True Facts: Army Ant Riders

hey nope all right hey quick question could i seriously hey there nope come on you can do it there we go okay okay settle down i can explain it's straightforward my name's pete and i'm your new butt let's back up a bit if you're picking up a kind of get me the out of here vibe from that scorpion that's because just a few yards away there are some ants billing about before you judge though these aren't your run-of-the-mill playground picnic ants these are army hands in the genus escytom if you follow this train of ants back to where they're coming from you'll end up at one of these this is their temporary home called a bivouac and it is made from hundreds of thousands of ants if you look closely you can see some of them holding hands to form chains it's very cute and they're good at it too and these chains of ants link together to form a structure for the bivouac inside is a single queen and all of these ants are her daughters every month or so she lays up to 300 000 new eggs and these eggs quickly become larvae that's a lot of little ant babies to feed and that's really when the murder starts in the early morning light the army ants begin to get a bit excited all those tiny little ant legs walking all over each other i'm sure it tickles as the excitement grows the bivouac comes alive until some tipping point is reached and the raid begins thousands of ants begin to pour out of the bivouac and onto the ground the shape of a raid depends on the species acetone burchelliai are swarm raiders the front of the swarm is a fan-like carpet of ants that can be up to 60 feet wide it's basically what people hallucinate when they're having a bad trip don't do drugs often many army ants are on the hunt for very specific prey often targeting the pupae larvae and workers of another species of ant these are the sorts of things that they bring home for supper baby food made out of real babies other army ants including ecetan berceliai are not such picky eaters all sorts of things are on the menu which is why that scorpion was like hell no as the raid progresses outward an incredibly efficient operation emerges behind it lanes are formed connecting different parts of the front back to a base column along the way groups of ants are cutting and tearing apart legs and other body parts there's a job for everyone on their way back to the bivohack prey items are temporarily stored in what are called booty caches you know where you cash your booty the ants build bridges out of their own bodies allowing them to move over gaps and to smooth sharp corners it's like when you get caught holding the door open for a large group of tourists but all of this amazing group behavior seems to arise from a set of fairly simple rules that each ant follows for example if a bunch of ants start walking on your back hold on tight and stay still you're a bridge now if ants stop walking on your back let go you're not a bridge anymore except for you you hang in there little one sometimes however this rule-following behavior can lead to some problems an ant will follow a scent trail left by another ant and it in turn will lay down a scent trail behind itself however once in a while a group of ants may get cut off from a main column and this can result in ants following each other around in a circle the phenomenon is called an ant death spiral because in the worst scenario the ants keep walking in circles until they exhaust themselves and die however more often than not it resolves itself clusters of ants almost seem to gain escape velocity breaking the pattern and dispersing the rest of the ants this collection of simple interactions performed by hundreds of thousands of ants can almost be seen as a single orgasm as our organism jerry you have to proofread but no i don't have freudian lips jerry that's not even a thing you made a typo these army ant raids are incredibly efficient killing machines in a single raid these ants can capture over 30 000 prey items ant birds follow along these raids not to eat the army ants but rather to pick off all the poor bastards that are trying to escape if the birds don't get you then parasitic flies lay their eggs on your body so their larvae can eat you from the inside out there's even these butterflies that follow along and eat their bird's poop it's a whole thing but the point is if you're a small arthropod you stay the hell away from these ants so what the hell is this guy doing it turns out that a number of small arthropods don't stay the hell away from the army ants and in fact try and stay very close army ants can provide quite a bit of food and protection the trick of course is how not to get killed army ants have a bit of an itchy trigger finger when they sense that something isn't right a number of species of rove beetle took the let's blend in approach these are myrmacoids or ant mimics you can see that they went through quite a bit of trouble to look just like the ants impressive however the ants are blind a for effort their mimicry however is mediated by other senses to get in with the ants it's really about touch and smell by mimicking the grooming behaviors of the ants the beetle not only fits in but it also acquires the scent of the colony gets right up in there doesn't it some of these beetles are so specialized in their mimicry that they only associate with a single species of acetone ant some are so well integrated that they'll even go along on raids other rove beetles who are less specialized in their mimicry don't fit in as well and risk being attacked by the ants these beetles like tetradonia hang out on the periphery looking for opportunities to pick off and kill army ant workers that have strayed too far some rove beetles went in a different direction instead of mimicking the ants they developed teardrop-shaped armor a shape that is almost impossible for the ants to attack clown beetles don't look much like ants at all but they do quite a bit of ant grooming to acquire the colony smell however it's not foolproof and a grooming can turn into a biting very quickly under threat this little fellow balls up and pretends that he's dead waiting for things to settle down a bit before getting back to business some of the smaller beetles like nymphister cronori aren't fast enough to travel with the ants when they move to a new location so they have to figure something else out the name nim fister sounds like a cosplay character from an adult-themed comic book convention nice gloves sorry this beetle uses its mouth parts to grab and hold on to the waste of a worker ant and in doing so looks just like an ant's butt much like how groupies attach themselves to the crotch of band members to travel from city to city this arrangement allows the beetle to travel with the ants if this beetle booty generates unwanted attention from other ants infister can pull in its limbs and become virtually impossible to attack while it goes on its piggy butt bride butt beetles are not the sorry but beetles are not the only creatures to hitch a ride on these ants mites are perhaps the real stars of this behavior here one has that teardrop shape and is attached to the mandible but macrocellulase retin-myery goes a step further pun intended they attach themselves to the feet of large major ants in the species acetone dulcium you'd think this would be a problem for the ant especially an ant that likes to hold hands and form chains and build bridges but this mite actually assumes the function of the foot as well grabbing onto things just as the ant would do it's certainly a complicated but effective way of making sure you don't get left behind and that's important because during the period that acetone larvae are still immature the colony will pack up and move to a new bivouac location every night it's a bizarre and wondrous parade of babies and beetles and soldiers and workers and right there in the middle you can just see the queen all rushing to build a new home where in the morning the murder starts again no jerry the point isn't whether freudians have lips or not i'm sure they do but it's not about the lips of freudians it's freudian slips no that's not what you said jerry you said i had a freudian's lips well thank you jerry i like your lips too but it's really not about whatever hey ant check this out get it i'm your butt oh that's good hey how long is this road trip i forgot to tinkle before i got on oh and can we not be a bridge cause that sucks

Channel: zefrank1

Views: 3,204,126

Rating: 4.974308 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: p16g5IVCdeE

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BluSolace]

I love this guy's videos. I wish he uploaded regularly

[u/WizardOfIF]

Imagine a color you can't even imagine. That's how a mantis shrimp do.

[u/bmmckay]

I have loved the more in-depth and detailed True Facts :'-) the ones where zefrank partners with the author of a particular paper/book are so class.

[u/jck73]

Very well done & entertaining!

You've got to proof read!

[u/Rabid_Dingo]

I just recently rediscovered Zefrank. It started years ago with the sad cat diary.

But I love all the little mannerisms.

Wavy wavy, hidey-hole, behbehs, etc.

And him chastising Jerry for the bad writing or double entendre is hilarious.

[u/ATLHawksfan]

Woah...blast from the past! I remember watching the How to zdamce Properly website like 20 years ago.

[u/KindredWhispers]

Ze Frank is a favorite in my house. Entertaining and educational. Subscribe..you will not regret it.

[u/bluecyanobacteria]

This is great! Reminds me of the beginning of "Children of Time" a book by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

(Evolutionary world building with ants and spiders.)

[u/CanadaPrime]

Butt ants... But, ants. That delivery was so perfect.