Hey, everybody, chuck here real quick with some bad news and sad news. Uh. Sketch Fest this year in San Francisco, which is where we were gonna have our first live show in two years here in a couple of weeks, has been postponed. I believe they're looking to postponed it by a whole year and kind of rebooked 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 UH, as bummed as we are, we think it's the right move as well. So, uh, 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 onto them, they're good for next year because we're probably gonna look in the same theater. But listen 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 I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and this is stuff you should know, um one that I'm super super excited about and didn't realize that I would be this excited about Chuck because this is a Chuck pick and hats off to you, sir. I'm surprised that, uh had you just never really thought about ants much? Yeah, I mean I've looked at them before, but I've never really researched him. I guess I've I've seen documentaries and then that of course, the animated cartoon Ants years ago kind of got me into it. And I feel like every time I've watched a Nature documentary about ants, I'm just like continually amazed. Yeah, I mean they are like amazing. I knew they were amazing, I just had no idea how amazing they were. Like so much so we could conceivably do a spinoff podcast on just ants, if you ask me, I'm willing to do that. I'm just putting it out there right now. Hey, you have fun and knock yourself out. No, no, it has to bebably the first one to subscribe it has to be both of us, I'm afraid. Uh, we do need to thank the original inspiration for this though, Joey from Tucson. Oh you remember that? Oh yeah, what was that a listener mail that came in? No, this was during our co Ed Oh yes, yes, yes, our friends at co ed auctioned off a zoom with Josh and I and some people were kind enough to donate some money and we had a zoom and we hung out with everyone and and and shot the s and Joey and his mom were on there from Tucson, and Joey said, why don't you do one on ants? And I said, all right, Joey, we'll do one on ants. Yeah, and that's gonna be a good one because joe is gonna get his money's worth on this. But we're doing Joey, not just one part on ants. We're doing a two parter on ants. That's how cool they are. It's a doublet because you know ants, like you said, we could do a four parter. Yeah. So just to kind of start like people I think can very easily take ants for granted, they're very small. Uh, they kind of typically mind their own business unless you step in one of their nests, and there they happen to be um uh imported red fire ants um which you do not want to mess with UM. So they're just kind of easy to overlook. But when you start to kind of dig into things like the number of ants on Earth or the kind of things they're responsible for on Earth, you come to realize, like, ants actually pretty much dominate the terrestrial ecosystems everywhere. They're apparently found everywhere except for Antarctica. Despite the name. Uh yeah, they're very hearty little creatures. They're a hundred and thirty million years old from the Cretaceous period, so they actually survived the Cretaceous tertiary extinction event, and you know, they've been around forever. They will be around forever. Some parts of the world they make up about half and this is places where there are lots and lots of insects, and they make up in some places half of the insects. Wow. So like, if you just took all the insects in one ecosystem and spread them all out, half of them would be ants. Half of them would be ants. Don't step on them. We said it before. Don't kick over those ant hills. Kids, don't torch them with with lighters and hairspray cans. You need to leave those ant hills alone, right. One other surprising thing about their evolutionary history that I was not hipp too until recently is that ants are um closely related to wasps. In fact, they think that they are evolved from wasps. Uh. And their closest one of their closest relatives is the mud Dauber wasp. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the wasp, but it sort of looks like a intimidating flying ant. And ants have stingers. A lot of them have venom, so I mean, it's not like you just couldn't possibly, you know, accept that fact. That's right. Uh. And that is a bit of a misnomer because I still say bitten by an aunt, I got an ant bite, But that's not what's going on. You're actually getting stung. Uh. The stinger on an ant a is a is a modified ovipositor. And the little worker ants we're gonna talk all about this later, but worker ants are sterile females. They can't produce eggs, so they're ovipositors or stingers, and the male ants don't have stingers and as you'll see, like if you're at all familiar with our b episode or a WASPS episode, like, a lot of this stuff is gonna seem really familiar again because their ants are kind of pretty closely related to those things. They're in the same um, the same order hyman up tera as we'll see. But they do all sorts of amazing things that we're gonna get into all of this. But are uh. They turn the soil, they move um uh materials and energy up and down underground. They turn over more soil than the earthworm. Um. They're extremely important little animals running around on Earth. So the next time you see an aunt, especially after you hear these two episodes, hopefully you'll salute them or at least step over them or do something to to show a little bit of respect. How many ants are there, so, I've seen the one that can Ruse. Dave Ruse helped us out with this one. The number he came up with, I've seen pretty much almost everywhere, which is something on the order of ten to the fifteen power adult ants on Earth right now, So about a quadrillion, which is it's not just a number of four year old says, no, it's a thousand trillion to be precise, which is that sounds more like a number than a four year old says, right, if you, if you, I mean, if you think about it, Um, how many humans are we do we have on right now? Something like seven eight billion? I believe sure this is a thousand trillion ants. And there's a lot of debate also, chuck about which one weighs more calculating the bio mat It's all over the place. One of the one of the figures I've seen bandied about is that ants, if you, if you wait everything, every living thing on Earth, ants would make up somewhere between fifteen to of that weight, which is a lot. But a lot of people say, well, that's that just completely dwarfs how the biomass of humans. And that's not necessarily true, so it's kind of up in the air. Yeah, let's put it this way. If all of the ants got together and they decided they wanted to go to war with humanity, it would be a pretty intimidating fight. I'm not sure who would win, but humans would probably lay wasted themselves to to lay wasted the ants, you know what I mean? Well, yeah, and also I mean some ants especially those red fire ants. They eat flesh like its are not all just herbivores, they're they're generally omnivores, which means that they'll eat eat flesh as well, which means they'll eat human flesh if you'll stand still long enough and let them devour you. You know what's that fire ant? They can strip a frog in twelve hours to the bone to the bone. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So the thing we have going for us, our legs are much longer than an ant's leg so we can outrun them very quickly and just get away from an ant, and then by the time we're out of it's it's per view, it forgot we ever existed, probably, right, unless there's another colony of three million ants waiting for you. Yeah, the other side, depending on what part of Europe you're in there very well, maybe too, as we'll see. Right, So we're gonna you know, this is gonna follow the order of kind of our usual animally insect the episodes, except I think this one's going to have even more just sort of random amazing facts and started along the way, right, Yeah, I don't think we'll be able to help it, alright, So I guess let's talk. I mean, let's go ahead and start off with some of these amazing ant things. If you study ants, you're a a mermacologist. And it feels like we've said that recently, but I think I might be thinking of something else. Dude, thinking of Eugene Mermon, That's what I'm thinking. Oh man, I love that guy. Yeah, he's a very lovable guy. What a good dude. I'm so glad of his Bob's Burger's success. It couldn't happen to do a nicer guy. But he's not an ant specialist. Uh, let's maybe let's just start off with these aunt rafts. Yeah. Well, that's one of the amazing things that people have figured out about ants is if you drop especially um red imported fire ants. They're just called fire ants in their native South America, but here in North America there they really are honestly called red imported fire ants, and they if you drop them into water as like a ball, they'll spread out and they will flatten themselves into a raft that is actually a pretty great, well made raft. And they do this, um just kind of without even thinking about it. Yeah. So, I mean, these things can be large they can be about as big as a dinner plate. We're talking hundreds of thousands of ants. And what they've learned. There was this researcher in particular at Georgia Tech that you dug up, I mean not literally dug up. He well, yeah, he was dead when I meant reanimated him. Uh and said Mr David, who what do you have to say? Uh? So he I think he's from Georgia Tech. And he focused on these rafts because it's such an amazing thing. And what they learned, or one of the things he learned, was that when these ants are building out this raft, they're like basically walking over the other ants until they get to the edge and then they're like, oh, well, I guess you know, they communicate to each other, and we'll get to how they communicate later, but they communicate to each other only when they get to that edge. Hey, you gotta get down here with us and make this thing larger. Yeah. Yeah, they and they basically weave themselves into an interlocking pattern to where they lay down perpendicular to the the ant that is the part of the edge of the raft. Then and then they become the part of the raft. Sticking out right, yeah, exactly, and they connect themselves to their fellow ants with multi multiple places with their interlocking arms. They also push away at the same time, which allows a lot of air in there, and these rafts can float because there's something like air. But the the weave is also so tight that the raft is waterproof, so that even the ants on the bottom of the raft chuck, will survive when they eventually hit dry land. Again. Yeah, I think they kind of likened it to gortex basically. Yeah, so that is that is one thing that one species of ants can do, and they do this. Here's the thing, Like you might say, well, that's really neat, that's amazing. Ants don't have brains that can hold plans in their heads like you and I do. Like, they can't read a schematic. There's no schematics there for them. And in fact, ants don't even technically have a leader. They just all do these jobs and perform this work somehow we humans have still yet to figure it out. But as each little ant performs its own job, and you've got hundreds of thousands of millions of ants all doing this job following the same system, these really amazing larger and more complex patterns emerge, and that's how you get things like ant colonies and aunt rafts. And they do it again without a leader and without a brain that could hold a plan in their head. Yeah, I mean it's it's a hundred and thirty million years of hard coding basically. Like it makes me wonder if a hundred and thirty million years ago, the ants we're like lucky to survive that tertiary extinction, and we're like, we gotta get our act together, guys. Yeah, we need to figure out how to make rafts quick. We can't make rafts. We can't do anything. Um Ants individually can swim some speech he s can uh, they basically I mean they can float and they basically do like a little ant paddle. They like him to do a dog paddle. I don't think they can swim like great distances. But if an ant, if some species of ant happened to accidentally fall into water, it's not necessarily the end of them. They're not a goner. They don't need to be reanimated yet they don't. Should we take a break already? Yeah? I think we can. I mean it's a two part or we can do whatever we want. All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk about not rafts, but bridges right after this. Okay, Chuck, you teased bridges. What about bridges? What do what do bridges have to do with ants? Well, I mean, first of all, all this stuff you should you should look up images and videos of when you can, because talking about it is one thing. But when you really see this stuff happening, when you see an ant raft or an ant bridge, it's pretty remarkable. Um. But army ants. There in a species of ant that we're going to talk more about as well later. But they are nomadic. Um. Usually ants kind of route down in one place, but these ants like to travel. And when they're traveling through the forest, if they come across uh, if they're like walking up a leaf and then they want to get across to another leaf, they will form a little almost at human bridge, they form a little ant bridge all the way across and can support you know, it's just tens of centimeters, which doesn't sound like much, but when you're an aunt, it's it's remarkable. Yeah, So there's something going on here. You you'll start to notice like there's something about an ant when it says Okay, I'm coming. I'm in water, and I'm on a ball of other ants in water. Now that I've reached the edge of water, or I need to interlock with my partner. Same thing when they reach it an end in the road, a gap between the road or the bridge or whatever they're walking on, they have some sort of encoded instinct to lay down and interlock with whoever's part of the bridge behind them to form their own part of their bridge. And then even more astounding than that kind of behavior is the fact that they can support the weight of the ants crawling over them, using them as a bridge, and then once the traffic dies down, they climb back up like in the opposite direction, they disassemble the bridge on the other way and then go along their merry way on the forest floor. Yeah, that's when they say socialism doesn't work. Um, but I was wondering how they So I saw an aunt bridge spanning between two leaves, so it was off the ground. Uh, how does it? And the only thing I could figure like, how does it? How did the how do they all get across to the other side at the end of this whole thing? I don't I don't know. I don't because you think it'd be like one of those rope bridges where you cut one in and it goes right. Well, I think that might be what happens. But I mean, this is just a guess, but I have a feeling at the end of that bridge they all just go really fast as after it disattaches to get to And if they're strong enough to hold each other across the span, then I guess they're strong enough to hold that last you know, a few centimeters as it dangles. Right. Yeah, they seem to make like preternaturally intelligent use of things like physics and enforces and loads and all sorts of stuff, um and And to be honest, like, I don't feel like a jackass for not knowing the answer to what you're saying, because we do not understand ants very well. It's more like we're we humans are in the the g whiz phase of studying ants, like we can't we can see what they're doing, but we can't really explain how they're doing it in a lot of cases, which makes them even more fascinating to me. But but Chuck, I suspect and once we fully understand ants, it will revolutionize our own behavior and the way that we see the world, in the way that we act ourselves, because we're gonna learn a lot from them. Oh yeah, but the problem is humans don't won't work together like that, because ants are a selfless society that works in concert to accomplish a greater goal. Maybe we'll figure out how to use them to like more efficiently deliver packages from e commerce for us. Right, that's not flying them and dropping them from a drone, even more efficient than that. All right, So that's that's just a bit of a tease of some of the amazing things some species of ants can do. I think we need to get down to kind of the basics, uh, like we do with all of our insect friends and animal friends, and just talk about the makeup of these little guys. Yeah, so their insects, like like I said earlier, there from the order him up terra. So there's bees, wasps, ants, they're all pretty much in the same little group right there. But there's at least ten thousand species of ants. Apparently, some botanists, not botanists who don't know what they're talking about, we'll say fourteen thousand, and then some anomalogists will say Yeah, the botanist was right. Fourteen thousand is how many species of ants there are. Botanists are like, why they keep cutting my leaves? Yeah, can you please ask your aunts to stop doing that? That's what the botanists say. Uh. If we're talking, and again, you know, since we're not starting our own side podcast all about ants, we're gonna talk about a few different species. Aunt rant, by the way, aunt Rant not in rhnd aunt Rant featuring the works of vine Rand instead of listener male, who is the opposite of ants actually, But we're gonna talk about the main ones you might find here in North America. One of course, is the odorous house aunt a k a. The sugar ant or the coconut ant. These are you know, I love ants, but these the problem uh ants in my life occasionally. Yeah, these are the little black ants that you know, if you have something out on your counter, can come into your house and a nice little single file line and we'll talk about those lines later, and they will eat whatever you have sitting out on the counter, if it's a little crumb of a twinkie, which makes me really want to eat a twinkie. I haven't done that in year's probably since our Twinky episodes, but it will. They will send a lot of ants after it. Uh. And they they're called odorous because apparently I've never really noticed a smell. But if you kill them, they smell like a rotten coconut or like a blue cheesy odor. Yeah, and I'm like, rotten coconut doesn't help at all, Like I don't understand when the rotten coconut smells like blue cheese. I understand more that I get that's not a good smell. But I have never ever smelled an ant that smelled like blue cheese or even rotten coconut. I haven't either, and I try not to kill any ants, but uh, invading uh, sugar ants can be a problem. Yes, sugar ants, That's what I've always heard them called too, So that's the odorous house aunt is the same thing as a sugar ant. Yeah right, okay, because we don't We're not like very bourgeois. We keep our sugar just on a mound on the kitchen counter. And we have a big problem with those ants too. Yeah. What about your next favorite, the pavement aunt? Uh? Yeah, the malcolmus Uh, the stand of viches? Right? If only um, they are the ones that you find like on the sidewalk, mainly maybe under rocks. And I don't think there are a whole lot different than the odorous house aunt are they I honestly don't know. I think maybe they don't come in your house. They're more like they just hang out outside on the sidewalk. You know, Yes, I like that, Babs. Yeah, I think I think what the describes is like where, Yeah, where you'll find them like understones and sidewalks and all. Because a lot of ants, like more than just the payment ant, make their nest under concrete. I'm not sure why, maybe just for protection or whatever from the elements, but there are plenty of ants that that seem to appreciate concrete slabs and for nesting. You got your carpenter ant, which are those big daddies. Uh, they will bore into wood. I don't know if there is a bigger problem as termites. I haven't really found them to be in mind own life. But yeah, no, those are the ones I grew up with. They're like there's yes, they're enormous ants, but they're almost like friendly, like they do not they don't sting you. I think they might be a sting or list. They're they're certainly not venomous. They'll like crawl on your finger and just kind of explore and you almost can make friends with them. Weirdly, but they're they're the friendliest ants I've ever encountered. Yeah, I'll do that. If I see a carpenter ant, I'll put my finger down and see if it wants to come up and say. You know, I've never seen one down here. I've only I've only seen them in no I Oh, I didn't even know they were down here. Oh oh yeah, we got carpenter ants. So once I did know we're down here, I found out the hard way. Um, right after we moved down here, I realized that I was standing in a pile of carpiner ants. And um, that was my introduction to them, like maybe a month or two after we moved down to the south. Oh no, no no carpenter ants or fire fire ants. Did I say carpenter Yeah yeah, No, no, I mean fire ants. Yeah, those are no good. Um again, I'm not gonna like try and kill their nest or anything like that. You just avoid them. Basically, It's true. It is true. It is true. That's that's true. But like you say, if you happen to step on one um, they can be pretty aggressive though. They'll come after me, and they will, they'll just keep going after you. And again it looks like they're biting you because it hurts and it stings, and they're they're like they're biting their mandibles. But you can't feel whatever bite they're giving you with their mandibles because they're too small. That stinger that that's getting you in the venom that they produce inside. That's right, no good, very painful. Leave a little red bumps, yeah, to say the least, and then the itch and and then you can't help but scratch them and you scratch whatever little welt grows up after them. It's you scratch that off. It's not it's not good. Did you get stung a lot when you when you were standing in one, yes, yeah, yeah it was. It was really bad. Mama got the same treatment to when she was a little puppy and she made the worst sound of ever heard in my life. And luckily you may had just done some research on fire ants and found that if you um are ever covered in fire ants, do not wash them off, because I think those might be the kind that swim, but also they that will make them clean even further to whatever they can on your body. To stand there and take the pain. You brush them off till they're done. But yeah, right, exactly, just eat the pain, right, It won't last long, but you brush them off with your hand. Do not use water, because it actually makes them like they It's one of those things where they're like, oh doubts with water, hang on even tighter, like they're making a raft with your leg, and then they're biding even worse. So luckily you had told me that like a week before, and my instinct I was walking MO near this pond. My instinct was to basically just dunker in this pond reils get a bunch of pond water on it to rint it off. And I stopped myself and just brushed them off. But it would have made it so much worse. But um Mo doesn't like if iire ants either. Now Mo probably doesn't like being tunked in a pond either. Just like like on a nice walk, you were going to do what to me when I was um I guess we should talk about you know, we're gonna we gotta talk about mouth parts. This part of stuff you should know. Uh, so you gotta. If we're gonna talk about the ants, body will go from the head backward. The head has those two antennae and they you know, we're gonna say things like smell and here with quotation marks, with air quotes, scare quotes like air quotes. But that's the antennae is what they used to smell, or their version of smelling. Uh. And pheromones and stuff like that, which we'll get to in greater detail later on. Yeah, which seemed to be basically the way that they communicate. They communicate a few other ways, which we'll talk about, but those pheromones are aces as far as ant communication goes, it's pretty cool. They also have um. Sometimes they'll have multiple kinds of eyes. Some ants have compound eyes, which have tons of different lenses and you know, the image on each lens is kind of combined into an image in the ant's brain. Or other ones have much more simple eyes called ocelli roselli um, which are they just basically sense light. And then some ants have both um. But the ones who just have a celli are are almost blind. But it don't feel bad for the ants because they are they can sense other things like pheromones with their antennae. That's right. Uh, We've talked about the mandibles a little bit, but those are the little pincers at the fry and uh boys, some of the mandibles and some of these species of ant are really large and scary looking. I can't remember which one, but I saw one picture. It may have been the Australian one that just will kill you, basically the bulldog ant. It might have been the bulldog ant. Yes, I saw that picture to where it actually uses its mandibles to clamp onto at the same time it's stinging you two man, and it has taken at least three lives um in Australia that's been documented. The bulldog ant just another Australian thing that can kill you. But so as bad as the bulldog ant is, apparently the bullet ant is has the worst sting, not just of any aunt, but of anything you could possibly be stung by in the world. Now, what's the deal with that one? I saw? So there's something called the Schmidt pain scale that was developed by a guy named Justin Schmidt, and he he sically just let himself get stung and then rated it and described this stuff that was that's what he did. We're gonna do a short stuff on it someday, but he gave he gave the bullet ant the UM level four rating on his words, which is four which is the highest, which as bad as it gets UM. But he's he described it as like walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail embedded in your heel. That's what a bullet ant sting feels like. And it's apparently other people who have. If you go on YouTube, like survivalists and outdoor people, they will go get They'll find out, like, what's the most painful sting you can get, and then they'll go purposely get stung by it and then describe it. It's kind of like people eating like ghost peppers on YouTube videos, but with with insects and apparently um most people who have been stung by a bullet ant agree like that's it's as bad as it gets. Cheeze. I found this one aunt uh. If we're talking mandibles, the uh that's had supposedly has the fastest bite in the world, the Latin American trap jaw ant, and it uses it's mandible to jump. So if you look at videos. They basically thought this is what was happening, but they weren't sure because these things can really leap like, you know, three or four inches across the room, and they filmed it with a super SlowMo up close camera, and their their bite is so fast. It accelerates a hundred thousand times the force of gravity a hundred and forty five miles per hour with a force equaling five d times its body weight. So I think it just pinches down in the ground so fast it shoots the ant back out of harm's way or whatever. Okay, So that's what I was trying to figure out. If it does like a cartwheel or summer salt, so it bites and propels itself backward. Yeah, and they they will somersault, I mean, because I don't think they have control, like after they there's so much force and speed, Like I saw SloMo videos of them, Like if they're falling down in a little hole in the sand or something, they'll snap that jaw and they will just slow mo back flip like four or five inches out of that thing. And it makes us did it should It's pretty amazing the trap giant, It is amazing. Um so that's all in the head, right, You got your eyes, your mandibles, your mouth. There's a little mouth that I mean, the ant has to eat and everything. They don't have ears, we should point out if we're talking about the head, but they do here by way of vibration. I think there's a an organ below the knee that senses vibration below the knee. I didn't see that one man. That just keeps getting better and better. Okay, So you move a little further back on the ant and what you'll find is the next little segment of the body called the mesa soma, which is not particularly interesting other than the fact that this is where the ants three pairs of legs, it's six legs come together on the ant. So it's super muscular because is how the ant propels itself forward and does all sorts of neat things, climbing hand to hand, combat, all carrying, all sorts of stuff. So it's very muscular part of the ant. The messisoma, yes, very mustily. Uh, you have the petty hole, which is the basically the waste of the ant between the messisoma and the gaster. But if you see, you know, you can see an ant kind of stand up at the waist where it's little front legs are off the ground. It's it's bending there at the pettyole. Yeah, it's kind of like you know those busses that are like two busses but they're connected by some weird like membrane and when they turn a corner you're like, oh god, oh god, oh god. But then they pull it off somehow. That to me is like the pettyole for the ant. I've never ridden on one of those buses. It's not it doesn't look like it's held together any better when you're inside the bus. Yeah, it looks a lot of city buses. I will say, though, Traveler's tip Emily Nights, I think it's this Before we took a bus in Manhattan one time, which we had never done before. We were always on the subway or in a cab or something, and we happened to be somewhere and we needed to get somewhere else and we saw the bus and I said, I think we can just get on this thing and it'll take us where we want to go. And it was like it was like a it felt like a tourist bus. It's like it's a great way to see the city bus. No, no, no, I was like it was red and I sat on the roof. They didn't have a roof on the toime. No, it was a regular city bus. But that's my point is like for very little money, the only difference is there's not some dummy with a microphone telling you about everything, but a knowledgeable bus driver will tell you where some of the stars live. Yeah, or at least where you're stopping next. Sure. Yeah, sit down and shut up. That's what they say. Uh, where are we are? We think? I think the petty all. We didn't mention that some of them have two of these wastes. Yeah, the petiole. If you want to show off as an ant, you might have two of them. Be like, look at it. I can go two different ways at once. Watch me go. Uh. And then you have the gaster And that's that rear part. That's where the organs are house. That's where the heart is. Although it does not pump blood, it has a colorless liquid. There are no lungs In't that right? Yeah? They breathe um. They basically just do um oxygen exchange oxygen carbon dioxide exchange to little holes that they have all over their body called spiricles, that's right, and those are connected through network of tubes. And I think just the ants movement is what makes that air exchange happen. It's very cool. Yeah. The gaster makes the mesasoma feel really inadequate as far as no just importance and the stuff that it's doing, you know, because it has so much important stuff in it almost got the heart, It's got that stinger, the reproductive organs. Some ants can spray formic acid from their gaster. If you come up to an ant in your aunt's size, it'll just spray it in your face with acid and say get back wow. And then what if it's a what do you say? A trapped orient? It'll just spring away completely out of sight in the blink of an eye, in the blink tupp pound. I yeah, I like trap door though. I bet there's a trapped orient. But what's what's it called the trap jaw? And oh? I called a trap do orient? Yeah? But I bet there's a I guarantee you there's a trapped orient. I was thinking of Castlevania just then. Uh. They have two stomachs generally, and they one is for eating and uh, you know, digesting their own food, but there they also will share food, and that's what that second stomach is for, because they practice trophylaxis, is when they exchange food with their like if you know, you go out and forage, but the other ants are back there working on taking or the queen or whatever they gotta eat, so they'll bring back food in their second stomach and then transfer it either mouth to mouth or mouth to anus. Pretty nice, Pretty nice. It is very very kind. If you think about it, you know, it really is. So one of the things you talked about earlier. I think when we're talking about ant bridges um and how they can support so much weight, partially it's because they have, like most insects, kitan exo skeleton that can um that can withstand forces like three thousand times greater than the ant's body weight. So that's how you let ants walk all over you if you're another aunt without even batting an eyelash. That's right. And they are super super super strong um. I mean, I know there are a lot of insects that can do whatever x times their body weight, but it's tough to beat the ant. As a general rule, some of them can carry up to fifty times their own body weight, and apparently it's due to the due to their small size. And the reading I got from this was that their muscles are just dns. They have a greater cross sectional area relative to their body size compared to other kind of all other animals. So I think that's just like a really dense muscle. That's pretty cool. So they're muscular and they have a strong excess skeleton. They're just tough, that's right. And like you said, they could be found everywhere. Um So I say we take our second break now and then come back and talk a little bit about what ant eat, what aunt eat. We'll be right back, okay, Chuck. So we came back to talk about what ant eat, and um, I think I said earlier the answer omnivorous. Right, So that means they'll eat flesh, Like don't fool yourself. Given given a chance, if you lay still long enough, or if somebody stakes you to the ground and slithers you in honey around some red fire ants, they will eat your body. It'll be so well, so will your dog, your dog with two don't be mad at your dog. Your dogs just trying to stay alive. And it's always just been curious what you tasted like, you know, oh man, anytime you hear the stories, it's just so disturbing. He really is like the dog that eats the person that was just like in a bad drunk or whatever. Oh wow, passed out. No, I haven't. I'm not gonna tell it, but I know I know someone personally who their dog the eight part of their they're not there, but someone they live their roommates foot because the roommates foot was asleep and they were passed out like a down to the close to the bone. Wow. I know. It's disturbing. Wow, and you know somebody. Yeah, I'm not gonna get into all that, but it's it's it's somebody I know. But it's not like somebody you know from like the snoop something like. It's a person, a personal human who told me this happened to them and their roommate. It's not a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing. What happens to the dog after that that they keep the dog? Yeah, yeah, it's the whole thing afterwards. Alright, good lord, the dog's fine. But I'll tell you, okay, I did not see this counting at all. I didn't either, because we're talking again about ants, and ants, like I said, are omnivorous. Right. I don't even know how I got on this. I think if you lay still long enough and ant will eat you down to the bone. That's what we're talking. So will your your friend's roommates. Uh well, it's actually my friends dogged. But that's a difference. Oh man, that makes it even worse. So wait, your friend's dog at your friend's roommates foot Uh huh how do you apologize for that? I don't know, man, it's a weird scene over at this place. There's no cookie cake that they make for that. Oh boy, the cookie cake might help, but I mean help, sure, but you just have to get a generic one. Maybe one of those milk bar Jest buys that might do it. Really, anything from milk bar would work. I agree. Uh so, honey, Due, let's talk about honey Due. I think that's how we can get back on track. Let's talk about it. Have you ever tried to grow a citrus producing tree? Uh? No, I want a lime tree or a lemon tree, but we don't currently have one. Okay, So one of the worst things that's going to happen to you when you start growing that lime tree are a FIDS. And you're gonna know you have a FIDS, not because you see a bunch of aphids on there, but because all of a sudden, there's like sticky stuff running all over your leads, all over your branches, all over the try of your little lime tree that you're trying to grow and never did anything to anybody, but now all of a sudden, it's really suffering. And what you will know is that that you have an a FIT infestation. One of the other day giveaways Chuck, that you have an a FIT infestation on your future hypothetical lime tree is that it will be covered with ants. And those ants are not just they're eating that sticky stuff, they're actually what's what's some atomologists referred to as um raising these aphids as basically livestock. Yeah, so the honeydew, and I might I hope I'm not getting this wrong. It sounds like what they do is is the apid pierces the flow m ducks and then this stuff goes straight through them, this sap and goes in their mouth, comes out their butt as honey dew. And that's what those ants are. That's their delicious nectar, right. Yes, I don't understand why the ants can't just go to where the aphids just were and the honeydew that's coming out of there. So it must have something to do with with the aphid, like it's transformed by the aphid physiology. I guess it's a transformative experience, like like the ants. Like, yes, I see the raw ingredient there is coming out of the tree, but I can only I'm all about the stuff that's coming out of this a fid little bottom. That's what I want to lap up. I guess you know you want, you want that soft serve right out of the machine. I guess. So they are crazy for this stuff so much so that again that they they do so they will herd a fids two different parts of the plant um to say, okay, here, bite into this, and I'm just gonna position my mouth right right behind you while you do. Just let it flow right in my face. Um. They will move them around the plant like herds at at night or when it gets cold. They will actually like herd the aphids into their own little nests and protect them and defend them. Ladybug Love to eat a FIDS, So ants defend uh aphids against ladybugs. Um. They and then if they want an a FID to produce honeydew, they will actually like stroke the a fit to be like go ahead, let go, and then they eat the honeydew that comes out of the a fit. But they The fact is this, to me is one of fifty facts of the podcast. They heard and treat and raise and protect a fids just like humans do livestock like cattle and pigs and things that we depend on for for food. Yeah, those little, supposedly brainless little insects all in the name of that sweet sweet butt juice. That's right, honeydew. That is unbelievable. Yeah, I think that might top off at least this episode's fact of the podcast. That's better than rafts. If you ask me, I think you might be right, dude. So, not only do they like honeydew chuck um because answer omnivorous. I'm not sure if I said that yet. Um, they will eat all sorts of other stuff too, um, nectar, other insects. Um. They're apparently one of the largest predators of um invertebrates wherever they live. Now will they eat each other. Yeah, they'll actually cannibalize eggs to to um for so their line will will um will succeed over like a nestmates line in some cases. I also saw this thing and maybe this is a decent fact to sort of finish on that. Some ants are called slave makers and they practice slave rating. So if you're a slave maker, aunt you are specialized to another kind of species. It's really close to your own, and you basically capture them and force them to work in your colony. What is going on? And they do it. They they just go over there and they work in their colony like it was their own, and all the slave maker all they do is go and replenish that labor force with more enslaved ants. That is crazy. You have to just stop researching at a certain point. I did. That's what I'm saying, aunt radiwise, it's eighteen hours long, aunt Ran is coming in chuck from us. Is that is that good for part one? I think so it was a great one to finish on. Nice work. And then as as this custom, we don't typically do a listener mail for part one of a part two, right, and we'll see you guys Thursday, I Guess for part two of ants. If I'm not mistaken, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. 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