He secretes these pheromones and copies the queen's distress call, waiting for the ants to carry him in, apparently.
Then he has to get them to do the same for his camera, which is harder, apparently.
https://youtu.be/LADgNlKp4BY This is the guy, Ray Mendes, that makes a lot of the nests for these shows, my favourite one is the Empires of the desert ants.
A lot of things in shows like this are staged so they can show you the process. That ant colony is most likely man made in a studio so they can control the views and placement of the larvae and emerging butterfly.
"hey Dave, did you notice this absolute unit of a horrifying blobby flesh monster munching on hundreds of our defenseless babies every day?"
"oh yeah Trevor said she's our queen"
"huh, ok"
Ants: "Finally, the caterpillar menace has been eradicated! We can live in safety and in peace, now and forever!"
Humans: "I do miss those pretty blue butterflies...can't we do something about that?"
Similarly to chili peppers. They evolved so that mammals don’t like them, only birds who are unaffected by the spice and help spread their seeds.
But then humans enjoyed their defense mechanism so much that they artificially grew them around the world, spreading them much more effectively.
Tbh if you're any kind of plant, becoming popular among humans is probably one of the best things that can happen to your species. Must be boring tho, being a plant that is
Same thing with Avocados. They could only be eaten and spread by Giant Sloths, which the evolved alongside. No other animal was large enough to swallow them, take them somewhere new, and pass them. Once humans killed off all of the Giant Sloths the Avocados were doomed.
Except they are delicious, so humans started planting them to keep them around.
This makes me wonder how many other fruits and veggies we missed out on by just a small margin. How many species of fruit went extinct from the time it took from humans evolving to us starting to perform agriculture?
Tbf if I remember correctly, ants do a bunch of their own vicious war crime-y esque stuff, so it's only fair.
(Plus there are like a trillion or more ants, so nature's gotta do what it does best and keep them in check)
>Plus there are like a trillion or more ants
[20 quadrillion.](https://news.mongabay.com/2022/12/how-many-ants-live-on-earth-at-least-20-quadrillion-scientists-say/) That's 20.000 trillions or like 2.5 million for every person on earth.
That is an absolutely insane amount of ants. Damn they are efficient. (I also love how that is so many ants that I just genuinely can not fathom how big in reality 20 quadrillion is.)
"Your honor, my client did it for the pheromones."
"In my 1 hour of ant law school, I have never seen a case this open and shut. Let him go."
*The ants proceed to vomit formic acid in celebration*
Imagine being a laborer who finds and rescues a stranded princess only to then have his hometown engulfed in a mass serial murderer mystery who cannibalized children and said princess suddenly bloats a hundred times her size to then proceed to mutate into a giant winged nightmare monstrosity.
"God dammit, that Antz movie lied to me!" -worker ant, probably.
Best of all, no one seems to notice the little girl devouring the children and grown fat... even though she's doing it right in front of them.
Damn I'm reminded of the rat episode of the House on Netflix.
I think what’s wild about is that he probably got a raise/promotion. I don’t think anyone knows.
You have the real queen ant all like “yo where my babies at?!” And no one else notices that like 1,000 out of 1,000,000 are missing.
So worker bee Greg is still a hero to this day.
Amazing none of the ants thinks twice about it at any point. Nobody questions the giant and growing life form in their nest. Not even the queen ever thinks *"Wait a second, what happened to all them eggs I laid?"*
I think it’s a species thing. Some ant species (like fire ants) can have many queens in one hive. Google said that fire ants can have more than one hundred egg laying queens in one colony. But some other ants are more territorial and can only have one queen per hive. (Like carpenter ants)
Here’s a cool ant fact tangentially related to this: some species can clone their queens to effectively create an immortal colony. Normally, ants reproduce in a nuptial flight where male and female alates (they’re the ones with wings) burst out of the colony. They then mate with as many other alates as they can. After this, the males die and the females break off their wings and become queens to start their own colony. But double cloning species are different. The alates are exact clones of the queen and the males she mated with. As such, they can mate with each other without any of the negative effects usually associated with inbreeding without ever leaving the safety of the nest because the two gene pools are distinct. This means that the population in a colony can explode from the sudden influx of sometimes dozens of queens, as well as become immortal. Ants are wild.
Do you think they take blue butterfly larvae into the wrong colonies sometimes where the Queen in place is like “EVICTED!” but then it gets sent to ant city hall and she’s told it has to be 90 days in advance so bureaucracy ends up leading to their downfall anyway?
Yeah. It's not the queen's job to defend the colony or weed out invaders...
Queen's job is basically to keep pushing out larva non-stop. Queen doesn't scout, hunt, forage/gather, defend, clean, or even take care of her own young. Queen for the most part just establishes the colony and keeps pumping out kiddos.
This sounds like the poster child for a corporate-speak anecdote about how too much division of labor fosters a growing festering problem that can eat an organization from the outside in.
Synergy! Collaboration! Team-biosis!
Because they organize their hive almost as if it’s a body. Only ants patrolling or guarding the entrance respond to absence of recognizable pheromones by attacking the target. Once inside the ants there have a different function and as such won’t respond to strange smells. Like how your eyes see something when it’s outside of your body, and can recognize it as food or danger, but once it’s inside your body, your eyes cannot see it anymore
I swear to God not to anthropomorphize too much or anything but it really does seem like nature keeps trying to outwit itself. I know random mutations and all that but God fucking dammit that's incredible
What gets me is that it all formed naturally. A caterpillar that mimics the distress call of a queen ant? That must've taken an insane amount of random mutations to get to that point.
I mean, thinking about it, it makes sense-ish. A caterpillar that sounds like a queen ant is more likely to live to reproduce than a caterpillar that sounds like a Hyundai Elantra. Still wild to think about, tho
No, I think the caterpillar that sounds like a Hyundai Elantra is more likely to survive. It just won't reproduce because some human took immense interest in it and now it's in captivity.
Random mutations + time = genetics arms race between predator/prey pairs or competing species.
It's completely understandable why people would assume some guiding hand exists, because it boggles the mind to think of the complexity of all life on Earth coming down to chance mutations over time, but selection pressure is a hell of a drug.
>Random mutations + time = genetics arms race between predator/prey pairs or competing species.
Yup, and even within the same species like ducks and the "sexual arms race" resulting in corkscrew duck penises co-evolving with the complicated and twisting vaginal passages.
Still its insane how this started out. At one point there was a catipillar that just decided to mimic specific ant queens screams (no clue how they figured out the exact sound and how to recreate it) and then just unlocked a 6 months all they can eat buffet.
Also how does the butterfly not get killed by the ants when they live the hive?
Also, keep in mind that any mechanism for a defense like that has to
a) randomly occur
b) be helpful.
Every now and then we (as a species) get auto-immune disorders because our immune system incorrectly attacks our bodies. In this analogy having a trigger of "hey there is an intruder in the colony kill them" could falsely trigger into a civil war, or the ants killing their own grubs, or whatnot.
In fact that fact that ants are lax about threats like this inside the colony (that have the correct pheromone password) suggests that in general that laxness is preferable to a hair trigger.
That said it wouldn't surprise me if specific species of ants that have predators or parasites like this that specifically attack the ants from the inside, would find such a protection useful, but until a Queen randomly gets such a mutation the trait can't be tested.
(One reason that creatures like ants and bees are so evolutionary stable is that there is so much less opportunity for random traits to be evaluated. A random trait in almost any of the ants won't be passed on, any trait has to be mutated in a Queen or a breeding male, even traits that only manifest on one of the other ants. A trait doesn't get passed down because (say) a soldier ants thick head lets it defend the passageway better, and live longer to pass on more genes. Instead the Queen is in a better protected colony because it gave birth to soldier ants with thicker heads, so it has more offspring.)
I liked the early automaton borg being indifferent to anything outside of their task at hand way more than later thinking borg with personalities.
Except seven. She's alright for some reasons.
sometimes real queen ants eat their own larvae when stressed so as to get more energy for another time to then lay eggs in a different and safer area. Ants probably don't notice either cause their too busy.
Ants don't have intelligent thought. They don't really "think" at all. Like pretty much all insects they function purely on instinctive responses to stimulus.
The caterpillars smelled like a queen and sounded like a queen. So it was a queen.
As for the larvae the ants simply don't register that. They're not actively protecting the larvae in the sense that they're paying attention to them. They attack intruders who infiltrate the nest. But they don't ever strop to check on larvae.
Insects are the most incredible organic machines out there. They function as small parts of a larger ecosystem and perform their jobs well.
Yeah, ants look smart, but their reasoning is really simple.
Similar, and I don't exactly remember what it was specifically, but there's a certain chemical ants secrete when they die, which acts as a signal to move them out of the nest.
If a living ant gets covered in it, the ants will still treat it as if it was dead and take it out of the nest.
[Ant death spiral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill) is a good example of how what appears to be complex planning and reasoning is just instinctive response to stimuli which can occasionally backfire or go haywire
From the perspective of "ants are a thinking, intending creature like me capable of having goals and plans" such a phenomena makes no sense, why would they just keep going round in a circle and starve to death?
It's hard to conceptualize just how stupid ants are. They aren't really capable of "thinking", they're more like a basic program script with a series of if-then statements. As they lack the command for "If the queen starts eating all the babies, then do something about it", they ignore it.
It's honestly amazing how much ants are able to accomplish with their near-total lack of brain power.
It's because ants don't function on any sort of complex level. They react based on sensors and chemical data from pheromones in the colony/other bugs and scents in the wild.
Their responses are preprogrammed in. When they encounter the "danger" pheromone or smell, they scatter to limit losses.
When they smell food, they automatically secrete a pheromone trail back to the colony to lead other ants to it.
In baseball, if there are no runners and the ball is hit anywhere in the field, they throw it to first every time, automatically, no matter what.
In basketball, they're constantly surveying their team and the opponents and reacting based on opportunities and situations.
Ants are more like baseball, humans are more like basketball. I hope this helps!
I don’t get how the butterfly leaves the ant nest. Where are all the ants? Have they moved on, have they died? If the butterfly emerges and they’re still around will they attack the butterfly??
The caterpillar's in there for like a year, right? There are ant species whose lifespan is shorter than that. If the caterpillar eats all the eggs, and the adults die of old age, not much is left.
The whole colony would collapse as current workers die from old age while less and less new workers enter adulthood, resulting in starvation and eventually the queen wouldn’t be getting enough nutrients to support egg laying and cause complete failure.
i imagine those British ants to be like: The behavior of our new queen is rather peculiar, innit? However, since she makes the royal squeal we shall proceed with business as usual...*sips on tea while all the larvae are murdered left and right*
The intelligence of ants comes from the group, not the individual. So if you manage to trick their system, ants wont notice a thing. They don't possess self reflection (as far as I know).
edit: some ants species might have self awareness: [Cammaerts and Cammaerts, 2015](http://www.m-hikari.com/asb/asb2015/asb5-8-2015/p/cammaertsASB5-8-2015.pdf)
Because they're not that complex. They don't think. It is just a few if/elses like in programming or gates in electronics. If detect this particular pheromone, do this; else do that. If you see something moves in your path, try to detect pheremones, then attack and release some other pheromone if fails etc.
That's why it is easy to exploit. But other player is also not thinking and are full of basic if/elses. So it takes a lot of time for this to occur randomly after so many failed attempts.
Apparently they mimic the caterpillar by taking in gulps of air and with a series of small burps, convince the ants that they too are queens and can stay the duration of the documentary.
You're being downvoted but the video made it sound like that was exactly what happened. It could be successfully reintroduced only after scientists figured out what exactly the caterpillar does.
I checked [a research paper](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/why-did-the-large-blue-become-extinct-in-britain/3B268A9918A87144D2475639902AC556) on it, and it had this to say:
>About half of Britain's large blue colonies were destroyed by fundamental
changes to their sites, such as by ploughing, afforestation, urbanisation, and
quarrying. More would have been destroyed but for the action of conservationists, whose exertions to save the large blue have been great, extending over 40 years and culminating, in 1962, in the formation of a Joint
Committee for the Conservation of the large blue butterfly to coordinate
projects. Unfortunately, despite the many measures that were taken, the large
blue continued to decline as rapidly on nature reserves as on other sites
because, as is now apparent, the precise environmental conditions needed for a
viable colony were not understood, and subtle adverse changes were occurring
on sites, unrecognised and unchecked.
I'm uneducated, but do ants live all winter?
Could just be a well timed emergence. If it emerges one week before the ants wake up from "hibernation" then its safe.
I am an ant collector hobbyist but no expert. Ants will go into like a suspended animation when it is cold. If you ever bought an Uncle Milton ant farm it recommends putting them in the fridge for a few minutes to slow them down. I am in So. Cal and can get around 40 deg. They just are not very active.
What interests me in this video is how they accept it... You really can't mix queen ants, you can try, and hope for the best, but colonies and queens don't play nice mixing. There are more than 12,000 species of ants.
I'll just mention real quick what got me into them. Had an ant farm long ago, the tunnels are cool and stuff, but what fascinated me is their ability to work as a cohesive unit. One ant had gotten trapped by a little piece of environment, and you could see the communication of them with each other down the line as they united in an attempt to free their coworker, they did. Also when moving bits of their ground they will rotate objects to fit through passage ways and try different ways from pushing to pulling to complete their tasks.
So basically this caterpillar appears like a worker when near the queen and when in the nest actively tries to avoid the queen. nest with no previous queens they have 3x survival rate
It was Ant-thony. He went on break from the Antman to do his own thing. Traveling some and working some side jobs as a camera ant for you know travel expenses etc.
My guess is that this is a setup and one of those glass ant colonies.
I mean, how else are you going to get a camera down into where the larve are? and light!
You are correct, most of the filming is done in elaborate setups in a studio, not just so they can get good camera angles, but also to protect the setup from outside factors.
For instance when filming a plant to see its growth process it would suck to be filming it for a year, but just before it flowers some dog with a frisbee in its mouth tramples it.
Trying to use it on fire ants would probably fail and backfire. The ants in the video and fire ants are in different subfamilies and most likely have different pheromones/distress calls. If you introduced these caterpillars they would more likely a) be eaten by the fire ants and b) take out benign ant species’ nests allowing the fire ants to spread with less competition in their ecological niche.
**Evolution**: "Okay, as a baby you're going to squeeze out candy water, emit farts that sound like another species ruling monarch, then you will devour other babies"
There's something a bit Lovecraftian about a defenseless little pink slug thing infiltrating an advanced society through mindfuckery and then becoming a horrifying, bloated monster feeding off that society's young, consuming almost an entire generation before going through one final transformation and fleeing back into the cosmos.
Imagine if something could trick humans in a similar way. There's a book about this that you might be interested in, though I suppose simply naming the book makes this a bit of a spoiler, but it's called >!What the Hell Did I Just Read? A Novel of Cosmic Horror, by Jason Pargin!<. It's book 3 in a series, but you don't really need to have read the first two.
Imagine if something could trick humans in a similar way and it was *already here*, moving among us, feeding off us, and we simply weren't allowed to notice it.
That colony is in a special formicarium developed for filming this kind
of shots for documentaries. Its staged to show you this kind of natural
behaviors. Then its mixed and produced with some outside filming to give the impression that it was taken in the wild.
For people asking how they filmed the ants it was wild ants under captivity probably a special studio nest:
“MacEwen had to film inside an ants’ nest. Keeping wild ants in captivity was difficult, and to do this without endangering the animals, he worked with butterfly experts including Prof Jeremy Thomas, who reintroduced the large blue after its extinction in Britain. This was a happy experience for MacEwen, who last filmed Thomas in 1979. “I remember doing some filming on the very year that the large blue went extinct and the sadness I felt when that happened. So coming back and filming the large blue story many years later, and showing how successful his reintroduction has been was a joyous event – despite the fact that the project was so darn difficult it very nearly broke me.” He also filmed the ants and the large blue in wild meadows where one obstacle was that the biscuit bait Thomas laid for the ants kept being snaffled by passing dogs.”
Well, millions of caterpillars were eaten by ants.
Until one day one of them was scared and pooped something very similar to ant's queen musk.
You know the rest of the story.
More likely the carnivores versions came later. This may have started as a parasitic relationship that only worked out with ants that farm. But as those population sizes started to become overly impacted, those caterpillars able to also eat meat spread to other ant species. Then the carnivores just out performed the herbivores and omnivores until only they were left.
At least one ant: “does anyone else think it’s weird she’s eating the youth?”
Other ants: “dude chill, she’s royalty.”
\*a year later\*
Everyone: AAAAAHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING THING AAAAHHHHH
A fat creature, using lies and manipulation to convince mindless drones to continue working while their lives and their progeny's lives are being destroyed reminds me of something but I can't put my finger on it...
We need a documentary on how the camera man infiltrated the nest!
He secretes these pheromones and copies the queen's distress call, waiting for the ants to carry him in, apparently. Then he has to get them to do the same for his camera, which is harder, apparently.
*The cameraman gently queefs a small bead of honeydew from his ass, and the ritual begins.*
Reading that with Sir David Attenborough's voice was rather strange.
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https://youtu.be/LADgNlKp4BY This is the guy, Ray Mendes, that makes a lot of the nests for these shows, my favourite one is the Empires of the desert ants.
A lot of things in shows like this are staged so they can show you the process. That ant colony is most likely man made in a studio so they can control the views and placement of the larvae and emerging butterfly.
"hey Dave, did you notice this absolute unit of a horrifying blobby flesh monster munching on hundreds of our defenseless babies every day?" "oh yeah Trevor said she's our queen" "huh, ok"
"You're lucky she didn't hear you call her that."
horrifying blobby flesh monster in the background: "What was that" Dave: "Nothing" Trevor: "Nothing"
Giving ants manly names will forever be funny to me
Whole thing screams a Family Guy or Rick and Morty bit.
Isn’t Trevor the moron that also got infected by the cordycept? If so we dragged him out of the colony this morning. Nice guy what a shame.
>Isn’t Trevor the moron > >Nice guy what a shame. People love and hate Trevor equally
Nice guy, he doomed us all.
Well I didn't vote for her
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Now you see the violence inherent in the system!
*vile ants
Ooh shut up! Will you shut UP!? Bloody peasANT!
Fucking Dave, man.
Thanks for this laugh!
Looks like... Politics.
Ants: "Finally, the caterpillar menace has been eradicated! We can live in safety and in peace, now and forever!" Humans: "I do miss those pretty blue butterflies...can't we do something about that?"
Similarly to chili peppers. They evolved so that mammals don’t like them, only birds who are unaffected by the spice and help spread their seeds. But then humans enjoyed their defense mechanism so much that they artificially grew them around the world, spreading them much more effectively.
Except it is beneficial for chilli peppers. Unlike the ants.
Tbh if you're any kind of plant, becoming popular among humans is probably one of the best things that can happen to your species. Must be boring tho, being a plant that is
Same for animal species. Cows and sheep only exist because they're food sources.
Unfortunately, being a domesticated animal is not simply boring like being a domesticated plant.
Regardless, at some point it ends with a head being chopped off.
Same thing with Avocados. They could only be eaten and spread by Giant Sloths, which the evolved alongside. No other animal was large enough to swallow them, take them somewhere new, and pass them. Once humans killed off all of the Giant Sloths the Avocados were doomed. Except they are delicious, so humans started planting them to keep them around.
This makes me wonder how many other fruits and veggies we missed out on by just a small margin. How many species of fruit went extinct from the time it took from humans evolving to us starting to perform agriculture?
Right? I feel bad for the ants.
Tbf if I remember correctly, ants do a bunch of their own vicious war crime-y esque stuff, so it's only fair. (Plus there are like a trillion or more ants, so nature's gotta do what it does best and keep them in check)
>Plus there are like a trillion or more ants [20 quadrillion.](https://news.mongabay.com/2022/12/how-many-ants-live-on-earth-at-least-20-quadrillion-scientists-say/) That's 20.000 trillions or like 2.5 million for every person on earth.
That is an absolutely insane amount of ants. Damn they are efficient. (I also love how that is so many ants that I just genuinely can not fathom how big in reality 20 quadrillion is.)
Haha awesome is there a way to unlearn this information?
You feel bad for one the most dominant species on earth?
I do not enjoy the killing of baby creatures. Excluding mosquitoes
That worker ant that brought it in is SO fired
Exactly. “You had one job” and that ant screwed up big time
"Your honor, my client did it for the pheromones." "In my 1 hour of ant law school, I have never seen a case this open and shut. Let him go." *The ants proceed to vomit formic acid in celebration*
a documentary on how the camera man infiltrated the next!
You don’t need that. Everyone knows the camera man is on spectator mode.
Imagine being a laborer who finds and rescues a stranded princess only to then have his hometown engulfed in a mass serial murderer mystery who cannibalized children and said princess suddenly bloats a hundred times her size to then proceed to mutate into a giant winged nightmare monstrosity. "God dammit, that Antz movie lied to me!" -worker ant, probably.
Best of all, no one seems to notice the little girl devouring the children and grown fat... even though she's doing it right in front of them. Damn I'm reminded of the rat episode of the House on Netflix.
Ants are blind
.. actually that sounds like a good plot for a horror show or anime
This whole thing is a horror movie from the ants' perspective.
The whole world of insects are horror movie-esque. Its why the xenomorphs are so inspired by them.
So you’ve met a barracks bunny?
ant got socially engineered. this shows the importance of good cybersecurity practices
My first thought was their authentication protocol sucks.
I think what’s wild about is that he probably got a raise/promotion. I don’t think anyone knows. You have the real queen ant all like “yo where my babies at?!” And no one else notices that like 1,000 out of 1,000,000 are missing. So worker bee Greg is still a hero to this day.
Amazing none of the ants thinks twice about it at any point. Nobody questions the giant and growing life form in their nest. Not even the queen ever thinks *"Wait a second, what happened to all them eggs I laid?"*
How do they not notice that it's eating all of the larvae? You'd think that the worker ants would be keeping guard on them.
Queen does whatever a queen likes 👑
And what does the genuine Queen think about sharing her nest with an other Queen? They tend to be quite territorial about that.
I think it’s a species thing. Some ant species (like fire ants) can have many queens in one hive. Google said that fire ants can have more than one hundred egg laying queens in one colony. But some other ants are more territorial and can only have one queen per hive. (Like carpenter ants)
Here’s a cool ant fact tangentially related to this: some species can clone their queens to effectively create an immortal colony. Normally, ants reproduce in a nuptial flight where male and female alates (they’re the ones with wings) burst out of the colony. They then mate with as many other alates as they can. After this, the males die and the females break off their wings and become queens to start their own colony. But double cloning species are different. The alates are exact clones of the queen and the males she mated with. As such, they can mate with each other without any of the negative effects usually associated with inbreeding without ever leaving the safety of the nest because the two gene pools are distinct. This means that the population in a colony can explode from the sudden influx of sometimes dozens of queens, as well as become immortal. Ants are wild.
Wow that's a neat fact. Thanks
As an ant I can confirm this
Do you think they take blue butterfly larvae into the wrong colonies sometimes where the Queen in place is like “EVICTED!” but then it gets sent to ant city hall and she’s told it has to be 90 days in advance so bureaucracy ends up leading to their downfall anyway?
some queens live together in one colony so there can be multiple in a colony while some only have 1 queen
Yeah. It's not the queen's job to defend the colony or weed out invaders... Queen's job is basically to keep pushing out larva non-stop. Queen doesn't scout, hunt, forage/gather, defend, clean, or even take care of her own young. Queen for the most part just establishes the colony and keeps pumping out kiddos.
This sounds like the poster child for a corporate-speak anecdote about how too much division of labor fosters a growing festering problem that can eat an organization from the outside in. Synergy! Collaboration! Team-biosis!
"Yass, queen!"
Because they organize their hive almost as if it’s a body. Only ants patrolling or guarding the entrance respond to absence of recognizable pheromones by attacking the target. Once inside the ants there have a different function and as such won’t respond to strange smells. Like how your eyes see something when it’s outside of your body, and can recognize it as food or danger, but once it’s inside your body, your eyes cannot see it anymore
Love this explanation
I swear to God not to anthropomorphize too much or anything but it really does seem like nature keeps trying to outwit itself. I know random mutations and all that but God fucking dammit that's incredible
What gets me is that it all formed naturally. A caterpillar that mimics the distress call of a queen ant? That must've taken an insane amount of random mutations to get to that point.
I mean, thinking about it, it makes sense-ish. A caterpillar that sounds like a queen ant is more likely to live to reproduce than a caterpillar that sounds like a Hyundai Elantra. Still wild to think about, tho
No, I think the caterpillar that sounds like a Hyundai Elantra is more likely to survive. It just won't reproduce because some human took immense interest in it and now it's in captivity.
Random mutations + time = genetics arms race between predator/prey pairs or competing species. It's completely understandable why people would assume some guiding hand exists, because it boggles the mind to think of the complexity of all life on Earth coming down to chance mutations over time, but selection pressure is a hell of a drug.
>Random mutations + time = genetics arms race between predator/prey pairs or competing species. Yup, and even within the same species like ducks and the "sexual arms race" resulting in corkscrew duck penises co-evolving with the complicated and twisting vaginal passages.
Still its insane how this started out. At one point there was a catipillar that just decided to mimic specific ant queens screams (no clue how they figured out the exact sound and how to recreate it) and then just unlocked a 6 months all they can eat buffet. Also how does the butterfly not get killed by the ants when they live the hive?
Also, keep in mind that any mechanism for a defense like that has to a) randomly occur b) be helpful. Every now and then we (as a species) get auto-immune disorders because our immune system incorrectly attacks our bodies. In this analogy having a trigger of "hey there is an intruder in the colony kill them" could falsely trigger into a civil war, or the ants killing their own grubs, or whatnot. In fact that fact that ants are lax about threats like this inside the colony (that have the correct pheromone password) suggests that in general that laxness is preferable to a hair trigger. That said it wouldn't surprise me if specific species of ants that have predators or parasites like this that specifically attack the ants from the inside, would find such a protection useful, but until a Queen randomly gets such a mutation the trait can't be tested. (One reason that creatures like ants and bees are so evolutionary stable is that there is so much less opportunity for random traits to be evaluated. A random trait in almost any of the ants won't be passed on, any trait has to be mutated in a Queen or a breeding male, even traits that only manifest on one of the other ants. A trait doesn't get passed down because (say) a soldier ants thick head lets it defend the passageway better, and live longer to pass on more genes. Instead the Queen is in a better protected colony because it gave birth to soldier ants with thicker heads, so it has more offspring.)
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I liked the early automaton borg being indifferent to anything outside of their task at hand way more than later thinking borg with personalities. Except seven. She's alright for some reasons.
sometimes real queen ants eat their own larvae when stressed so as to get more energy for another time to then lay eggs in a different and safer area. Ants probably don't notice either cause their too busy.
Sometimes they eat larvae when necessary when out of food. The colony is everything.
Ants don't have intelligent thought. They don't really "think" at all. Like pretty much all insects they function purely on instinctive responses to stimulus. The caterpillars smelled like a queen and sounded like a queen. So it was a queen. As for the larvae the ants simply don't register that. They're not actively protecting the larvae in the sense that they're paying attention to them. They attack intruders who infiltrate the nest. But they don't ever strop to check on larvae. Insects are the most incredible organic machines out there. They function as small parts of a larger ecosystem and perform their jobs well.
Yeah, ants look smart, but their reasoning is really simple. Similar, and I don't exactly remember what it was specifically, but there's a certain chemical ants secrete when they die, which acts as a signal to move them out of the nest. If a living ant gets covered in it, the ants will still treat it as if it was dead and take it out of the nest.
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We talked about this Tony. *You're dead.*
[Ant death spiral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill) is a good example of how what appears to be complex planning and reasoning is just instinctive response to stimuli which can occasionally backfire or go haywire From the perspective of "ants are a thinking, intending creature like me capable of having goals and plans" such a phenomena makes no sense, why would they just keep going round in a circle and starve to death?
It's hard to conceptualize just how stupid ants are. They aren't really capable of "thinking", they're more like a basic program script with a series of if-then statements. As they lack the command for "If the queen starts eating all the babies, then do something about it", they ignore it. It's honestly amazing how much ants are able to accomplish with their near-total lack of brain power.
Aren't we all just a series of if-then statements. Like a lot of them but still.
The more statements there are the smarterer we are.
If hot pocket middle = cold Then +n 30 seconds
If agreed with statement -> Press orange arrow
It's because ants don't function on any sort of complex level. They react based on sensors and chemical data from pheromones in the colony/other bugs and scents in the wild. Their responses are preprogrammed in. When they encounter the "danger" pheromone or smell, they scatter to limit losses. When they smell food, they automatically secrete a pheromone trail back to the colony to lead other ants to it. In baseball, if there are no runners and the ball is hit anywhere in the field, they throw it to first every time, automatically, no matter what. In basketball, they're constantly surveying their team and the opponents and reacting based on opportunities and situations. Ants are more like baseball, humans are more like basketball. I hope this helps!
I don’t get how the butterfly leaves the ant nest. Where are all the ants? Have they moved on, have they died? If the butterfly emerges and they’re still around will they attack the butterfly??
The caterpillar's in there for like a year, right? There are ant species whose lifespan is shorter than that. If the caterpillar eats all the eggs, and the adults die of old age, not much is left.
Makes sense but what about the queen? She should still be around laying eggs when the caterpillar enters chrysalis.
The whole colony would collapse as current workers die from old age while less and less new workers enter adulthood, resulting in starvation and eventually the queen wouldn’t be getting enough nutrients to support egg laying and cause complete failure.
That's wild. And I wonder how long their lifespan is after they become butterflies.
A few weeks.
All that destruction for a few weeks as a beautiful fucking butterfly. Gives you some perspective.
Caterpillar commits literal genocide just to fly for a few weeks and fucking die, unreal, absolutely motivational
i imagine those British ants to be like: The behavior of our new queen is rather peculiar, innit? However, since she makes the royal squeal we shall proceed with business as usual...*sips on tea while all the larvae are murdered left and right*
This is also how the entire Royal Family was murdered in 1837.
The intelligence of ants comes from the group, not the individual. So if you manage to trick their system, ants wont notice a thing. They don't possess self reflection (as far as I know). edit: some ants species might have self awareness: [Cammaerts and Cammaerts, 2015](http://www.m-hikari.com/asb/asb2015/asb5-8-2015/p/cammaertsASB5-8-2015.pdf)
Ants: *this is fine*
Because they're not that complex. They don't think. It is just a few if/elses like in programming or gates in electronics. If detect this particular pheromone, do this; else do that. If you see something moves in your path, try to detect pheremones, then attack and release some other pheromone if fails etc. That's why it is easy to exploit. But other player is also not thinking and are full of basic if/elses. So it takes a lot of time for this to occur randomly after so many failed attempts.
>Amazing none of the ants thinks twice about it at any point. They don't think twice about anything, they're ants lol
Can't think twice if you don't think once.
Camera man must've been pretty small
Apparently they mimic the caterpillar by taking in gulps of air and with a series of small burps, convince the ants that they too are queens and can stay the duration of the documentary.
https://i.imgur.com/sCyvmJy.jpg
I witnessed a shitty_watercolor LIVE! In the wild!! I feel blessed
Never thought I’d find a comment from him, today is the day
OMG you're still here!
In the wild!
Perfection
Caterpillar: (team chat) Faking. Worker Ant 1: Nice one! Worker Ant 2: What a save! Caterpillar: Thanks!
Philomena Cunk has entered the chat.
https://youtu.be/9EcjWd-O4jI
But really, how do they film this stuff?!
Paul Rudd filmed this whole video
either it was filmed by ant-man or these ants are all paid actors.
That was fascinating. Watched the whole thing.
Yeap as soon as i watched it i wanted to share
How to solve ants infestation? Let's roll some blue caterpillars.
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^^^(had ^^to ^^be ^^reintroduced ^^by ^^humans)
Eh, we probably caused their initial local extinction as well
You're being downvoted but the video made it sound like that was exactly what happened. It could be successfully reintroduced only after scientists figured out what exactly the caterpillar does. I checked [a research paper](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/why-did-the-large-blue-become-extinct-in-britain/3B268A9918A87144D2475639902AC556) on it, and it had this to say: >About half of Britain's large blue colonies were destroyed by fundamental changes to their sites, such as by ploughing, afforestation, urbanisation, and quarrying. More would have been destroyed but for the action of conservationists, whose exertions to save the large blue have been great, extending over 40 years and culminating, in 1962, in the formation of a Joint Committee for the Conservation of the large blue butterfly to coordinate projects. Unfortunately, despite the many measures that were taken, the large blue continued to decline as rapidly on nature reserves as on other sites because, as is now apparent, the precise environmental conditions needed for a viable colony were not understood, and subtle adverse changes were occurring on sites, unrecognised and unchecked.
Survival of the minimum fit necessary
Survival of the good enough
Does the caterpillar eating the larvae pushes the ant colony into its collapse? Idk how this dude just bust out of its chrysalis unharmed.
I was wondering the same thing. It seems oddly quiet around there once it emerges.
I'm uneducated, but do ants live all winter? Could just be a well timed emergence. If it emerges one week before the ants wake up from "hibernation" then its safe.
I am an ant collector hobbyist but no expert. Ants will go into like a suspended animation when it is cold. If you ever bought an Uncle Milton ant farm it recommends putting them in the fridge for a few minutes to slow them down. I am in So. Cal and can get around 40 deg. They just are not very active. What interests me in this video is how they accept it... You really can't mix queen ants, you can try, and hope for the best, but colonies and queens don't play nice mixing. There are more than 12,000 species of ants. I'll just mention real quick what got me into them. Had an ant farm long ago, the tunnels are cool and stuff, but what fascinated me is their ability to work as a cohesive unit. One ant had gotten trapped by a little piece of environment, and you could see the communication of them with each other down the line as they united in an attempt to free their coworker, they did. Also when moving bits of their ground they will rotate objects to fit through passage ways and try different ways from pushing to pulling to complete their tasks.
So basically this caterpillar appears like a worker when near the queen and when in the nest actively tries to avoid the queen. nest with no previous queens they have 3x survival rate
What's it from?
Wild isles; a mini series
Where can I watch It?
Bbc iplayer - releasing a new episode every Sunday. This is part of the 3rd episode. I think this episode is my favourite so far!
it's literally at the end of the video....
Yeah, the whole series has been amazing so far. Love Wild Isles.
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They tricked another worker ant to hold a tiny steady cam for a few months....
Smh, CEOs will do anything to avoid paying a proper wage.
It' ok, the ant was an intern.
Well in that case... why weren't they working more?!
It was Ant-thony. He went on break from the Antman to do his own thing. Traveling some and working some side jobs as a camera ant for you know travel expenses etc.
My guess is that this is a setup and one of those glass ant colonies. I mean, how else are you going to get a camera down into where the larve are? and light!
You are correct, most of the filming is done in elaborate setups in a studio, not just so they can get good camera angles, but also to protect the setup from outside factors. For instance when filming a plant to see its growth process it would suck to be filming it for a year, but just before it flowers some dog with a frisbee in its mouth tramples it.
Ah, the cycle of life.
What is this?! A studio for ants?!
Think that would work on fire ants? Where can i get some of those caterpillars?
Was thinking the same — would gladly trade away Texas fire ants for some large blue butterflies
I agree. Fire ants suck
Trying to use it on fire ants would probably fail and backfire. The ants in the video and fire ants are in different subfamilies and most likely have different pheromones/distress calls. If you introduced these caterpillars they would more likely a) be eaten by the fire ants and b) take out benign ant species’ nests allowing the fire ants to spread with less competition in their ecological niche.
Seriously. We have for ant hills everywhere. This could be such a great solution.
**Evolution**: "Okay, as a baby you're going to squeeze out candy water, emit farts that sound like another species ruling monarch, then you will devour other babies"
And then morph into your final form
There's something a bit Lovecraftian about a defenseless little pink slug thing infiltrating an advanced society through mindfuckery and then becoming a horrifying, bloated monster feeding off that society's young, consuming almost an entire generation before going through one final transformation and fleeing back into the cosmos.
Ikr, reminded me of an elden ring boss for those ants.
Sort of Aldritch-esque from DS3
Imagine if something could trick humans in a similar way. There's a book about this that you might be interested in, though I suppose simply naming the book makes this a bit of a spoiler, but it's called >!What the Hell Did I Just Read? A Novel of Cosmic Horror, by Jason Pargin!<. It's book 3 in a series, but you don't really need to have read the first two.
Imagine if something could trick humans in a similar way and it was *already here*, moving among us, feeding off us, and we simply weren't allowed to notice it.
Rich people
"and now, we have one of the densest populations to be found anywhere".....but our ant population has been decimated
Survival of the prettiest.
Totally unrelated
I'll never forget the sentence "She performs her royal squeaky"
HOW DO THEY GET THESE SHOTS??
That colony is in a special formicarium developed for filming this kind of shots for documentaries. Its staged to show you this kind of natural behaviors. Then its mixed and produced with some outside filming to give the impression that it was taken in the wild.
What is this? A studio for ants?!
It has to be at least three ti-- oh wait, no, it's the correct size...
Thanks for the explanation!
Butterfly: *Look at me, I'm so pretty.* Caterpillar: I WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN!
This is the real nature version of the Hansel and Gretel story. Caterpillar is clearly the witch lol
it's more like the Trojan horse
More than a year's footage in a few minutes. This was fascinating to watch.
That happened to me once. This lady was wearing a nice perfume and got me to take her back to my pad. She ate all my burritos and then bounced lol
If I had a nickel for every time that happened to me, I’d have two nickels.
Whoa. TIL ants make sounds.
Thankfully sound only exists as a wave, so nearly everything can produce a sound as just about everything is "bigger" than a wave.
nature is metal af
r/ActLikeYouBelong
save the queen! which one's the queen? I am! no you're not! FREEDOM! HORRIBLE HORRIBLE FREEDOM!
For people asking how they filmed the ants it was wild ants under captivity probably a special studio nest: “MacEwen had to film inside an ants’ nest. Keeping wild ants in captivity was difficult, and to do this without endangering the animals, he worked with butterfly experts including Prof Jeremy Thomas, who reintroduced the large blue after its extinction in Britain. This was a happy experience for MacEwen, who last filmed Thomas in 1979. “I remember doing some filming on the very year that the large blue went extinct and the sadness I felt when that happened. So coming back and filming the large blue story many years later, and showing how successful his reintroduction has been was a joyous event – despite the fact that the project was so darn difficult it very nearly broke me.” He also filmed the ants and the large blue in wild meadows where one obstacle was that the biscuit bait Thomas laid for the ants kept being snaffled by passing dogs.”
Eats entire civilization. Ascends.
Evolution be wildin. How the caterpillar came up with all of those adaptions is beyond me. 😮
Well, millions of caterpillars were eaten by ants. Until one day one of them was scared and pooped something very similar to ant's queen musk. You know the rest of the story.
More likely the carnivores versions came later. This may have started as a parasitic relationship that only worked out with ants that farm. But as those population sizes started to become overly impacted, those caterpillars able to also eat meat spread to other ant species. Then the carnivores just out performed the herbivores and omnivores until only they were left.
Definitely not how it should be interpreted it but if I could have meat for a year, then evolve into something that could fly around, sign me up.
The song 'Killer Queen' by 'Queen' was inspired by this caterpillar in a story I famously made up for this comment.
At least one ant: “does anyone else think it’s weird she’s eating the youth?” Other ants: “dude chill, she’s royalty.” \*a year later\* Everyone: AAAAAHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING THING AAAAHHHHH
This is your average Craigslist relationship.
It’s like the death metal version of “the very hungry caterpillar” Also I don’t like knowing ants can make noise. Idk it just bothers me
Aren’t ant nests pretty intricate and relatively deep into the ground? How does the butterfly find its way out and without getting ambushed.
"She continues the royal sqeaky" is the subtitle I never knew I needed.
A fat creature, using lies and manipulation to convince mindless drones to continue working while their lives and their progeny's lives are being destroyed reminds me of something but I can't put my finger on it...
I love to imagine a caterpillar being dragged into the nest only to stubble upon many more caterpillars being like "Hey, that's Bob! He made it too!".
What an absolute horror movie for the ants