SciShow Tangents - Ants

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman expert Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. But also today we have a very special guest, scientist, journalist, former host of NPR's Shortwave and contributor to great shows like Science Friday and PBS's Deep Look. It's Maddie Savaya.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello. I love to get science people on the SciShow Tangents podcast. One of the most science people of all time, I would say. Well, let's lower our expectations. Now you know how it feels to be called the science expert. Now Maddie's our science expert. Yeah, Sari gets to take a break.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Yeah, I'm taking a nap. I get to ask questions like, what's your favorite thing about a salamander? I'll go first. My favorite thing about a salamander is that despite every every piece of evidence to the contrary, people used to think that they were they were spawned by fire because they throw wet logs? And so salamanders, despite being the wettest of the land animals, are deeply tied to a mythology of being fire related, like Charmander. Oh, is that? Is that where? You know, I have no idea. I have no idea. They may not have known.

Starting point is 00:01:40 It might have been a coincidence. No, absolutely. It's not a coincidence. There's the word Mander in it. He is a salamander. you looked at him yeah so they went like what if it was an actual fire lizard and then they went oh what's the word for that char char mander wow i gotta know now oh okay can i go next because i'm ready sure yeah yeah it's the mucus for me it's the mucus all day it's gotta be right i mean tell me more about the mucus well hank how's got to be, right? I mean, these things- Tell me more about the mucus.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Well, Hank, how long can- So, I mean, it's all about gas exchange, right? With the salamanders, right? We're doing some respiring through our skin, right? It's just made a little bit easier with a little shield of mucus. My favorite salamander, the hellbender salamander, is also nicknamed the snot otter because of just the level of beautiful gourmet mucus on it. So it's mucus for me.

Starting point is 00:02:31 That's hands down. It's an easy question. I hope I'm not telling tales out of school, but I read that you were inspired to get your PhD because of salamanders. Is that true? Yes. Yeah. Amongst other things, but it was mostly the salamanders for me, for sure. I think they're pretty cute.

Starting point is 00:02:46 That's what I like about them. Once you've looked into the eye of a hellbender salamander, then you know what your purpose is. Although they are very violent, so they will hit you in the face. So it's a process. Sam, is it just that they're cute? I guess. These ones actually aren't cute now that I'm looking at them. No, hellbenders aren't very cute.

Starting point is 00:03:03 Like slimy rocks. They look like a slimy rock. They're cute in a big way. You can have big and cute. You can be big and cute. Yeah, it's like any flat, you know, there's something to it. I think they're great. Cute in the way that you'd say about an animal that's sometimes called a snot otter.

Starting point is 00:03:20 Or a lasagna lizard. That's another good name for them. But wrinkles do look like noodles that's when it's a little flap of noodle a little extra gas exchange baby it's all surface area beautiful all right sarah what's your favorite thing about salamanders oh that they all look like axolotls and then they just stop looking like axolotls when they're done they grow up they got their gills they have an axolotl stage yeah or that's like um part of their juvenile stage they they have a stage where they don't have little feets and they have big external gills

Starting point is 00:03:51 underwater uh those little feathery i don't know hair pieces almost it's a hair piece yeah and then and then they shed those and get little leggies and then their mucus intensifies uh yeah i guess not shed they they reabsorb probably is a better way of saying it i bet they wish they could keep the head the hair pieces though because those are really cute and they're probably like why do you think the axolotls do it yeah they said i don't want to grow up and then just stayed like that i want to cut my hair mom i want to keep my cute pink hair that's how it works oh man i wish we were going to talk about salamanders today but we're not because i've heard that also maddie might be a little bit into ants yeah like a normal amount but i shouldn't have said that because i have to do the introduction before

Starting point is 00:04:41 we talk about the topic every week here in sci-show tangents we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory, but also for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem, This Week from Maddie.

Starting point is 00:05:03 So the only ants that i have like very intricate understanding of are imported red fire ants and where are we familiar with these they survive floods by building a raft out of their own bodies and they can kind of float around for days looking for dry land yes they're incredible they've been known to like crawl onto rafts after hurricanes, which people don't like, but it is an incredible survival mechanism. So I was inspired by that. And I wrote this poem from the perspective of a fire ant realizing that there is a flood. Wow. oh crap y'all we about to die quick grab the babies somebody tell the queen it's go time critters you know what i mean time to make more venom time to get pissed we're the nightmare boat they'll wish they missed we don't need food we barely need air we'll build a lookout tower as high as we dare hold on tight just one more night if ant raft is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Starting point is 00:06:06 At the end of our journey, we'll do what we do best. Eat all the neighbors and build a new nest. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, you will. That was beautiful. Do they get extra venom-y when it's time to pick a raft? They do.

Starting point is 00:06:20 It's unclear if they actually produce more venom or the volume of the venom sack increases but they are more agitated and produce more venom when they're in raft mode which i think makes sense i'd also just like to thank you for in in this in this month of march as we approach the 140th day with snow on the ground in montana to remind me of of the fire ant and that I actually am quite glad I don't live in Florida anymore. Yeah. Yeah. They were,

Starting point is 00:06:49 they are not a good situation. Yeah. Not, I I've never really had that many interactions with them, which is why I'm told I like them a lot. So the topic for the day is ants. Sorry, but,

Starting point is 00:07:00 uh, Sari, do you, we know, do we know what ants are? Yeah. Ants. Ants is a 1998 American adventure comedy film.

Starting point is 00:07:10 It was produced by DreamWorks. It's not to be confused with A Bug's Life, which was produced by Walt Disney and Pixar. Ants are also a branch of the Tree of Life, I imagine. Yeah. Ants with an S is a branch of the Tree of Life. They're in the same order, hymenmenoptera as wasps and bees um which is why i got similar body shapes they're also eusocial like they form these colonies they've been around for a while the oldest fossils date around 100 million years ago uh and modern ant subfamilies started appearing around 80 to 70 million years ago and they like we mostly know them because of like we've been talking about they all work

Starting point is 00:07:54 together really well they they form these nests there's usually one or sometimes in the really big colonies a few queens all working together, laying eggs. There are reproductive males that show up just to fertilize the queen. And then most of the worker ants, soldiers, the ones tending the larvae, etc., are non-reproductive females. And they use a lot of chemical signaling to know what's going on, where to go for food, how to treat each other. And because they've been around for so long, they've got lots of weird facts about them. Other organisms pretend to be ants. They've got weird parasites that have co-evolved with them or have taken them over and that's like the last of us fungus that cordyceps yeah uh that everyone in

Starting point is 00:08:50 the science communication world i feel like had a sense of and now everyone in the broader world knows because it got famous in a media thing well yeah what do we have now y'all you know what i mean we'll get something we'll get something there's lots of gross stuff left. There's something bumping around that's going to become a video game in the next few years. So there are solitary bees and wasps. Are there solitary

Starting point is 00:09:11 ants at all? I was going to ask the same question. Hank, oh my gosh. Are there solitary ants? I did not look this up for this episode, even

Starting point is 00:09:19 though that's a great question. I think bull ants might be. They're like very weird and one of the older species that has stuck around. And I think don't work together as well. They're trying their best.

Starting point is 00:09:32 Yeah. Well, they're just very aggressive. So I think, I don't know if they're trying their best. They're just not very friendly. Yeah. The longer you're around, the less you want to be around, you know, other people, I guess, in this evolutionary time. That makes a lot of sense. but what are the male ants doing oh they don't do anything they they live only a couple days or weeks they uh they they mate with the queens and then they die and they croak okay yeah then they die that that's all they're good for really i can't like the queens hold on to sperm for a long time like years that sounds right to me that they have some sort of like so they really just they're just they're just that one time and they're just hanging on to it yeah it's like if a sperm bank was in your body instead and you can

Starting point is 00:10:18 selectively release it and be like ah yes more egg time now i'd like by the end of this episode to like ants more. If we can make that happen, that would be great. You don't like ants very much? No! I love them. They're swarming, stinging insects. They're so stinking cute, though.

Starting point is 00:10:36 They crawl all over everything and they bring food back to each other. My question is, just out of respect, you don't even like them? Hey, you can't even... them? Hey, you can't just, you can't even. This is what I'm asking for. I need more context to build my appreciation. And I could start by building your respect with the etymology of ant, which I think is quite interesting.

Starting point is 00:10:56 All roots of ant trace back to European languages and words that mean to cut, maim, like the same root as maim i think and that can either be because an ant is a creature that cuts with its mouth it's got the mandibles and it's like a motion or it could come from the same idea as insect or um entomo and entomo is like entomology, which both derive from the fact that insects are segmented bodies. So the ant has little cuts in its body. It's not a tube like a worm. It's like a couple separate segments. And I never really thought about that with regards to the word insect, but it's a notched animal. It is a sectioned animal. Another word that came from that cut etymology is emmet, E-M-M-E-T.

Starting point is 00:11:54 And so we could have had that as the word for ants. So instead of a bunch of ants, we got a bunch of emmets. That's cute. I could definitely hear that. They seem like a bunch of little emmets. Hey there, how are you doing? That's how they I could definitely hear that. They seem like a bunch of little inmates. Hey there, how you doing? That's how they would talk to. And now that we know all of those things,

Starting point is 00:12:09 it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing Ants Truth or Fail. Whether you are at a picnic or maybe just relaxing at home, you probably haven't had some kind of ant encounter. You've seen them walking in a line, marching towards your food. It's annoying, but it's also kind of routine at this point. Sometimes, though, interactions between humans and ants take a very weird turn. The following are three stories of absurd ant-human interactions, but only one of them is true. Which one do you think it is? Story number one,

Starting point is 00:12:42 scientists studying bats in abandoned nuclear bunkers came upon a grisly discovery, a colony of ants that had fallen into the bunker and started eating each other. Concerned for the ants, the scientists set up wooden planks for the ants to climb out of the bunker. Or it could be story number two, a group of park rangers had to contend with two invasions at their cabin at once, woodpeckers and ants. And to deal with both issues at once, the rangers trapped the ants, blended them into a syrup, and applied them to nearby trees to lure the woodpeckers away from their cabin. Or it could be story number three. A group of kids were playing with a slingshot, shooting clay balls at a tree trunk when they saw something strange. A group of ants that live in the tree began to congregate and stack up on each other in the area the kids were targeting,

Starting point is 00:13:34 like they were using their body as a physical shield to protect the tree. So it could either be the scientists saving cannibalistic ants from an abandoned nuclear bunker, the rangers creating ant syrup to get woodpeckers to stop bothering them, or trees using an ant shield to defend themselves against kids with slingshots. Ants do be stacking.

Starting point is 00:13:56 You know? It's true! They build whole nets out of themselves. Uh-huh. You mentioned that they build watchtowers when they're rafting how do they want how do they what do they do if they see something if they like come upon a stick or something they'll be like oh that's better than our bodies and they grab the hand onto it they go all the way up it and it's unclear if they're trying to look for land or if they're it's just like

Starting point is 00:14:21 structurally easier for them okay but they can do it in like two minutes. It's incredible. All right. So they do be stacking, but that feels like a trap. Like Hank would know that we know. That's the pitfall of truth or fail. What's a trap and what's just a true fact? The scientist blending something up, that's weird enough. That feels like they were in the cabin,

Starting point is 00:14:43 they had some time on their hands. It wasn't possible for them to introduce a third species to try and take care of it at the time if ants are stacking scientists are definitely blending we've talked about some blending many things so i can i don't know for sure a woodpecker would think that's yummy they would look at the the blended ants and go oh formic acid it's a humanity that's the biggest monster they eat bugs but yeah there's also some ants that don't have formic acid you know they're juicy ants instead they were like a little grape ant the first one i've heard this i've heard this story but i feel like there's aspects of it i

Starting point is 00:15:28 don't know if are wrong for this like i can't remember there's so many episodes of scishow that i've watched and listened to that i've half paid attention to that i'm just so confused all the time basically i want to go with number two i i believe a scientist was like let's blend these bad boys i just i know that guy i i am with sam i'm gonna go with number one because i think i've heard it before but i don't know in what context and this has got me into trouble before but i'm going to my gut fresh start for me and this season is it the first episode of the it's the first episode of the new season hank oh my. I guess we should have mentioned that. Welcome to season five.

Starting point is 00:16:09 We have a special guest to celebrate the beginning of season five. Yeah. Number two, I just don't know that woodpeckers would be like. Well, we never. Did we say it solved the problem or just that they thought. That's a good point. That Jeff thought this was a good idea. That's a good point.

Starting point is 00:16:25 I think I'm going to go with. I'm going to go with three, though. Well, everyone. In 2013, scientists were studying abandoned bats in abandoned nuclear bunkers in Poland. And they did indeed find an ant colony that had ended up in the bunker as well. And they came from a colony that lived above the bunker, but it had fallen through a ventilation pipe, and they couldn't find their way back out. And the population seemed to come entirely from above. And when they were digging through the colony, they could find no larva or

Starting point is 00:16:54 queen or any other sign of reproduction. And in addition to the lost living ants, there were piles of more than 2 million dead ants that had bites and holes in them suggesting that they had been consumed by fellow ants, which was just such a bad vibe. And they felt so unpleasant about it that after taking some time and not at first intervening, some people got upset that they had sort of talked about this but not intervened. And they decided in 2016 to help the ants reunite with their above ground colony. And they first introduced a smaller sample of the bunker ants to the non-bunker ants to make sure that they were actually still friends. Yeah, that they weren't. And after that little time, they added wooden planks to the bunker to help the ants climb out, which they then did. What year did they find this?

Starting point is 00:17:40 Good job, I guess. Yeah, wait, what year? Did they come back years later? Did I catch that right? Yeah, yeah. They came back years later. Who wrote this grant? This is incredible. Like, they're just, they happen upon a different organism, and they're like, no, no, no, we're

Starting point is 00:17:55 going to do a reintroduction. These are bat biologists. They don't know ants. I know, I love it. I love it so much. This is the thing about grant-funded research, is that you can't study the thing that's most interesting. You have to study the thing you wrote the grant about. You don't know.

Starting point is 00:18:11 They violated the prime directive also. This isn't allowed. Look, Sam, I think you might be confused about the situations in which the prime directive applies. It's just ants. All the bat biologists I've met are really nice. They would do something nice like this. You know? That's nice. Sweet, sweet bat biologists. I have cool facts about

Starting point is 00:18:31 the other ones. For example, that ants created a funny part of woodpecker evolution. So birds have lost the ability to taste sweetness because they didn't need it. But woodpeckers converted their savory receptors back to sweet because apparently that's important when you're a woodpecker, you need to be able to taste sweet.

Starting point is 00:18:53 But even weirder, there is a specific woodpecker, the Rhynek woodpecker that converted its sweet converted taste receptors back to savory because of how many ants it ate and it needed to be able to taste the ants. So you had a savory receptor convert to sweet and then back to savory just for this one woodpecker. Did it need to be able to taste the ants or want it to be able to taste the ants? Sometimes surviving isn't enough, Sam. You know? You got to take some joy in your life.

Starting point is 00:19:21 Did he need to taste the ants? No, but he wanted something to look forward to, Sam. He's like, I spend my whole day hitting my head into a tree, so please, just give me this. Give me this. This is one.

Starting point is 00:19:31 I just want to feel. And Sam, you chose three, correct? I sure did. This is a very cool story, but it's not what I said. So in Panama, a teenager accidentally

Starting point is 00:19:43 shot the tree trunk of a cecropia tree, I don't know how it's pronounced, which is known to live in symbiosis with Azteca ants. And the ants get shelter from the tree. And at the same time, they protect the leaves. The next day, the teenager noticed that the spot where he had wounded the tree had been healed. So a group of high school students worked with a scientist to study the tree. They drilled holes in the trees and they saw how the ants would immediately

Starting point is 00:20:10 go to the wound and begin repairing it, often fixing it completely within 24 hours. The behavior might protect the trees from sloths and anteaters that might scrape them with their toenails. But interestingly, not all colonies fixed up the damage and they weren't able to figure out

Starting point is 00:20:25 why some colonies did this and some didn't so far. They're writing the grant right now. They're writing the grant only to find out that they're actually going to be studying bats. What did they fix it with? They were just like,

Starting point is 00:20:43 what were they doing? I don't actually know. I don't know what to do. It's got to be spit up. Ants are always spitting up. Big spitters. When they're on those rafts, they feed each other mouth-to-mouth style because they can't get food. So they have like a little goo that they store in their abdomen.

Starting point is 00:20:56 That doesn't help the one who's doing the feeding. Well, yeah. I mean, obviously, you've got some ants that have got some more. You know? Yeah. You've got some youth. My favorite part,, you know. Yeah. You've got some you've got some youth. My favorite part. Babies are on the bottom because they float the best.

Starting point is 00:21:09 You know, there's. Yeah. I wrote the line. Finally, a useful baby in that documentary. And they cut the line and I have never forgiven them. I do understand how that happened. But it is objectively true babies are not in and of themselves in the moment useful i tried to fact check it too it didn't work but here's a list of useless babies

Starting point is 00:21:38 so we are headed out of the truth of the truth or fail with sam and maddie at zero and sari with one point next we're going to take a short break and then we'll be out of the truth or fail with Sam and Maddie at zero and Sari with one point. Next, we're going to take a short break and then we'll be back for the fact off. All right, everybody, get ready for the fact off usually when we have a guest we just don't do a fact off we do other stuff but maddie was so eager to blow my mind and so eager to defeat sari that she is requested to do one so we're going to do this fact off like the old days when there were four hosts our panelists have both brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow me and Sam's mind. And after they have presented their facts, we will judge them and award a Hank Buck to whichever fact we liked more. This better be good.

Starting point is 00:22:37 And to decide who goes first, we have a trivia question. The first ant farm, also known as a formicarium, was made by Charles Janet in the early 1900s. But the first commercial version was patented in 1931 by Frank Austin, a professor of engineering who came up with the idea of placing soil and ants in between two panes of glass so people could watch the ants live their lives. To stock up the ant farms, he recruited local kids to help track down ants. How many dollars per quart did frank austin pay children for his ants in 1931 uh-huh i like that i'm adjusting for inflation right now like that's gonna help me because that seems like a lot in 1931 a whole dollar multiple dollars you can do it in current money as well. Current money. If you would like to do it that way.

Starting point is 00:23:27 Five bucks for a quarter of a million. Oh, dang it. Serious. I'm going to say eight bucks. Eight bucks in current dollars, current U.S. dollars. Yes, current. I'm guessing current dollars. Sure, yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:23:37 The answer in current U.S. 2023 dollars, $79.17. What? What's up? Which in 1931, Sari was $4. 2023 dollars, seventy nine dollars and seventeen cents. Oh, what? Which in 1931, Sari was four dollars. That's like I that's that's good freelance money. That's like imagine needing to collect a quart of ants. Truly. I am in.

Starting point is 00:23:57 That's a lot. That's a lot of ants. Get some honey on the ground. There's my court. Yeah. But what next? What next, Sari? Get some honey on the ground. What's your plan after that? I don't know. Get some honey in a jar. Get some honey in the ground. There's my court. Yeah, but what next? What next, Siri? Get some honey on the ground?

Starting point is 00:24:05 What's your plan after that? I don't know. Get some honey in a jar. And just pick them up one by one. So yeah, I guess it was a fairly expensive endeavor purchasing an ant farm at that point. I assume that it was part of your sort of like cabinet of curiosities if you're a wealthy person. When you're rich and eccentric, you can really do anything you can be like children fetch me some ants so that means that maddie goes first does that mean that we're tied or is sari still up one

Starting point is 00:24:37 oh sari is up one right now okay you just got to go first so if it get both me and sam then you can still win okay okay here we go so we are all somewhat familiar with carnivorous plants in this tangents family right okay so if you don't know what they are they are plants that capture and eat insects arthropods whatever little critters and one such plant is the pitcher plant And it's shaped kind of like a water pitcher. And it has these kind of like little tendrils that come off of it. And the rim of the pitcher and the inside of the pitcher plant is super slippy. Like so slippy that scientists are studying them to try and make better toilets. Like there is like science going on about i like the idea that the thing that we

Starting point is 00:25:26 most in the world need to be slippier is the inside of a toilet i understand exactly something else maybe something else water slides too dangerous if not a water slide in a way anyways so one of the main things that these pitcher plant eats are ants. They kind of like climb onto the plant. The pitcher plant puts out some like good stink and the ants come around and they slip down and are slowly digested over time in digestive fluid. It's beautiful. However, there is one ant called Colobopsis schmitzi. I don't know if you're supposed to pronounce the bop like that in the middle, but I like it.

Starting point is 00:26:04 That's fun and they evolved to basically be like not only am I not scared of this this slippy plant this is where I live now so it builds its nests in these little tendrils and for some reason that is unclear they are able to walk around the rim of this plant and they will like clean up the rim and keep it nice and clean for the plant or they will climb down into the plant somehow dive headfirst into the digestive juices underwater for like 30 seconds at a time they do this specialized like underwater run i think like this with my, grab stuff that the pitcher plant has hunted and found, float back up to the surface,

Starting point is 00:26:51 go back to the side, and drag it up the side. Yeah, so they steal the pitcher plant's food, but Hank, remember the slippy side. That's the slippiest substance on Earth. And they're not just getting out, they're getting out with extra mass. They kind of come up and they're still just getting out they're getting out with extra mass they're getting out well they kind of like they kind of like come up and they're still like in the pitcher and they tear it up and

Starting point is 00:27:09 then they drop what they don't want back into the digestive juices which is very metal but it is unclear to scientists how they are doing this they don't seem to have any kind of like weird morphology or their little tarsies aren't weird In my understanding is that they just try harder than every animal I have ever read about them because it takes them. Let me get this right. If they drag, like, let's say they have some mosquito larva, okay, right? They drag this mosquito larva from the digestive fluid up to the rim of the plant, which is about five centimeter. And it can take them up to 12 hours to drag this thing up you have never tried that hard on any like 12 hours to drag it up i've never been focused on

Starting point is 00:27:56 a single task for 12 hours and they just eat it apart and then they drop the rest of it and they climb out and they're like what's up and then they go live in the rest of the plant. They just try harder. They just try. It's our current theory. I mean, there's some cool stuff they're doing with their swim and their underwater run. But as far as just like making the climb, I think, you know, they're just, they just got grit.

Starting point is 00:28:17 For any animal moving for 12 hours, two inches has to be the smallest. Yeah. I think it makes those ants that live in that bunker look like a bunch of quitters they could have gotten up in several years i wasn't gonna say it try harder next time you're stuck in a nuclear bunker i'll think that to myself what was the scientific name again so it's colobopsis schmitzy ah that's great just a bob in the middle it's got to be a guy's name too it's definitely schmidt schmidt did this

Starting point is 00:28:46 for sure this and is now immortalized by finding the cool one of the coolest dance one of the coolest dance i can't is there a cooler answer i think i'm gonna lose this one but I'll give it a G-dang try. So dogs, to me, feel pretty unique in the grand scheme of animals because even though they're all Canis familiaris, one species, they can be huge and fluffy like a Newfoundland or small and scrawny like a Chihuahua. There's a lot of size and shape differences, which are generally called polymorphisms. And part of that, big part of that is due to humans and our artificial selection of them while breeding. But there are some pretty extreme polymorphisms that just happen in species too, including in ants specifically, and most extremely in species of marauder ants, such as Carebara diversa.

Starting point is 00:29:47 So in many ant colonies, kind of like we talked about, you can expect to see a couple different sizes. Usually the reproductive queen is a little bit bigger. If you've watched like those bee and ant TikToks, they're like, oh, that's the queen wiggling around. While the fertile males and the non-reproductive females like workers and soldiers are generally a little smaller or have specialized adaptations to help them do their tasks. And marauder ants have all these categories too, but notably have lots of different tiered versions of workers, like one huge cartoon family where you squashed and stretched their bodies and faces to create different ants that are all part of the same colony.

Starting point is 00:30:26 So to give an example of the extremes, the so-called major workers tend to have big, hairy square heads that can be over 10 times as large as the petite, oval, and smoother heads of minor workers with body differences that generally match those trends. So it's not just the heads. But they have different roles in the colony where bigger ants are more involved in the defense and smaller ants are more involved in raising young but it seems like in the case of marauder ants all of them participate in foraging raids to various degrees these ants can't sting so the way they hunt is just like overwhelming prey all the ants they rally of all shapes and, overwhelm their prey like a frog with their

Starting point is 00:31:06 bodies, bite them all, and rip pieces of skin. Very brutal. And the main reason I chose this fact is that sometimes entomologists have observed the bigger ants, like major workers or queens, which are generally pretty large, those 10 times or more bigger, carrying minor workers on piggyback. And the pictures are great. One biologist named Mark Moffitt wrote that he thought it might be a way for the little guys to conserve energy by basically riding a giant ant bus on their little, the little rain. That's cute.

Starting point is 00:31:38 Which is an image that I love. And more broadly speaking in biology, ending with a little mystery as well, some 13% or so of ant species have this kind of huge variation in worker size. Maybe not to this extreme, but there are significantly bigger, like multiple times bigger ants and smaller ants of the same species. So it must be advantageous in some way to have like big guys who can carry a bunch of the little guys around.

Starting point is 00:32:04 But we don't really understand like the social or nutritional or environmental factors that cause these differences we've we've researched a lot into like queen reproducing versus not but not like why would you have a big boy and a lot of tiny boys and uh or i guess ladies uh a big lady a big big old gal and a lot of tiny ones uh like what what is evolutionary advantageous to do that yeah who knows besides the looking cute little piggyback ride every once in a while it's so weird and awesome that one that like they are they are the same genetically. And it's just like we got to remember that morphology and genetics are not the same thing.

Starting point is 00:32:52 Genetics is not destiny. And it's so weird that ants can do that. Oh my God, I'm starting to like ants. Definitely come to that. Some of them are buses. That's very strange. Some of them are buses. So do the little ones definitely ride the big ones

Starting point is 00:33:07 because this is important yes I think so there's enough pictures of the little ones riding the big ones around that it does seem like I mean that makes perfect sense to me that that would be that would be evolutionarily advantageous for the same reason it's advantageous to have a bus yeah but then that bus has to eat

Starting point is 00:33:22 bus has got to eat you have to feed a bus too S, but then that bus has to eat. Yeah. Buses gotta eat. You have to feed a bus too, Sari. Yeah, that's true, I guess. Same thing. You gotta feed a horse, a bus, all of them.

Starting point is 00:33:32 It's just like having a horse. But the horse is also, it's like if a smaller horse is riding a horse. Like you were riding a giant, you. A giant guy.

Starting point is 00:33:44 Yeah, I mean, I bet I would want to ride a giant person if the ground was as big and bumpy as it is to an ant yeah i got a real big wife she can pick me up and put me on her shoulders and she just walks me she takes me for a hike and then she yeah then i buy her a sandwich gotta feed the bus gotta feed the bus feed the bus oh man i don't know how to make this choice this is really hard potentially the slowest animal on earth escape the grips of the predatory plan through plant through pure grit or a bunch of little ants riding a big ant bus. I know there was more to your fact than that, Sari. That's the pith for me.

Starting point is 00:34:32 Oh, yeah, definitely. I just wanted to beef it up. I couldn't just show you the picture and walk away and be like, look at this ant. In full disclosure, there might be something we haven't discovered. It might not be just grit. I choose to believe the little schmitzies are out there trying their hardest what is what's the scientific name of yours is it as good as colobopsis it's carabara which is pretty good i would say that's good too come on that's not carabara i don't know come on it could It could be Carebara, huh? It could be Carebara. I think I said Carebara.

Starting point is 00:35:07 You're gussying it up for us. You're trying to pull it over. It's just a big old Carebear ant that's giving the little guys a hug and carrying them. Oh, I'm looking at the bus right now and... Yes! A lot of ants could fit on that ant bus all right i know i've i've made up my mind god bless it care bearer come on do you want to say the person's name is that how we do it okay i'll count to three and then on three we'll say the name one two three maddie maddie will say the name one two three maddie maddie hey wow wow wow wow that's good sir i would have voted for you too i was thinking about what was going to make the best tiktok and i i felt like

Starting point is 00:35:54 the pictures of the care bear with the ants on it was gonna scare people away they're pretty cute wow so it's just about the content with you it's all about the content that's what you will learn you might learn that early uh it's probably for the best oh wow well i'd just like to thank god and my family and you know everybody that brought me here um my partner who i asked between a couple of facts, and they said, ask one of your other friends. Ask somebody who cares about this. And now it's time to ask the science couch

Starting point is 00:36:36 where we ask a listener question to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At RobotBanana4 asks, are they just like incredibly strong or are they small enough that 10 times their body weight just isn't hard to carry? I wonder this all the time myself. I have also wondered this. I'm like,

Starting point is 00:36:54 yeah, it's 10 times their body weight, but they're ants. I can also lift 10 times the body weight of an ant. So, yeah. Is this something that should be compared in that way? So, it is because they're they're small and it has to do with like math of scaling up animals which gets a little bit brain bendy but i will try to walk through it uh so like the biological reasons are ants and other insects

Starting point is 00:37:20 are have super hard exoskeletons but they're very thin and light and so their muscles do a lot of moving but not a lot of support for their bodies and our we've got so much like squishy flesh and organs and whatnot that our muscles have to support but ants they're just like hollow tubes basically their muscles can i think their closing jaw muscles in some species can take up around half to two thirds of their head space. And like, that's all for crunching, for clamping shut, as opposed to for like our neck muscles. We're supporting our big, gushy heads and whatnot and our jaw muscles are relatively small considering we're carrying around all these bones wasting our time carrying around all these bones so ants and other small insects have the advantage of they've got less

Starting point is 00:38:17 to carry around and so their muscles can do more at that scale. The main consideration is as you start scaling things up, the mass increases more than the muscle strength does. You're like stretching it out two times and then it's eight times as chunky. And so that's the same thing as an ant. It's mass, we get heavier. And the way that muscles work is it's tensile strength. it's uh like the way it pulls and pushes so your your muscles proportionate to your body size are not as strong when you've got a bunch more body to deal with the visual that worked for me is like from an ant to like a coconut crab so a coconut crab also has an exoskeleton also has like claws pinchy claws also has muscles that's like crab meat it's just muscle just for everybody's heads a coconut crab is like a dog-sized crap yeah

Starting point is 00:39:11 i recommend looking them up like horrifying but like animals that is how like a an ant would have to scale up like i think you imagine like the Ant-Man ant scaling up when it gets all big, it's still really spindly and light, but in order to support its increased body mass, it would need its legs to like balloon out to hold more muscle mass to be able to support that body, even with a light exoskeleton. And then the exoskeleton would have to get thicker or have more pores in it in

Starting point is 00:39:44 order for it to breathe oxygen because there's no like centralized circulatory system it's just hemolymph inside an ant and they breathe through pores in their exoskeleton so it'd have trouble breathing it'd have trouble holding itself up and whatnot we're still studying like what what's going on in ants one study that was trying to look at robot insects and how to build, they basically tried to take ants apart like a little robot and understand what the strong parts were and not. Their experiment, who is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering,

Starting point is 00:40:19 they attached the ant heads to the center of a centrifuge and spun them around and was like, how much strength can the neck withstand? And apparently the neck joint of an American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times the ant's weight. So there's

Starting point is 00:40:38 something specifically about the neck joint because their heads are the ones doing the biting and lifting and whatnot. Bat researchers would never do that to ants. You know what I mean? They would never. But a mechanical engineer? No, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:40:51 A mechanical engineer would do whatever they want to an ant mech. Every single one of you, and you know it. All of you mechanical engineers listening. If you want to ask the science couch your question, you could follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics or upcoming episodes every week. You can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord as well. Thank you to at Klezbot, Chris P on Discord and everybody else who asked your questions for this episode. That's Chris P, not Chris P.

Starting point is 00:41:19 That was just for clarity. Thank you, Maddie. Can we check out what you're up to these days anywhere? Yeah. I'll be hosting Science Friday on April 21st. So check that out. But I'd like to use most of my time to say happy anniversary to my partner. As it is our anniversary today.

Starting point is 00:41:38 And they understand that I needed to record something. Audience. That is important happy anniversary, happy Pi Day, happy all of it. Sometimes being a podcaster means you make your wife mad. Unfortunately.

Starting point is 00:41:54 Sam, that's what Sam thinks anyway. Yeah. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents to become a patron, get access to things

Starting point is 00:42:06 like our newsletter and our bonus episodes, and a special thanks to patrons John Pollock and Les Aker. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show, and it also helps other people know that you like what we do here. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow

Starting point is 00:42:21 Tangents, just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Maddie Sophia. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Faith Schmidt.

Starting point is 00:42:36 Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bizzio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:42:53 And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. This one comes from reporting from up-and-coming science journalist Ed Young. In 2017, researchers discovered army ants in the Costa Rican rainforest with two butts. After a closer look, though, they realized the second butt wasn't actually part of the ant. It was a tiny, super well-camouflaged beetle, from its reddish-brown

Starting point is 00:43:36 color to the microscopic structure of its shell. We still don't know what these butt beetles eat, or what predators they might be hiding from, like the ants themselves, or organisms that are scared of army ants but we do know to look for them chomping on an ant waste i mean the fact that there's a fake butt beetle or ants what can't beetles do what can't they do the fact that there's a fake butt beetle and we have no idea why they're doing if you're pretending to be a butt you're're hiding from something real bad, I think.

Starting point is 00:44:08 That's right. This beetle made some mistakes earlier in his life. This beetle made some mistakes. This beetle's hiding for themselves and their family at this point.

SciShow Tangents - Ants

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