incredibly efficient. But I've got I've looked through places where army ants had just roamed through. There's still bugs in the litter. They didn't get everybody and everything. Yeah, sloppy. And now what about bullet ants and fire ants? Why are they called those things?

Well, bullet ants just call bullet ants because it really, really hurts when they sting you. Because it hurts so bad. Why is it hurt so bad? Like it could be like approximate answer, which is like, well, it's because the structure of this ponderotoxin, you know, the alpha ponderotoxin and beta ponderotoxin causes a lot of pain, right?

But the real question is, well, why is it they evolved the toxin, which is so much more painful than everyone else? So my pet concept behind that is, well, bullet ants are huge. And they also have pretty big colonies, considering their size. The colonies can have a few thousand individuals when they get to be big. And so the larvae and the pupae are really big and chunky.

It's like a really, really good meal. Like I can imagine like a kawadi or a peckery or someone digging up the ground and would love eating all of those. This just in, a kawadi is a very cute, long-faced, raccoon-looking idiot. And a peckery appears to be a spindle-legged forest piggy with frothy Texas hair.

And they would probably love to eat soft, squishy bullet ant babies, like Swedish fish, you know? And so because they offer such a massive nutritional reward to someone who attacks the colony, they probably have to deter vertebrates really well. And so no vertebrate in its right mind is going to mess with a bullet ant colony. And so their colonies, you could probably like dig

and access them within several seconds if you had like a shovel or good digging claws. But you'd just be crazy to because they stink so badly. Whereas so many other ants, if they have a lot of nutritious prey available to them, then they're probably deep in a piece of wood. Like carpenter ants get to be almost as big as bullet ants, but they don't even have a sting and they bite you,

but it's not the worst thing in the world. It's just that, but they're nesting in wood. You're not going to rip open like a whole, you know, tree to eat a carpenter colony. So bullet ant colonies are really vulnerable if they're just in soil at the base of a tree. That's a great answer. So the lesson is hide your shit or be prepared to defend it.

Now, how do you feel when you see people say in like science programs or YouTube that are like, I put my hands in a fire ant colony or I let a bullet ant sting me to see how it would feel? Are you just like shaking your damn head on the side? Well, I mean, I think with a fire, that's just, I don't know, that's just kind of dumb. I think, I mean, gosh, it's kind of hurt.

I mean, you've seen, I mean, people with fire ants, if fire ants sting you, you get all these welds and you get the blisters and it's horrible and it's painful. And so you know what's going to happen. But I think with bullet ants, what happens is you get stung and it looks like nothing. Initially, you might swell up or whatever, but then you see people reacting in extraordinary pain.

And it's a matter of curiosity, right? I've had several students intentionally get themselves stung by bullet ants because they wanted to know what it felt like. And it really hurt. What did they do? What kind of reactions happened? Well, they just, they just screamed their heads off

and then used all kinds of cursing. So I've worked with bullet ants. I've published a few papers on them and I've only been stung by them once and that was in the lab when I was being dumb. And so it's possible to work with them and not get stung if you just treat them with respect and understand how they behave.

Well, hello. What happened? What happened? Tell me everything. You were in the lab. You got stung by a bullet ant? Where? How?

How? So I was in the lab and I needed to weigh this ant because I was putting, we're doing experiments with microbes in their guts. And so to weigh the ant, I needed to put it in a container and weigh the ant in the container. They need to track the weight of the container. But I realized that when I weighed the cup,

it didn't have a lid on it. And I was like, oh, I need to weigh a cup with a lid. But I wasn't thinking that that cup that had the lid on it was the one that had the ant that I was weighing in it. Oh, no. I just wasn't thinking. And so the moment I got the lid off. PS, if you haven't already, now would be a good time

to cover the ears of your children or my mom. You know, it just got me right on the tip of my finger. And I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And I flung the ant like somewhere in the balance room and it was roaming around. Meanwhile, so I have like this, you know, sophomore in college. I'm showing her how to do this experiment

for the rest of the summer that she sees this. It was like, oh my God, it was so bad. It was really, really bad. Did you ever find the flung ant? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, they're huge. How do you not find it? Okay, I looked these things up and they are meaty as hell.

They're about as big as a wingless wasp. But with a sting, some experts say is 30 times more painful than a bees. Worse than childbirth and being burned. PS, how do we know that? Well, one Cornell University study in the 1940s was trying to measure comparative pains using something that's still called a Dolorameter.

Dolor, by the way, is just straight up a noun, meaning great sorrow or distress. So they use this Dolor meter. And during childbirth, the team of scientists, James D. Hardy, Harold G. Wolfe and Helen Goodill, heated, I mean, I guess, burned women to ask, which feels worse? And the answer must have been a consistent fuck off

enough that they stopped using this method. Now for Terry, who has a child, but no experience shoving one out of an orifice, how would he describe it? Oh my God, what did it feel like? So the way I explain it, I've seen multiple people get stung, right? And so or at least see the after effects.

And so it affects different people differently. So it's not to say that everyone else will have this response. But for me, it was like, if you put your finger on a countertop and I were to give you a hammer and ask you to hit it as hard as you can. That's what it felt like. Yeah. How long does it last? Well, the common one common name that people have for them

is Rormiga vanti quadro, the 24 hour ant. So mine did not last 24 hours, but it really hurt. So I mean, so I took a full dose of ibuprofen and Benadryl because my hands started to get really puffy. And so it was throbbing enough where I just couldn't focus on anything. So it was like my day was kind of done. Yeah, you think? And then like then I had lost muscular strength in the hand.

Like I couldn't hold a coffee cup in this hand. Like like I just couldn't squeeze enough to hold it. It was weird. And then that evening, like the whole hand was like numb. Like I would poke it and I couldn't feel it. Oh my God. Here's a question. If you could do your whole life over and you had a chance to not have that happen to you,

would you erase that from your experience? Or are you in some way glad that you know what it's like? I guess, well, enough people have asked me what it feels like. What did it feel like? What did it feel like? That it's better to have that experience than to be like that smug dude who's like, well, I'm so careful I never get stuck, right? I mean, I have heard also like Phil Torres, the lipidupturologist that I interviewed about

butterflies. He says that entomologists have a rite of passage of like everyone kind of wants to get a botfly. Larva stuck in them. Do ant researchers say like, I kind of want to see what this is like. You know, I don't think it's like, no, I think among the ant people I know, it's the more, at least the ant men, I know. They would be more into, I think they, a botfly would still be a bigger rite of passage than like a bullet instinct.

Probably, yeah. Oh my God. What's the craziest thing that you've seen in the field or the craziest behavior you've ever witnessed? Wow. I would say probably the coolest, coolest thing I've seen are kidnapper ants. What the hell? So, so people used to call these slave making ants, but I don't think that really describes

their behavior well. And so, so, so what kidnapper ants are, and those, and this actually I just, I've seen in Arizona. So, they are colonies that go on seasonal raids where they find the colonies of other ants and steal their brood and bring them back to their own nest and raise them up and then those ants live there. So, they're like, so they're kidnapping baby ants from other colony and then those ants. So, if you were to look at a kidnapper ant colony, there's two kinds of workers. There's the kidnapper ants themselves, which are like big and bright orange.

And then the ants that they stole, who are working alongside them thinking they belong there, but they were actually kidnapped. Is that a matter of pheromones? Do they rub their pheromone on it where they're like, you think you're, you can't tell that we are not your real family? Yeah. So, I mean, so the thing is, if you're raised in that environment, then you'll basically be having the odors that come from that environment.

And so, we know that kidnapper ants will use pheromones to disrupt the communication of the colonies. So, these ants that get raided by kidnapper ants, they kind of know it's coming. I mean, it's evolved over like, you know, probably millions of years. And so, and so they've evolved some kind of defense, but obviously the defenses aren't quite good enough. So, does that mean that the kidnapper aunt queen is kind of like a cult leader? She's like a David Koresh of like a Jonestown, like she's like, you belong here and you love

it. Keep working. You totally can imagine that, yeah. And now, what are aunt queens like? I should have asked this earlier, but what are aunt queens like? Are they just pumping out babies all the time? Like, do they get killed and eaten by someone when they're ready to go? Yeah, so most folks, the popular conception is that queens run the colony.

For the most part, like queens are not in charge. It's the workers that are running the colony. And so, the queen, if anything, is the captive of the ants because the queen is doing the reproductive labor for the colony and the ants are doing all the other labor. And so, and if a queen has only mated once, then because of bizarre genetics that we could get into, the workers are more related to the queen, to their sisters, the queen's daughter, than the queen is to her own daughters. Weird.

So, you could argue that the queen is actually doing the reproductive work, you know, for her daughters who are in the colony. Ooh, that's some handmade stale shit right there. Yeah, totally. And what does your research right now deal with? Like, what's your bread and butter research? So, the way a friend of mine described what I do, he's like, I really like when you do that experimental natural history.

And I'm like, oh, that's a good word for it. Oh, and so, what I do is I find, you know, there's so many curious, weird phenomena that we don't understand out there. And I'm like, you know, I think I'm going to try to do experiments to try to figure out what's going on. And so, I have a few different things I'm working on. So, one thing is I'm understanding, and this is what a lot of people are working on this for good reason, the thermal biology events and how they are adapting to hotter temperatures.

And so, the way I've been looking at this is looking at variation within a colony and how that might evolve and how colonies use behavioral flexibility to respond to changing temperature. So, a lot of people are looking at differences among species to think how about how things will change. But I think actually ant colonies might evolve to behaviorally adapt to higher temperatures. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Do you think that they'll store more water or seek higher ground or lower ground?

Yeah, they might nest deeper. They might vorage at different times of day or nest in deeper leaf litter. But it looks like that they're more adaptable than people thought. I mean, so that's one thing I'm working on. There's this other group of ants that I'm working on that move their nests all the time. Well, many ants, people think of ants as like, here's a hole in the ground where they add colony lives. But it turns out that the majority of species move their nests on a regular basis,

like every few weeks, every few months, once a year. And so, I've been working to show people that this is actually kind of the way the ants are. They're not like miniature plants rooted in the ground. But just like how invasive arginal ants move all over the city, even if you go, don't look at invasive species. If you're just looking in natural areas, ants moving their nest has a pretty common thing. And so, I've been trying to figure out how and why that happens in a couple species. Why does it happen, do you think?

Well, it's very different for, depending upon the species you're looking at, about what the advantage is. Like, there are some that do it because they're trying to find a sunnier patch. And so, if the structure of the forest changes so they end up in a place that's shadier, they need to move to a place that's more sunny. Oh my god, they do this skedaddle. Yeah, totally. Now, how do you feel when you see people pouring like molten aluminum into an ant colony?

So, side note for a visual, just imagine like a small squat, shiny metal Christmas tree that a robot might put up. Or shimmering silver coral. Or maybe a bush Dr. Seuss would dream up for the future. Now, if you Google ant hill art, you can see the products and some art displays and also the process. And in so doing, you will, again, realize that we are the villains in an ants action film, for sure. Because I know that they can then dig it up and it's this beautiful branching structure,

but I'm also like, dude, ants. I know, I just had as like a gorgeous work of art. I mean, so it's like, I estimated on the back of an envelope the number of ants that I killed. And it was like, on the low end, very low end, it's like a quarter million, half million. So, so I, you know, maybe there's a little wanted posters of me inside the ant colony. You know, unlike a lot of other people who study insects, I actually work really hard to avoid collecting. And I think biological collections are very important.

And we should continue to build and maintain collections. But I think we need to think hard about the ethics of how we do this. There's a lot of data to be acquired from those two. I know people are now doing that as an art piece. But also a lot of what we've learned about nest architecture has done, has come from that kind of casting. And so the guy who pioneered this technique, Walter Schenkel, you know, has done all this amazing work on the architecture of nest colonies before doing the metal casting.

People would cast colonies with dental plaster. Because you need something that goes down the fine little holes that ants crawl through if you're going to cast the whole colony. And so dental plaster is fine enough that you can penetrate it, the colony really well. But then digging up the colony is so difficult because it doesn't come up in one piece. So then you have to reconstruct it. So a metal casting of the colony stays intact. But the plaster cast has to be reconstructed like a jigsaw because it breaks apart.

Now, however, molten metal, surprise, destroys all the ants. While the plaster can be washed away later and the scientists can figure out which ants were kicking it in which part of their house. And so you can be like, Oh, these ants were in this chamber. These ants were in this chamber. Oh, well, you can't do that with metal. Exactly. Can you imagine if just just a wall of molten metal came out like a flash flood?

Out of nowhere. Yeah, you're just like, oh my God, are you ready for rapid fire round? Sure. Okay. Patreon questions. I got like 80 questions. Okay. But we're not going to do all of them because some people ask the same questions. We're going to run through as many as we can.

Are you ready? Okay. Okay. But first we're going to throw some money at a cause. So this episode first aired in 2018 when we didn't have ads because I didn't know that you can have ads, but say no to ones that you don't like. So now we have ads and I say no to ones I don't like. And then with the money, sometimes we buy the guest a buffalo life. Man.

So we are donating to one of Terry's favorite causes, ESA seeds, which is a mentoring program for underrepresented higher education students to explore careers in ecology. And it's hosted by the Ecological Society of America and the Seeds Field Trip Endowment provides quality field experiences to undergrads, including those who didn't have an outdoorsy experience as kids. So that donation in Terry's name was made possible by these ward approved sponsors. You may hear about. Okay. Your questions. Let's answer. Let's answer them.

Sarah Nichelle wants to know why do bullet ants scream when they attack? Is it an intimidation tactic? Some people think so. I think it could be. Yeah. So bullets make this when you disturb a nest. And the odor is a little garlicky when they do that. And so I must. And so I jump back when I hear it. And so I imagine that other vertebrates do too, because that way it's a warning sign. My guess is yes, but it has been shown experimentally.

Sure. If you hear that, I mean, why do you think rattlesnakes have rattles? Right. They're like, don't make me use this venom. Exactly. So they're like, do you know what's coming? It's like the ice cream truck. But like with pain and death. Todd McLaren wants to know what's the deepest ant hole recorded? Any idea? So I know there are, if you were to look at leaf cutter ant colonies, they can go

like maybe 10, 20 meters deep, I think. There are probably some that go deeper that we haven't collected. Like I know people that have tried to excavate colonies where like there's these volcano ants in Australia where they make these tiny little mounds of soil that look like volcanoes. And you try to dig them up and the hole just goes deep and deep and deep. So I know people have gone down many meters and not found them. Damn. That's some spelunking right there. Yeah. For reals. Jessica Chamberlain wants to know, if you're mean, like my husband,

and squish a scout ant that you see, you know, on its own in your house, will the colony send another scout to look for it or will they just abandon their fallen comrade? Um, Mike, so I'm just speaking from experience. If it's in your house and you have one ant roaming around, if you, if it's the very, very first ant, in theory, maybe, but in practice, probably not. Oh, really? Okay. So they'll probably send more. All right. So they're just like, Hey, where's Heidi? And they're like, I don't know, go find her. Maybe she found good stuff. Yeah. I think they probably forget that. I mean, it's better to do that than not.

If you don't want them to come back, but I think it's probably futile. I think I'd look for the cock gun instead. Okay. Or follow her and see where she goes. So if you keep following her and she's like on her way home, she's like doing her home commute, you can find where the entrance is. Totally. Which is about like what, how I spend most of my time in the forest. If I'm like,

if you want to find an ant colony, give them food, then they'll walk back to their home. So actually, if you're trying to get rid of that scout ant, what you do is feed her, then see what crack she's going to go into, then kill her and cover up the cracks. That's, that's really calculated. Yeah. That's not, that's like definitely premeditated first degree, instead of just a crime of opportunity or passion. That's amazing. You're like, no, do you want a crumb? And she's like,

man, thank you so much. I'll take this home. And you're like, no, you won't, bitch. Several people wanted to know how are ants so strong? How can they lift 10 times their own weight? Radha, Evan, McKenna all wanted to know how much weight can ants carry? Why are they so strong? So I think the answer is they can carry like maybe a hundred, 200 times their mass or something like that. And so the answer is, is the ants are not particularly strong. It's just a matter of scaling for body size. So in other words, if you were to shrink your own body down to the size of an ant, then you would be as strong as an ant that size. Okay.

And so it's scaling the way that muscles work is their power. It's a function of like the cross-sectional area of the muscle essentially. And so if you shrink down, then you're just that much more powerful. And so just like if you were to take an ant and to scale them up to our size, then they'd only be as strong as us. They could barely do a push up and they're like, my luggage is too heavy. Will someone put it in the overhead for me? I had no idea. I thought they got so much props. I thought they were just like mystically strong. Yeah, totally. Who knew? Physics, scaling. Cody Wappingamp and Dave Miller, both pretty much wanted to know.

Someone once told me that based on estimates, ants outnumber humans. Am I gullible or is that fact true? And is it true that the weight of all the ants in the world exceeds the weight of humans? So let's debunk some flim flam. Numbers and weights of ants versus human. Oh, there's way, way, way more ants than people. There has to be. Like any back in the envelope calculation, I would say every other thing that people say about ants dates back to an off the cuff thing that that E. O. Wilson said 20 years ago. So for some context, 89 year old American biologist and author E. O. Wilson is said to be the world's foremost expert on ants. And he postulated in a 1994 book, quote,

when combined, all ants in the world taken together way about as much as all human beings. Like all mermicologists know this quote. And so that's the thing about the mass of ants being equivalent to the mass of people. And so, you know, getting more mermicologists using more back of envelope calculations, we're like, yeah, that sounds fine. Okay. So ants outnumber human beings definitely numerically and also by weight. Yeah. Or maybe about the same. But ballpark, it could be within an order of magnitude, you know, the same as more or less. Okay. So then that's not even flim flam that we needed to debunk.

Yeah. That's some real shit. Kendall, Thorsten, Christopher Barley, and Eva all want to ask about ant farming. Like, do they farm aphids? You mentioned something about a fungus farm. Like, how did they get so good at farming? Like, does that make them smarter than early humans? Well, that makes them more social. I mean, so, I mean, so the question is what is smarts, right? This is your philosophy background. Um, so, so the party line is that ants evolved agriculture 60 million years ago with fungus growing ants. Oh my God.

And so they, you know, collected bits of like animal poop or whatnot. And so famously now leaf cutter ants will cut leaves and they'll grow a big garden. So remember, there are the leaf cutter ants that take leaf pieces and grow fungus on them. Well, meanwhile, me, an alive human who can drive a car and Skype France has killed three cacti in the last year. And so they, and so they carefully tend to this garden and they use the same kind of integrated pest management that we use in our crops. Oh my God, that's crazy. You know, and there's weeds that grow in there and they've evolved relationships with bacteria

that attack those weeds and all that, you know, and so every single day, you know, there's someone in a few labs that's discovering a new partner in this co-evolved complex situation of how ants do this. So, so I would say the analogy for farming would be with fungus growing ants, whereas the analogy for ranching, I would say, would be with aphids, right? Oh my God. Right. Cause so, so ants will occasionally will grow aphids and they will milk the aphids to get their honey due, which is basically the leftover sugary stuff that the aphids don't consume when they're feeding on plants. And so, and there's also caterpillars that will do this with ants too. I mean, that's essentially just like, like nectar pee, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But also, analogously, in addition to milking cows, they occasionally will kill them and eat them. You know, the same thing goes with ants and the aphids. They won't, you know, they might eat an aphid once in a while. And are they managing the herd? Oh, they carefully, yes. They will transport them around and adaptively manage it. They sometimes, you know, they'll kill off a plant by using too many of them, but oftentimes they use ranching management techniques. Yeah. That's so wild less. That's insane. So cowboy. Okay. So Kristen McAdams and Lily Hill both want to know, why do fire ants hate me? They both asked, in particular, why do fire ants hate me? So Lily and Kristen at least know it's not just you. And Mark wants to

know how can they act as both a solid and a liquid? So fire ants, what's their beef about? And also, are they a solid or a liquid? Yeah. So why are fire ants are just like so mad? So ants will defend their nests. And so if you take an individual fire ant, it can walk on you and it's not going to sting you right away. But the thing is, if you disrupt a mound, then it's going to get really mad at you. And so most other ants, you can't destroy their mound so easily, because they're underground or something, whereas fire ants have this big soil mound above the surface. And so if you kick that soil mound, then they're just going to get really pissed because it's like you just took apart their home. And so I think they seem to be more angry

because the structure of their home is a lot more likely to be disturbed. And they also have a potent sting that goes with it. Lesson insecurity makes us bitches. And so the whole solid liquid thing is like, and so in how they can, they can float and raft when it floods. So it's cool. So fire ants evolved in these seasonal flood plains in South America. And so when it floods, the colonies can just pick up and then raft along and then land when the waters recede. And so the ants' bodies will cling together. And then if you have a whole bunch of ants clinging together, then they will like pour with these physical properties. Well, actually they act as a liquid, but the ants themselves also can be a solid. And so I don't think I can offer a solid

answer with respect to physics, how they do that, but it's super cool. I floated this idea by Google and it turns out that the little hairs on their tiny lady legs trap enough hair to keep them all afloat. So congratulations. There is another reason to avoid shaving your legs today. Oh, Olivia Roos, great question, says as soon as she saw this post, it reminded me of the infection that turns ants into zombies. What is it? And what's the life cycle? This is Cordyceps? Yeah. So the common name, Cordyceps, like Ophiocordyceps. Yeah. So the zombie ant fungus is super cool. And there's a number of people working to figure this critter out. It takes over the brain of the animal and it tells them to perch somewhere. And then that results in,

that kills the animal and the spore gets spread, that it'll infect another animal. It's super cool. And now it kind of turns them into these zombies, though, like where some ants will crawl up a plant stem, perch out on the leaf and then wait until the Cordyceps explodes from their head and infects all of their family members? Yeah. I think that usually the explosion happens after the ants are already dead and perched. But yeah, they will go to a location that helps the dispersal of the fungal spores. And so it turns out that, and there's a recent paper that came out showing that the way that ants bite onto the tissue corresponds to the environment that they're in,

that they're in, so to help it spread more effectively. I mean, does this stuff ever just completely boggle you? Do you start thinking, do you get galaxy brain where you're like, what is anything? Is this all a simulation? Does dark matter teach ants what to do? Do you ever get stonery about this stuff? Yeah, I kind of used to. But the thing is, for every single thing that I read about that's weird, I know people have already figured out even weirder things. And so I think it's like, wow, that's super cool. I mean, yeah, that's amazing. But then there are these flukes that will have like three or four different hosts, for example, so they'll infect a bird and they'll infect a snail

and like an alien. And then this complex life cycle and it affects the behavior of every single one. And so I mean, I'm like Cordyceps seems kind of straightforward compared to some of these other crazy like host altering ones. Like, you know, does the toxoplasmosis actually cause people to not have fear or so on? Like, I don't know. This isn't even college roommate Bong Ripper philosophy. This is just the wild world of brain parasites. Speaking of peril, Kellen Freeman and Ray Kasha both want to know how the death spiral works. What is happening in an ant death spiral? Okay, so for the uninitiated, the death spiral is this thing where so army ants forage in these big raids. And so they all follow one another. If you're to take

a bunch of army ants and somehow separate them from the rest of their colony, you can trick them or they might accidentally would happen, like would march in a big circle, right? They just follow one another. So they basically create a single pheromonal trail and it's a death spiral. They keep marching and marching until they're all dead. Why? Yeah, well, because I think is they all follow one another in big trails. So so like individual ant colonies can solve complex problems and do big things. But ant workers are dumb and they follow simple rules. Terry explains how this is kind of like computer code. And so if you have an army colony that's a quarter million ants, every ant is doing following a simple program. And when you have all

these simple bits of code together, then they function. But if you were to take some of these individual ants and separate them from the other ants, then they're just kind of screwed and they'll just wander around. Like, so if you take an ant and bring her away from her colony to the far enough away that she'll never get back, she's not like that dog that's going to cross the whole country and find its way home. Yeah, no, it's not like 1993's homework bound. You know, it's going to be like, oh, I don't know where to go and then wander around aimlessly until it tries to find some signal about where its home might be. And then it won't. And they'll just die. Huh? This is a bummer, man. So Tracy Benhamal wants to know, I have to know, will ants added to a

camping saute add a little flavor like lemon juice due to the acetic acid in their heads? Have you eaten ants? Yeah, some ants. Yeah, yeah, I try not to. I'm vegetarian. So I extend that to insects. But I've tried some inadvertently when we all eat insects when we don't try. So there are some ants that taste absolutely horrible. But for instance, in this part of the world, we have what we call citronella ants. And so they live underground in genus lazius, and they actually have a citronella-y order to them. And so the weaver ants in Southeast Asia and Northern in the Australian wet tropics, they have a lemony flavor to their butts and people call them lemon ants. I don't think they have that much acetic acid. I mean, there's formic acid, butyric acid.

So acetic acid is straight up vinegar. Lemon ants, by the way, release this citrusy smell when attacked to warn others. And they also use formic acid as an herbicide, and that creates clearings in the forest where nothing really grows. This is called a devil's garden, which is definitely a venue that my existential metal band, Mere Meat, would love to play. But ants would add other flavors. I mean, people will eat, will roast, like queens of leaf cutter ants. People once a year will collect the brood of weaver ants and collect them in large, large numbers. You can get them in ethnic food stores and jars here. Oh, wow. I hear that there might be a little spicy, too. Some ants.

Oh, some of them, yeah. I have a little bit of spice, yeah. Crazy. I think I've eaten ants. I can't. I think I had ants on a cookie on purpose, but let's see. Elliot Anaya wants to know, do it fart. Do ants fart? Oh, my God. I haven't gotten to that page in the book yet. So Terry is referencing the best-selling book, Does It Fart? Now, I don't have a copy of this book, but I do have evidence that Ant-Man might have taken from this screen junkies interview with Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd's tooting. He has either a very squeaky chair or problematic intestines. Ant Farms, yes or no? Ant Farm, the ones that you buy out of the box, Uncle Milton?

No, because they're all going to die because they don't send you a queen. They just die. And it's like, so it's like there's these onion articles about getting an ant farm as a lesson and toiling until you die. That's what that is. But if you were to build your own ant farm and collect your own ant colony, there are many amateur like ant enthusiasts who really know their biology and are super cool and there's ant chat rooms and they're willing to help. And so if you want your own ant colonies, then doing it that way, yes. Oh, so as long as you get the queen and you set it up right and you do it respectfully. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. I didn't do that.

Super cool. There's a whole community of people who do that. You know what? I can't have a dog in this apartment, but maybe I could adopt like a couple thousand ants. You could totally have an ant colony in here yet. I just found my summer project. A few different people like Craig Minami and Sarah Sparrow want to know if there are plants or natural remedies or other insects that you could use in your house to deter ants. Probably not. Okay. So there's a lot of, you know, discussion about what chemicals could you use? Could you spray powder or chalk or cayenne pepper or whatever? Pretty much those don't work. Okay. Cinnamon? No. No. Just checking. Okay. So the answer is no. The answer is get a

cock gun. Cock gun, yeah. I mean, so a general answer would be to kill your lawn. What? Right? Because I mean, so of course I've killed my lawn and I still have trouble with ants. At least if you're in a place, a dry place like in California where you have all these Argentine ants, they are fed by moisture. If it's dry, you don't have them. It's like we were doing a cleanup in Compton Creek up on a dry spot and you had harvest ants like right there in the middle of urban whatever. Oh, wow. Harvester ants just on the lookout for that quality, organic, free range, gluten-free seed to eat, whereas Argentine ants are munching on pizza crust under a dead possum and loving it. Often the invasive species will

be following water or following human disturbance. And so if you get all your neighbors together and have more native landscaping, then you have fewer of these invasive ants that would be taking over your house. But once in a while, but I think the key is to keep from letting them in. Okay. So that just gently follow them home like an absolute creep. Right. Yeah. Anna Thompson wants to know, are there loner or introvert ants who are not down with the social thing? The only non-social ants we have are our colonies that produce what we call social parasites actually they're not colonies. They are non-social ants. And so they only produce queens and males

and what they do is the queens will then fly off and live inside the colony of other ants and take their food and lay their own eggs and sneak them in with the rest of the colony. So side note, the fact that ants don't have a long-running reality show franchise is an artistic failing of our culture. And then she'll just make queens and males to make new colonies. So they're socially parasitic and they evolved after ants originally evolved. Oh, wow. They're kind of like sociopaths. They just come in like freeloaders. They're total freeloaders. Yeah. Total nurses. So all other ants are social. Oh, I didn't know that. Danny Kay wants to know,

have you ever spelled your name out in ant pheromones, Ala Ea Williams? I have not spelled my name out in ant pheromones. Okay. Just checking. Zach Tarville wants to know, I heard that ants are great at predicting weather. Is there any truth to this? They are. The one example I can think of is they're great in predicting weather is if they know if it's really going to rain. So in the, for instance, in dry areas like in the southwestern US, like they reproduce after a rainstorm. And so you'll often, if you're going to have a lot of rain, like there's mating flights. And so sometimes they'll start flying

before the rains hit. And so often people studying them who are trying to collect them can look at the weather reports and be like, oh, I bet they're going to fly tonight. And you said queens. Do some colonies have multiple queens or no? Yeah. So many kinds of ants will have more than one queen per colony. Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't know that. Sean and Josh Grandinetti want to know, what's the most amazing ant behavior you've seen and do they have self-awareness? Do they, I don't think they have, if we say talk about self-awareness as in like a cognition where they recognize themselves in the mirror. I don't think so.

Okay. Okay. So the most amazing behavior I've seen deals with the army ants that roam across the ground and eat all the other ants that they find. There's this colony of ants, which we now call Cappadocian ants. Okay. So I look this up and this is a region in Turkey that's known in part for its elaborate network. You ready for this? Of underground cities, hidden tunnels that could house possibly up to 20,000 people, the entrances of which could be concealed by boulders. It's like full underground cities. We just discovered a few years ago. Like if you are an archaeologist working on this with any kind of hookup, please do holler. I am here by begging you. Okay. Back to ants.

So, but there are these Cappadocian ants that are really tiny, but routinely are subjected to attack by army ants. Outside their nest entrance, they have a little pebble sitting outside. And when an aggressive ant comes to the ant colony and they smell them, an ant will come out and drag that pebble and plug the nest shut. And so you can stimulate this behavior by getting any kind of really aggressive smelly ant like an army ant and wave it in front of the ant entrance and they'll come out and they'll grab that little pebble and close it shut. Damn. They're like, nothing to see here. You're not getting in here. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Like in horror movies, when you see someone block the door with a chair

and you're like, that'll keep them out. That's so smart. I love this question so much. Jade wants to know. And we ask, I asked this definitely from a lot ofologists, but Jade wants to know which is more accurate scientifically, a bug's life or ants? Bug's life. Really? Do you have a preference between both ant movies? Gosh. Well, I've only seen each of them once. Okay. And I generally just found the ants one annoying. Like when Woody Allen has a good movie is good, but otherwise it's like, oh, you know, and then there's all these other issues of Woody Allen. And so, but I think bug's life in general, the whole concept about the colony, you know, having a seasonal nature and working together and storing food. But no, I think,

I mean, but in general, in terms of the life history of the ants, I think it's far better than the ant's movie. Ant Man, I thought was wonderful with ant biology. I thought a lot of stuff was bought on. It was, dare I say, in some ways, it was realistic. Like, right? Now, when you go to your next Miracology conference, will you guys probably talk about that and be like, hey, who did the consulting on that? Because it was like, pretty good job. Yeah, we all know the dude who did the consulting on that. Oh, really? No, last one ant meeting I was talking to, it was a, yeah, the grad student who worked on it and he did a great job. And he's like, oh, the one thing I'm really annoyed about he was telling me was that that they didn't do the all ants being female.

Right. That was my next question. Like, how do you feel when you watch the bug's life? And it's like, protagonist is like a little male and are you like, what? Well, I don't know. I said the thing is, it's like, if you're going to explain why all ants are female, that's not an easy discussion. I think old me and other more pedantic people would be like, oh my gosh, are you kidding? How can you let them get that wrong? That's like the most basic thing ever. Yeah. But, you know, recent me is like, well, you know, actually, since it's not an easy thing to explain and it's rather obscure and it doesn't in the grand scheme of thing make that much difference, then maybe we should just say, well, yeah, they're, you know, sure, fine, whatever. Let's not talk about gender.

So Terry says that there's one character named Anthony that is clearly morphologically, physically a queen, but it's a male, which was noted by the consultants, but the studio was like, nah, it's fine. Because there's all these other things they had absolutely right about all the other ants, all these, oh, well, carpenter ants are like this and they do this and, you know, and bullet ants are like this and they had all that stuff right and they looked like them and they behaved like them. It was like amazing. And so I think, so they made some decision at the home office like, okay, we know the consultant told us about this, but screw it, we're just not going to do that. I do feel like a lot of people know that that social insects tend to be primarily

female. Do you know what I mean? I feel like a lot of people like, you don't have to be like a super, super obscure, like a mermicology group be to know that. But what can you describe in a nutshell why they are female? I know you said it's obscure and complex. Okay. But in ants, bees and wasps, the males have a single copy of the genes. They are haploid. Okay. And females have two copies of the genes, meaning they're diploid. And so that's a thing in this group. That's just the way they are. And so that means that when males are making sperm, there's no meiosis, there's no sorting of genes. So in other words, all male sperm is identical. Oh, wow. And so their sperm is an exact copy of them.

Oh, weird. And so that results weirdness, these asymmetries in relatedness, but for the most part, like most of the social animals that are truly social that way have that genetic thing going on. And then how, how do they know that the eggs are just going to be female? Essentially, there's like a competition or a war or whatever in the colony, where a queen will lay an egg and she can choose to make it a male or a female, depending on whether or not she squirts sperm on it. Because in insects, the females have an organ called a spermatheca that stores sperm. So, so males die after they have sex for the most part. But worse for females, what they do is they just don't have sex again,

they just store the sperm for the rest of their life. Oh man, you get one super lay and then you're like, I guess I'm celibate. Yeah, or maybe a bunch and then you have sperm for multiple males, but then that's it. Okay. Yeah. Right. And so then, so then she lays an egg, she can make it a male by not putting any sperm on it, or she can make it a female by fertilizing it. Oh. When she makes a male, that's 100% her genes, right? Oh, wow. Okay, that's kind of crazy. So genetically, it's in the female's interest actually to make males, because the males are more closely related to her than her daughters who are only 50% related to her. So if a queen essentially is being selfish, then she's making too many males. But then the workers will get pissed off. And if the, you know,

because the workers want them to lay sisters, because the workers are more closely related to the sisters. Oh my God. And it's like Game of Thrones. Yeah, it's totally Game of Thrones. And so there's all these conflicts of interest and it's a total met. So for a long time, scientists were very firm in thinking that the relatedness caused the evolution of social behavior. But there's a new generation of scientists that didn't live through these wars. But anyone who's my generation or older, like, like we're talking as fighting words. Really? Yeah. Drama, so drama in the colony, drama outside of the colony, looking at the colony. Yeah, totally. Who knew that ant life was just like such a roiling soap opera?

Yeah. Okay, so last questions. What do you hate about your job other than getting stung by bullet ants? Oh gosh. I guess. Well, I guess I don't. Oh, this is a hard thing to say because it's so awesome. But as a mermicologist, what do I hate about being a mermicologist? I guess it's because being in Southern California, the ants are relatively boring compared to so many other parts of the world. Oh, we don't have quite as much like trapdoor ants and fungus ants. And we've got like, we've got a couple big species battling it out. Right. So you have Argentine ants, which is like an invasive species and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the some of the native ants, oh, they're kind of cool. But it's like, once you get tropical, then you see all these amazing things.

And so I see them when I go elsewhere, but not when I'm here. So I guess it keeps you thirsty for field research. Right. Yeah, exactly. Are you ever like at a picnic in LA or like at someone's house and you get distracted by ants and you're like, oh, I gotta go look at that. Yeah, once in a while and people chore it will be like, oh, you know, I should have like a vial in my pocket at all times, but I don't. But some people I know, they don't go anywhere without a vial. Do you have friends who call you Ant-Man? Yeah, there's a few. And then what do you love the most about being a mermicologist? There's still so much mystery. Like it's a whole frontier. As Cory Moreau recently pointed out, there's like a few hundred people in the world that are that,

you know, have labs that are focusing on studying ants. And there's so many things that we don't know. And especially in the tropics, you know, wherever you go, there are ants and they are doing things that are running the world. And so it's hard to not discover cool things if you choose to look. And if you had to glean some self-help information from ants, is there anything that ants have inspired you to do differently with your life or could inspire us to do? Within ant colonies, there's a lot of conflict. And despite the reputation for having their act together and working really hard, there's a lot of lazy ants that are waiting for other ants to do their job. And so I mean, I think, so I would think of if you were to look

in an ant colony, most ants aren't doing anything. Really? For every ant that you see above ground doing something, there's 10 ants sitting on their ass doing nothing underground. Oh my God. And so I think that's a good counter example for me. Like ants, instead of being the go-to-the-ant thou sluggard, they work really hard, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, ants are waiting for other ants to do their job before they can do theirs. They're like the opposite of being hardworking, entrepreneurial, whatever. And so they're a counter example. That's how I learned from ants. Does that make you work harder or chill more? No, I think I should learn from them that I probably should choose my own path and do my own thing rather than just try to perform the

role that I think I'm supposed to be doing. Like for instance, if my house is messy, it's because when my wife's waiting for me to do the dishes and I'm waiting for her to do the dishes, so they don't get done, that's the kind of thing that may or may not that I could kind of see happening in an ant colony where they follow the rules. If the individual washing dishes isn't there at the moment, then it's not going to happen, right? That's so funny to think about lazy ants like making you take initiative, which by the way, I have a sink full of dirty dishes and I live alone. So this is the saddest thing. I'm my own lazy ant. This was so informative. I love this. I don't think I'm ever going to look at ants the same. I mean, I already love them,

but I'm definitely going to be more prone to just seeing where they're headed. Yeah, you just watch them. I mean, so the thing is, if your kitchen is overrun with ants, you don't have to freak out and like wipe them all away because if you wait five more minutes, it's not going to get worse. Might as well just watch them, right? And then you nuke them. Thank you so much for being here. This was dope. I loved it. Thank you so much. So go around and go ask some smart people some not smart questions. All you want, even if they seem like small inquiries, the answers might be mighty. So now go find Terry Mclin on Twitter. He's at Ormiga, H-O-R-M-I-G-A on Twitter, which is Spanish for ant. Nice.

He's also at leaflitter.org. He's so great. And we are at Allergies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with 1L on both. So do say hello. Thank you again to Birthday Girl, Erin Talbert for admitting the Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Shannon and Bonnie for helping out too. Thank you, Emily White of the Wardery who makes our professional transcripts. Kayla Patton, Bleep Swears out of the episodes. And you can find both of those at aliward.com slash olergies-extras for free. Anyone who needs them. Thank you, Susan Hale and Noel Dilworth for keeping the olergies business running behind the scenes. Thank you, Kelly Dwyer for making my website. She can make yours too. Her link is in the show notes.

Thank you, Steve and Ray Morris for the original edit of this episode. Thank you and very, very happy birthday to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas who works on smallergies. He's wonderful. Those are short, class-in-friendly versions of classics. They come out about every two weeks. So thank you again, Zeke, for doing those. Thank you, Nick Thorburn who made the theme music. Thank you to Dr. Tegan-Wall for saying that male aunts are called uncles. A joke for which she gave me permission to steal. And of course, thank you to Queen of This Castle, Jared Sleeper for helping put up this encore and driving to and from my parents all weekend while I very literally drooled on myself

in the passenger seat. If you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this secret is that I have one of those pilea plants. They're called like pancake plants. They look like coins on stems. And it was given to me as a housewarming gift three years ago. And I've been really weirdly superstitious about not killing it. Like I'm really afraid to kill that one. And I haven't, and it's been two and a half three years, but it's starting to grow tall. And it has like this naked stem that's bending over. And I don't know what to do. I never thought it would live this long. I'm so anxious about it not dying. And I think it needs a stick to prop it up. But I don't know. It's one of the few plants I've

never killed. Also, I ordered a new toothbrush holder, which will make more sense if you listen to last week's episode. Okay, bye-bye. Because it's so awesome.