Stuff You Should Know - Ants! Part 2!

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

The exciting conclusion of Ants Part 2! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Chuck here real quick with some bad news and sad news. Sketch Fest this year in San Francisco, which is where we were going to have our first live show in two years here in a couple of weeks, has been postponed. I believe they're looking to postpone it by a

whole year and kind of rebook the whole festival ideally. But you know with what's going on around the country with Omicron, they didn't feel like they could press forward and as bummed as we are, we think it's the right move as well. So if you have tickets, just stay tuned for an announcement. I think you will either probably be able to, well I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen with them. Maybe a refund, maybe if you hold on to them they're good for next year because we're probably going to book in the same theater. But I'll list it up for announcement soon. And again, all apologies. We're super sad about it. We're really looking forward to getting back out there again. But until further notice, live shows are still on hold. All right, now here we go

with the show. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Stuff You Should Know, part two about ants, which is just knocking our socks off. We released this one on the first one on Tuesday, Chuck. My socks are still off and it's Thursday. That's right. And you know, if you listen to part one, we tried to throw in some amazing ant facts. And I think we, I think we came through there, but most of that was a little bit of the nuts and bolts. I think part two has got a little bit more wow factor because we talk a lot about, a lot more even about the social structure of these amazing insects.

Yeah. So ants are great, great example of a social insect like bees, some wasps, but I think there's plenty of solitary wasps too. But let's say like bees, they really kind of resemble bees in that sense. Yeah, totally. And despite, you know, how many ants there are and how many bees there are, apparently social insects only make up something like 2% of all insect species. The rest are solitary or antisocial or drifters, that kind of thing. So at the heart of any social insect society is the queen. And usually Chuck, the whole thing is so hierarchical, there's just like one queen. Yeah, this is the one part that tripped me up a little bit as far as there, as far as that being a benefit for their survival, I would think like, hey, more queens,

more eggs, like there should be, you know, not all queens because obviously I get that queens need a lot of special care. I mean, I guess let's talk about it because queens get fed. One reason that makes them the queen is that they're the only sexually reproductive female. And that's the only thing she does is mate and lay tons and tons of eggs. An army queen can lay up to 300,000 eggs in a few days. Wow. And they're bigger, like they're just, they basically sit around, they mate, they lay eggs and they get fed a really protein rich diet. So they grow up to like, you know, three, four times the size of all the other ants. Yeah. And so with the queen, they're, like you said, one of the big differences or the difference is that they're bigger than other female ants,

which are worker ants. Genetically, they're basically the same. It's just that they're much, much bigger, which means somehow I think also from that protein rich diet, they're also, they have ovaries that function as well. So they're able to reproduce. But that's basically the only two differences. And that just goes to show you that any worker egg can be raised into a queen. Right. And we'll see, you know, cases where that might happen. Another difference is they live a lot longer. The queen ants of the black garden ant can live up to 30 years apparently. That's amazing. Female workers live about a year. And I guess we can talk a little bit about the males, the poor male ant. They only live a week. They are hatched from, they don't even bother to

fertilize eggs for the males. They hatch from unfertilized eggs. Whereas all females hatch from fertilized eggs. And the males, you know, they do their thing. They're there to impregnate the queen. And then they die. They're sex slaves is what they are. Yeah. And Dave points out, you know, Dave Ruze helped us with this. He said basically almost any ant that you see is probably a female ant. Yeah. Not just because the workers are responsible for doing everything, but like you said, the lifespan of a male ant is so short. The chances of you seeing one are pretty slim. Although as we'll see, there are some times where they're on such full spectacular display that you actually may have seen male ants before. Sure. Yeah. We'll get to that weirdness

in a minute. But the females are the workers that, you know, it's like, where was Wonder Woman from? Amazonia. Amazonia. I don't know. It's kind of like the society there. It's just, it's all these ladies making things happen as a big group, all in service to this queen. And the workers do everything. They feed and care for the young. They feed and care for the queen. They go out and get the food. They maintain that nest and the colony, which we'll talk about. It's just remarkable what they do. They're the police force. They're the army. They are the custodians. They do everything. Yeah. So like everything that has nothing to do with mating and laying eggs, that's the workers doing all that stuff. Yep. It's pretty cool. And depending on the species,

sometimes the workers are more specialized than in other species. Yeah. Sometimes they'll be like major workers who are much larger than the minor workers. So they'll be the ones that go out and like forage and maybe defend the nest. While the minor workers, the smaller ones are left behind to tend to the larva and the pupae and basically raise the next generation. So there's, there can be like specialization of what you do as an ant depending on your size or how you were raised. That's right. And so it's a very strict cast system basically. There's no like working your way up the ladder. It seems like you kind of have your job. You're happy to do it. Ants are very happy, emotional little insects, right? Yeah. They really wear their hearts on their sleeves. You can tell

if an ant is having a bad day, but the good thing about it is you can cheer them up pretty easily too. Just hold your finger out, let them climb up on your finger. They find it so delightful. And if you have a little honey do in your pocket, you can really turn their day around. Now, you know, we mentioned the males just basically impregnate the queen then die, but I didn't really quite get this part about the genetics of the chromosomal genetics. So basically a male is just an egg that has a genome from it's his mother, from the queen, usually the queen. A female is created. So like that would mean that all unfertilized eggs are males and then the queen comes along and fertilizes some select ones. And I think

it's actually dependent on what the workers point out. I think the workers actually decide how many new female workers are needed compared to how many males are needed. And then the queen comes along and fertilizes some proportion of those unfertilized male eggs. And then those become workers, female workers. Okay. And then in some cases, when there's not a queen, say a queen died or something like that, a colony would find itself up the creek. But apparently there's plenty of ant species where the workers can actually lay unfertilized male eggs to raise a generation of males that can mate with a queen that the workers produce as well. So the workers can keep a colony from dying off if the queen dies. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. After I saw that some of

these queens can live 30 years, I just became paranoid about like accidentally killing a queen. But I think that probably doesn't happen because they're never out there to be stepped on, right? No, it's you pretty much won't have to invade a nest. Like you're an exterminator if you're killing the queen. Okay. Oh, man. I know. But that's what they do. I mean, that's what they're trying to go after the queen. So sure. Yeah, we have a mole problem in my yard. And I'm just like, I guess we have a mole problem because I'm certainly not going to let somebody come along and drop M80s into these mole holes and blow them up. But luckily I found a service that uses something called mole scram. And it's just kind of like an irritant, but it doesn't actually hurt

them in any way. They just don't want to be around it. So I'm going to give that one a try because they will mess up your lawn really quickly. I thought you're going to say a guy comes by with a flute, which leads them down to your neighbor's house. I just did our Piper episode as a select. So I heard it recently and it's really good. But the first 20 minutes is really odd. It's like oddly, like we're like challenging one another and it's just really weird. And then about what? I don't know. We're just like showing off to one another. You'll just have to listen to it. It's pretty interesting, but it really comes out on top. It's a good episode. Interesting. That's not the stuff you should know. I know that's what I'm saying. It's weird. It's a weird

start to an episode, but usually shrink in the face of competition. That's right. We don't challenge each other. You can't very strange. All right. I guess we need to get to the nests here. This is kind of some of the most remarkable stuff that you're ever going to see. I saw this one. Do yourself a favor. Go to YouTube and I can't remember what the search term was, but like amazing aunt colony or something like that. And it's like a three minute video where they found, they wanted to research what these things look like below ground. And so they pumped concrete into the hole. I don't know where this was. It took 10 tons of concrete to fill this thing. And then they let it sit for a month. And then they excavated or whatever,

like you would a fossil and dig around it. And they dug out what ended up being, it looked like about the size of a little league baseball infield. Wow. 26 feet deep, 175 feet across. And it was one of the most unbelievable things I've ever seen. It looked like literally like an architect had designed it. They were talking about the efficiencies of, you know, every tube was like it was the shortest route to get to the next thing. It was like, it looked like it had been purposefully designed that way. And it's just the DNA of these ants that know how to do this stuff. So yeah, you mentioned something important that the tunnels and the connections they make between all these chambers, they do tend to be like the shortest route between them.

And ants also apparently will burrow on these really kind of steep angles, but they're at the angle of repose, which is the steepest angle that something like a pile of dirt or a pile of sand can maintain without collapsing. And somehow ants just know like, oh, this is the angle I need to be to be digging at. Yeah, I saw that one thing you sent. And I guess we can talk about the force chains here. It's pretty interesting. But when they were studying these ants, they thought maybe like, maybe they're doing like a game of Jenga when they're making these tunnels where they, they feel a little bit and kind of touch the block, which in this case are little individual grains of sand or dirt or whatever to see if it would weaken the structure. And I think after

the end of this experiment, they were like, no, they're not, they're not doing that. They are just coded to do this. Yeah. And they were like, we have no idea how ants know what little grains of sand or dirt to pull out and what ones they shouldn't because they're load bearing grains, but they just do and they're really successful at it. And what they somehow are aware of is that there are things called what you said force chains, where if you follow like a force chain of soil or dirt underground, like in a cross section of ground, those are the things that are holding the soil in place. And not all of the pieces or grains of dirt or sand are responsible for holding the soil in place. So you could conceivably move one and leave another in place. And that column of sand

or dirt above is going to stay intact. Somehow ants know what grains are load bearing and what grains aren't. And so when they're doing this, they're actually removing the sands that aren't part of the force chain. And when they do chuck, it actually reinforces the structure of the force chain that it diverts it to the outside of the tunnel they're digging, which just makes it that much stronger. And again, they're not just kind of testing it like a game of Jenga, like that would make sense. And I see why they thought that might be what's happening is like they push a little bit to see if anything starts to give. Again, it's just like 130 million years of practice. Yeah. And because they're so good at creating these burrows and tunnels and chambers that not only

maintain, but also actually reinforce the force chains underground, it can ant colony, a subterranean ant colony might hold up for decades once they dig it out. I felt terrible when I saw this thing being pumped full of concrete. I didn't know if it was vacant or there was some pretty decent pile of dirt on top. But I know you made the point with that stuff you sent over that it's sort of like the tip of the iceberg. If you see a little ant hill in your neighborhood here in the United States that's 12 inches across and like six, eight inches high, there's a lot more going on under the surface. Yeah. I mean, tens of feet underground, like you said, the size of a little league field laid out

on its side and were tipped up on its end and buried underground. That's enormous. Yeah. I mean, this thing was huge. It was really, really something. Okay, Chuck, we're starting to get a little worked up. I think we need to mail out again. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, we'll be right back, everybody. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and

pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we wowed you with a little bit on these ant colonies in the nest and what's going on underground. I mentioned at the beginning of episode one, these army ants who don't root down in a specific place, they're one of the only nomadic species. And they go miles and miles, which is a long, long way for a little tiny ant, up to a million at a time. And to go to these places, they need

to eat a lot of food. And they basically make what are temporary encampments out of themselves. I know. Kind of like if our ants make a raft out of themselves, these guys make a Bivouac out of themselves. Yeah. They make a big, I mean, look this up again with these pictures. It looks like a big ant ball, but I guess it's hollow on the inside, right? Yeah. And then underneath, you've got a bunch of different kinds of worker ants, raising and directing where to fertilize and feeding and creating a new generation of worker ants. And then after that generation is raised to adults, they break down their Bivouac and de-camp and just keep moving. Unbelievable. Truly remarkable.

They also can form super colonies. I know that there is one kind of ant. It's an Argentinian ant that they don't do this in Argentina, but in Europe, there is one super colony that goes up the coast from Italy to Spain for 3,700 miles that is all technically one, you know, it's like the pando of ants. They just get together with their friends and they're like, hey, I know these people are like behind me by 10 feet. You want to meet them? And then that linked up for 3,700 miles. Yes. From Italy to Spain, to northwest Spain, it's just astounding. And you said something really important. You said that this Argentinian ant doesn't do that back in Argentina. And they looked into why, and apparently the reason why

is because back in Argentina, they are very genetically diverse. So that neighbor 10 feet away is basically an enemy because all of these ants are trying to preserve their queen's line as best they can. So another nest is just a totally different genetic line. So it's an enemy. But when they find land somewhere new like say Italy or Spain or whatever, that's a much less genetically diverse group. So as it reproduces, they form nearby colonies that are pretty similar to the original colony or the last colony. And so you have these massive super colonies that are super cooperative because there are basically just extensions of the queen's genetic line. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And apparently ants also get from places like Argentina to Italy

and have spread throughout the world largely thanks to humans who use like soil and sand as ship's ballast. And then when you get to the next place, you unload the ballast and there's all those ants you dug up from the last place you just set sail from. Wow. I know. That's unbelievable. That's how they've gotten around. That's how they think that the red imported fire ant came here. All right. So that's pretty good. Here's another remarkable thing about ants. Okay. Ants don't fly generally. Everyone knows that. Ants don't have wings. But if a colony is super successful and there are too many ants and they're outgrowing their own living conditions, they will just grow wings and fly up in the air, males and females, and have a big midair

sex or tea. That's what it is. Yeah, for sure. They grow wings and they say, all right, we're going to have wings now, everyone. I know we don't normally, but we're getting too big. So we're all going to grow wings and let's go up and fly in the air and have sex. So when the colony gets too big, there's some sort of signal that the workers pick up on. They're like, oh, things are getting a little crowded here. I'm not sure what it is. Nobody's sure what it is at the moment, but there's some signal they pick up on. And so they start raising a generation of queens, of virgin queens called princesses. And those princesses fly off on this. Usually it's not really actually a day, but in some places,

like the UK, they celebrate it as flying ant day, kind of like how, you know, when cicadas come up after like 17 years here in the States, I get the impression it's kind of like that, although it happens every year. And if it's humid out, if it's hot out and it rained the night before, there's a good chance you're going to see swarms of flying ants having air sex, like you were saying. But what those are are different virgin queens, and they're going as far away from their nest as possible, because that increases the likelihood that they're going to find some of the generations of winged male drones that were raised in other nests, and they're going to have sex, and then they're going to go off and found their own nests after

that, now that they've gotten some sperm. That's right. And they can store the sperm for quite a long time in some cases. The queen leaf cutter ant can store a viable sperm for up to 20 years, and just eat it out a little, one little bit at a time, not going to use the word Dave used, and just keep fertilizing generation after generation of eggs. And I don't think we said the name of this air sex, they're actually, it's called nuptial flights. Yeah, remember in the firefly episode, they had like nuptial gifts? Yeah. I was like, we've talked about that somewhere, I looked it up, it was definitely fireflies. It's pretty amazing. And then after that, you know, the males, as always, they die off. And then hopefully you got a bunch of new colonies.

Yeah. So this is like the one time the queen is off on her own for about two or three weeks. She's like busy founding an entirely new colony. There's nobody there to feed her. She's just laying a bunch of eggs, and she's choosing which to fertilize, which not. She's probably fertilizing most of them because she needs a lot of workers right then and not very many male drones to have sex with. So she's basically just laying and fertilizing worker eggs, hatches them herself. And then once she successfully has a generation or two of workers under her belt, now her colony's got a pretty good chance of becoming stable because the workers can start to take over. She can do what she does, which is lay hundreds to thousands or hundreds of thousands of eggs every

day. That's right. So if you ever see ants flying around, you know what's going on. Yeah. And don't confuse them with termites apparently. They do bear some similarities, but if you look closely, you can tell the difference. Like just the color alone is a dead giveaway. Yeah. I think termites are usually kind of whiteish. Yeah. But if you have an infestation in your house, it's probably termites. Yeah. Because the ants are flying around outside, they don't want to be inside right then, not for their nuptial flight. That's right. So that must be like a pretty lonely and scary two or three weeks for that new queen, you know? I would say so. I didn't get a good sense of what the sort of survival rate for that was. I didn't either.

I'll bet it's all over the place because again, there's like 10,000 to 14,000 species of ants, you know? Yeah. But it seems like a big deal when it happens, when they finally reach that their carrying capacity or whatever. And they're like, all right, we got to do this thing. It seems like it's a big deal to kind of split up that colony. One thing I didn't see is if you could make a beard of winged ants like you could a swarm of bees because that would be really impressive. Oh, that just makes me itchy. I'm just thinking about it. So maybe we should talk a little bit about the leaf cutter ant. If you see videos of the leaf cutter, if you've seen any documentary on ants, they probably talked a lot about the leaf cutter

because those are the ones that literally cut the leaf with those mandibles and you see them. It looks like they got a carpet knife and how cleanly they cut through that Christmas paper. It's really neat. Leaf. And then one bit of leaf at a time, they're marching that stuff out of there. Yeah. And I mean, these leaves are enormous compared to the body weight. But again, remember ants are super strong and leaf cutter ants in particular can be very strong. We talked about how sometimes workers are divided up into different specialties. Leaf cutters are one of those where they have majors. They're the biggest and the strongest of all of them. So they carry enormous leaves compared to their body. And they actually are basically like cutting down paths

like machetes to clear a path for the smaller ones, the Medea and then the Minims. That's right. The Medea do carry a lot of the leaves, but the little Minims, those little guys are just the farmers and they tend to this fungus. And this is, you know, it's pretty cool enough that they take these leaves, they cut them up and they transport them over these distances, considering how heavy they are. But the really remarkable thing about the leaf cutter is that they are just as the other ants kind of raised the cattle of these little aphids. These are actual farmers of a fungus and they had the symbiotic relationship to this fungus that they farm underground. It's so cool. Yeah. So when they cut these leaves, they're fertilizing the

fungus with these leaves to let them decompose and let the fungus basically eat the leaves. The adults actually drink the sap from the leaves because it's sweet, but they don't actually leave itself. They leave the leaves for the fungus and the reason that they grow fungus and like there's really no better word to describe what they do than farm. They farm this fungus. They tend to it. They heal it when it's sick. They know how to harvest it. They know how to get it to grow just right. The reason that they farm this fungus is because it produces a food that the ants harvest to feed their young, to raise their young on. So symbiotic is right because they definitely want this fungus to be as healthy as possible. So the fungus really thrives in the presence of

these ants and the fungus in turn provides the ants with food for their young, but also in some cases, Chuck, antibiotics, like antimicrobials that the fungus produces, the ants will coat them their bodies with and it will prevent them from being infected as well. Yeah. And not only that, if they need to split off, they don't like grow wings and fly up and have Arab nutshells or whatever. They just leave, but just like you would carry a sourdough mother to your new bakery, they actually carry a big chunk of that fungus over to start their new crop in their new home. That's so cool. It's amazing. It really is, especially if you imagine the fungus having a face and talking and also being really grateful for the help. I think in the movie,

they did and the animated film, they did. I think of it as kind of like looking like, have you ever seen that movie, Basket Case? Have I seen what was that? I know that. It was a terrible, terrible B horror movie from like the late 70s. Yeah, I remember that. Or like the guy carried his brother around in a basket. I don't think I saw that, but I think I remember that when I worked at Vision Video in college. So bad. It's really, really bad. Basket Case. But it looks kind of like a little piece of fungus that you would carry to a new ant colony. It's just what kept flashing through my head. I wish it would get out of my head, but it won't.

I need to look up that poster or that movie box because it's in my brain somewhere. I just can't call it up. Okay. Let's just watch that movie together tonight. All right, let's do it. I'll bring the truffle butter. Oh man, you're making me hungry. You first, you wanted a Twinkie, now you want some popcorn with truffle butter. All right. What I really want to do is take a break and then we will finish up all about ants, at least for now, unless we decide to come back to this well again. And we'll talk about how they communicate via these pheromones right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up

some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So I think we said at the top of the first episode that pheromones are basically it. They may be the thing that ants use to carry out just about all of their individual behavior,

which collectively, if you put millions of ants together doing the same thing, knowing what they're supposed to do, much more complex behaviors emerge. But it seems to largely come down to these pheromones, which are kind of like scents that the ants pick up, kind of like noses, using their antenna instead. It's kind of like a language almost too, because they're communicating. I mean, we should also say that they also, they can like drum on their abdomen to raise an alarm. They can make different sounds like crickets. They can rub different parts of their body. They can rub their legs against their exoskeleton. It's called stridulation. And they can vibrate their mandibles. So they do sort of speak in some ways and hear in some ways.

But it seems almost secondary to what's going on with this pheromone thing. Yeah, because there's just so many different pheromones. And they produce pheromones from a special scent gland. And I don't know how they differentiate pheromones when they're producing them. But it seems like they have different pheromones for different things that they're trying to signal. Like there's an alarm signal. They use pheromones to recruit some ants to go do something. Like if one's maybe tending to the nest and another one needs help tunneling, it will create some pheromone signal and recruit the other ant to come help it. They mark territory with it. They will use it to discourage rivals. Like if somebody's trying to

lay eggs or cannibalize eggs, they can use pheromones for that kind of stuff. Basically, almost all of their communication seems to be pheromones. And that communication is really varied and wide. Yeah. So a great example Dave uses is if there's an intruder, if like a spider comes upon an ant nest, the ants that see the spider come in that are, I guess, you know, these soldier ants standing guard near the opening, they will start to admit the alarm pheromone, I guess, along with beating on their abdomens for this alarm vibration. And then it becomes sort of like a game of telephone. The next closest ants hear this stuff. Some of them might, depending on what their job is, rush up to help. If they're like soldier

ants or, you know, or guard ants that'll help guard the nest. Others run back and they admit pheromones to tell everyone else. And then they all start emitting pheromones. And it's essentially like a volume knob going up until everyone knows what's happening or until the emergency is over or both. Yeah. And the emergency is signaled as over because the pheromones start to trail off. And one of the things about pheromones that we understand is that they're volatile organic compounds, which means they dissipate fairly quickly because again, they're volatile at room temperature in the air. So as long as you don't have a bunch of ants all pumping out this warning pheromone at the same time, the volume is going to start to dissipate and turn down. And eventually

the emergency subsides. And so the ants respond to pheromones. So their response to the pheromone is going to subside as well. And everything will go back to normal because the emergency is over. Right. So if you've ever, and this happens to me, I don't have an ant problem here. But when we go to the lake, sometimes we have ant problems there because it's out in the middle of the woods, of course. But I will, you know, clean up really good, I think at the end of the night. And if I leave a crumb of a Twinkie out there, I'll come back the next morning, just infested with these long lines of ants. And I'm always like, how do they know it's there? How do they tell everyone else it's there? And now I know it's pheromones. It's the same thing

as if the spider invades. Some ant sees this Twinkie crumb and amidst this pheromone is like, hey, everybody, there's some Twinkie over here, you know, come eat. And it eats a little bit and emits a pheromone. And what's kind of remarkable is the pheromones, it's not just a pheromone, like they differ, they can differ what the pheromone is and the intensity of it to tell everyone like what kind of food it is or how much food there is and how many of you should come and try to eat this crumb. Yeah, there's no way that the ants at your lakehouse haven't developed a special pheromone for Twinkies if you're leaving them out that much. No. And but just like with the emergency, like those other descriptions, not just foods here,

but this kind of food or this much food, that can be described by like variations in the intensity. So if there's a lot of food, you know, the ants really going to exclaim that there's a bunch of food with pheromones, it's going to attract more ants and they're going to exclaim. And just like with that emergency alarm, the volume is going to be turned up. And then because it's a volatile organic compound, as the food depletes, the ants that are coming along and grabbing the food are going to leave a more and more muted exclamation so that that trail is going to eventually dissipate and no ants going to follow it anymore because there's no food there anymore. Yeah, I mean, it literally takes the place of the ant yelling back, hey, there's a lot of food.

And then the last ant saying, hey, we pretty much ate everything. It's party's over. Yeah. Like they can't do that. So they use the pheromones. Right. And they think that pheromones, again, it's really tough to overstate the importance of them for every kind of ant behavior. And there's a, I'm not quite sure what field it belongs to, but there's a concept called Stigmergy, which basically says that it describes a behavior or a trait or an action that's carried out based on some sort of signal that's left there. And so ants really respond to things like if a litter mate or a nest mate is doing something, another ant is much more likely to do that same thing. And they think it's because a signal is left every time an ant does something, it leaves

a signal. Whether it's not doing it on purpose, it's not thinking about this. It's just part of this set of codes that ants follow, which if you run into this, if you are on a ball and there's water and you run into the edge of that ball, you form raft. Like it's just this kind of binary set of very simple codes that ants seem to follow. And what code or what set of codes is triggered depends on what pheromone the ant is either laying down for the next ant or is picking up from the last ant. Yeah. I love lamp. Exactly.

They also can communicate via touch. If you've ever gone to your kitchen counter like I have, and you've seen ants walking in a trail, you've probably seen a little two-way street happening where a bunch of ants are going in one direction and a bunch of ants right next to them are going in the other direction. And if you look really, really close, if you have like a magnifying glass maybe, you might notice... You might now with the sunshine. Oh, no, no, no. Don't ever do that. Yeah. Just get down there with your eyeballs then. They might be touching each other. Their antennae might be touching. They may be stroking each

other's exoskeleton. And scientists basically think that these are also communicative signals to one another. Again, saying, hey, there's some great Twinkie over there. Sometimes someone might even have a little bit of a Twinkie. He'll give to someone midway through the line and say, hey, buddy, this is what's waiting down there. Pass it down. And that game of telephone happens again. Yeah. Mouth-to-mouth food transfer. This is nice. But I guess it's better than mouth-to-anus food transfer like you were talking about earlier. Well, depends what you're into.

I saw another explanation for why ants do that because if you look closely, pretty much every ant does that to every ant that they come across going in the opposite direction. High five. One theory, right? No. One theory is that they're examining the ant to make sure it's one of their nest mates and not an intruder from another nest who's joining in the fun, which makes a lot of sense as well. Every time I see ants doing that, I just go in my head, good game, good game. Yeah, nice game, good game.

Good game. Yeah, right. That's one of my favorite parts of Dazed and Confused. It's just like the nostalgia there, like any kid who's ever played Little League knows that completely forced unenthusiastic good game line that you got to walk down. Yep. I remember that line. What else do we have here? Oh boy, Chuck, we have so much. A little more on this thing. We should branch off into another standalone podcast called Ant-Rant.

All right. Let's talk a little bit more about nesting. I think that's kind of all we've got. If you look at how they build their nest, a lot of researchers have been looking at this, speaking of which, this made me want to buy an ant farm for my daughter for Christmas. But when I looked into them, I read reviews where it seems like about a third of the reviews said the ants just sat around and waited to die in front of my daughter or my son. And it was traumatic. I don't really agree with keeping anything enclosed. I know. I just, the whole thing felt wrong. And so I didn't get it.

Good for you, Jack. I mean, it was a little selfish in that I didn't want a bad experience to happen. But then I thought, you know, you're also getting ants shipped through the mail. I know they're shipped at a certain temperature, so they stay alive. And, you know, I also saw success stories where like, oh man, they did great, and they lived their whole lifespan, but it just wasn't worth it at the risk for me. I'm with you. You should do is order some of those ants through the mail and just release them into your yard. Or just release them onto my daughter while she's asleep.

There you go. And then mobile and see what happens. But researchers obviously have been studying ant nests and colonies for a long, long time. And, you know, all those tunnels that look like little sponges, I mentioned the one on YouTube where they actually filled it with concrete, which is pretty amazing. But they decided to take this stuff and put it into like a computer model to see what happened when it came out the other side. And one of the things they learned was they had these very basic rules that kind of governed everything they did, one of which was each ant would pick up

at a very, very steady rate two grains of dirt or sand per minute and carry it. Which that seems like a clue right there if they're following some sort of time scale, especially if it corresponds to our understanding of time, that seems significant, you know? Yeah. I mean, I guess they would do that because that's the most efficient rate of work, like the most efficient speed of work. I guess. Like without getting overly tired or not getting enough done, you know what I mean? I think that's another example though that we watch ants do things and we don't understand

exactly why. We just know it works really well. Yeah. What else did they see? They also saw that there was a preference for dropping that grain that they were tunneling out, excavating by another more recently dropped piece of grain, which I think is an example of that stigmergy where they just saw their behaviors triggered by somebody else's behavior. Right. And then the last thing they saw, they saw these three basic rules was they would drop them closer to the grains that were already dropped by another ant, and they think that is like a pheromone marker like, hey, I dropped this grain here.

Like this is where we're building this thing. Right. And so they followed these ants movements. Like they really studied and tracked real ants. And then they created a computer model that simulated ants just following these three rules. And apparently the model created something that looked a heck of a lot like an ant nest that you would see in nature. So much so that there were connections that were developed between chambers. And these researchers were like, we didn't tell it to create connections.

That just happened on its own. It's a great example of that emergent behavior that comes from the collective actions of a bunch of individuals is doing their own thing. Yeah. I mean, and they have these, if you look at this concrete when they excavated, they had these big chambers. They have these tubes and then these big rooms basically, and each of these rooms has a function. They're not just like, let's just make a little space here. They take care of their dead a lot of times.

And I don't think they quite bury them, but they tend to their dead. It's remarkable. Yeah. They have ant cemeteries that they dump bodies on. It's pretty cool. Very cool. So there was one last thing I saw. There's a type of ant that basically engages in nursing where if you, these ants raid termite mounds and the termites sometimes will take a leg or two.

And if you're just missing a leg or two, you will be carried back by basically paramedic ants to the nest and then nursed back to health with an antibiotic that the ants produce themselves. Wow. Ant rant, Chuck. Ant rant. You got anything else? I got nothing else. We thank Joey from Tucson.

Thanks, Joey. Great idea. Great idea for ants. We had no idea it was going to be a two parter in this remarkable. Remarkable indeed. And if you want to be like Joey and get in touch with us to let us know a topic you'd like to suggest, who knows, it might even become an incredible two parter. You can reach out to us via email at StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Badie about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

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