Army Ants Rampage Through The Forest | The Hunt | BBC Earth

The army ant. This may look like a ball of a million individuals, but make no mistake... the colony acts as one. A super-organism with a sensory system of two million antennae. A skeleton made from the living bodies of workers. A defence system of soldier ants... ready to act at any sign of danger. A digestive system processing piles of food deep inside. Even a coordinated system for dealing with all the waste. These are insects that, by working together, transcend individual size. The colony can search the entire jungle... and flush out its wildlife. Each day, it sends out a silent probe into the forest in quest of food. It doesn't use scouts like other ants. Instead, a vast search party pushes into virgin territory... seeking out the signs of anything alive. They spread out along a ten-metre front... sweeping across the forest floor. To find prey, the ants must first touch it. The irony is that this, the most successful hide-and-seek player in the forest, is almost completely blind. It distinguishes the living only by their movement. As long as an animal remains still, it is safe. But the slightest twitch will give it away. Within seconds, the prey is pinned down. Within minutes, it's torn apart at its joints. The more the prey struggles, the more the ants engage. Right across the raid front, prey of all sizes are driven from their hiding places. Even wasps must abandon their homes when the ants arrive. Everything alive in the path of the raiders overwhelmed... by sheer numbers.

Channel: BBC Earth

Views: 7,768,848

Rating: 4.8671746 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, BBC Worldwide, Nature, Natural History, Animals, Wildlife, Wild, The Hunt, David Attenborough, Ants, Army Ants, BBC Documentary, Documentary, super organism, ant colony, ant, insect, apex predator, army ant, swarm

Id: JsfiUR0ZzLw

Length: 3min 51sec (231 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/xbyzk]

I would totally watch a movie about ant colonies going to war.

[u/thatchiveguy]

Reminds me of the " flood" off of halo.

[u/Pablois4]

Sometime in the late 60s/early 70s, I watched a movie on TV that had army ants killing everything in their path - people, livestock, and so on. They didn't travel single file but more like a wildfire laying waste to everything. One could run but could get trapped by different flanks.

I was pretty young (8-ish?) and this movie terrified me and triggered nightmares. Since this was the 60s/70s, they didn't show any gore but would cut away so that one would just hear the screaming which made it worse by making my imagination fill in the details.

[u/[deleted]]

This is why I come to this sub.