01x05 - Antzilla

[bunniefuu]

They're tiny, but mighty.

And when hundreds

of thousands join forces,

they can think, move, and act

as one massive super-organism.

It breathes like an organism.

It reproduces like an organism.

It behaves much more

like, say, a human body.

This humble little ant

is a growing global superpower,

spreading across the world

and under our feet.

Discover how this tiny animal genius

isn't so little after all.

Ants are one of nature's

greatest success stories.

They're what some call a super-organism.

That's when a group of individuals

band together and acts

like one single being.

But how can millions of tiny minds

get totally in sync?

The most amazing

thing about ant behavior

is that it even happens at all.

Each one of these ants

has the potential to be an individual,

to go off and do her own thing.

Yet they don't, and figuring out

why ants do that

rather than going it alone,

is a very key question in ant science.

To find out,

we're using the Frankencam,

a remote controlled macro camera

to super-size the ants and

enter their secret society.

Up this close, ants will reveal behavior

that was once almost impossible to see.

We'll find out how millions of brains

can be better than one.

All ants are social insects,

living and working together.

It's what has made them such a success.

They're everywhere.

But some species are just

much more social than others,

and when they are,

they explode by the thousands.

Like these long legged ants,

one of the most common ants

in the North American desert.

Even entomologist Alex Wild is impressed

by their power in numbers.

These are long legged ants.

They're a really common species

in the Sonoran Desert,

and as you can tell

by their name, they're quite leggy,

and they're pretty fast.

And the thing that these guys do

is find stuff that's out

there in the desert fast,

and they bring it back before anyone else

has a shot at it.

But just how does

a city of 3000 workers,

all female at that, operate?

Dr. Wild's Frankencam dives

underground to find out.

It sounds like a royal society.

An industrious, highly

organized city run by a queen.

But this queen has only

one job; to lay eggs.

She doesn't have to worry about much else.

Each of her 3000 dedicated workers

is assigned a very specific job.

It makes for a more organized system.

But it comes at a cost.

Workers have to give up queenly ambition.

With ants,

the challenge is getting the workers

to abandon their own reproduction

in order to help the colony as a whole

and help the queen reproduce.

But the workers

don't always obey the rules.

Each of them can reproduce if they dare.

That's, from the perspective

of the rest of the ants, cheating,

and it undermines

the cohesiveness of the colony.

This worker

is getting ready to lay eggs.

But the change in her body

creates a telltale odor.

Her sisters sniff her out.

They wrestle her to the ground

and hold her down for up to three days.

She's not harmed, but her eggs shrink.

It's what's best for the whole colony.

When an individual worker

decides to selfishly start laying eggs,

that is a cancer to the super-organism.

An ant colony has an immune

system against cheaters.

Worker policing is similar to the body's

own anti-cancer defenses.

The crisis is averted,

and the workers

go back to collecting food.

But as dawn approaches,

there's a new problem.

A better armed and

better organized neighbor

is after the same food.

A dispute over resources leads

to a clash of civilizations.

On the desert floor, a mesquite seed

sparks a battle between an infantry

of long legged ants

and the heavily armed red harvester ants.

They're equipped with stingers

and the most powerful venom

of any insect in the world.

Reinforcements continue to pour out

from the harvester nest.

And eventually the long legged ants

have no choice but to retreat.

They're out-equipped and outnumbered.

Harvesters are simply bigger and badder

on the super-organism scale.

Unlike long legged ants,

this colony of red harvester ants

is, in my opinion,

a super-organism,

and I say that because

these individual workers do not reproduce.

The future of the

genes that they carry with them

has to flow through the queen.

They function very much as cells,

individual cells, of a larger organism.

All of their energy

is channeled into the queen

and her newly hatching eggs.

This is the family's next generation.

With temporary wings passed down

from their wasp cousins,

they fly to far away places to create

new, growing colonies.

Some fly to remote parts

of the Arizona desert.

Others start vibrant, buzzing colonies

right in the middle of town.

Here in Tucson, Arizona,

millions and millions

of sprawling ant metropolises

lie just beneath our feet.

We might not

notice them because

the ants themselves are so small,

but on a typical city block,

there might be tens or hundreds

or even thousands of ant colonies,

all going about their own business,

pretty much ignoring us

the way we ignore them.

For harvester ants,

business is good.

Without babies to worry about,

workers have more time to simply work.

It looks like chaos, but

It's actually

more organized than it might seem.

First, there are nest maintenance workers

picking up little pebbles,

moving them around.

There are patrollers who

are generally milling about.

And foragers

are always on the hunt.

We don't think that these ants

are able to recognize their

individual nest mates,

that is, they don't know

Frank, and Bob, and Susie.

But they're very

good at counting and smelling.

Foragers smell

different from nest maintenance workers,

and those smell different from the guards,

and so if they measure returning foragers

at a particular speed,

at a particular pace,

they'll know to either go out

if there's a lot of food coming in,

or if there's not,

to stay home.

But a super-organism has more

than daily chores to do.

What about the bigger decisions in life?

Like when and where to move.

Or how to handle a food shortage.

How do millions of ants

ever agree on dinner,

let alone, anything at all?

Communication is key.

Central America's army

ants are an organized force

in constant motion.

Dr. Sean O'Donnell studies all the ants

in this Costa Rican forest.

But army ants are in

a league of their own.

This is one of the supreme examples

of super-oganismic development

in insect societies

that we know of.

They have some of the biggest colonies

of any kind of social insect,

and they move with an intensity,

you might almost say a ferocity,

that's hardly ever matched

in the animal kingdom.

These ants never stop moving.

And getting a clear view of them

is next to impossible.

That's where the remote controlled

Frankencam comes in handy.

It flies above the ants, getting up close

and personal detail

of both their biology

and their behavior.

Sean can identify exactly

which size and shape

of ants are doing what job.

Each worker belongs to a different caste,

or group, within the colony,

much like a human cell

belongs to a distinct organ.

And each caste, or organ,

performs its distinct job.

Big soldiers armed with

fierce mandibles keep guard,

while smaller foragers

march into the forest.

They're like the arms

of this super-organism,

reaching out into the

forest to grab its food.

Right now

we're in the middle

of one of the most

spectacular sights in the rain forest.

This is a swarm raid of army ants.

The ants have poured out of their bivouac,

probably starting about 6:30 this morning.

But what's remarkable is that

army ants are nearly blind.

No one really knows where they're going,

unless, that is, they

heighten their senses.

They must pick up tiny bits of information

from around them,

moisture, vibration,

the scent of prey, and in turn,

leave a trail of chemicals behind

for others to follow.

Interacting with each

other, almost constantly,

there's very little time that passes

when a single ant

doesn't touch a nest mate

as they're sweeping through the forest.

It's a network

almost as intricate

as the connections in a human brain.

There is no doubt there

is power in numbers.

The group can take down

insects much larger than them.

And their powerful stings

inject digestive chemicals

that dissolve

tissue and turn it into mush.

Their capture simply falls apart

into smaller pieces

for easy transport

back to the colony.

Army ants have no nest,

only a massive

mobile swarm of bodies.

For two weeks, it has rested here

while the queen lays her eggs.

But it's now time to

undertake an epic move

to find fresh hunting grounds.

Shortly before dusk,

the super-organism begins to stir,

and the army ant colony begins to move on.

It's like everyone in Manhattan packing up

and relocating 50 miles away, on foot.

Scouts select a site for the new camp.

They start to link legs.

And as more and more ants

arrive, they join the chain.

Before the end, a half a million ants

create the skin and skeleton of a giant

protecting the queen and her young inside.

An army ant colony is one of Earth's

greatest super-organisms,

but this forest

hides another ant society.

Even more complex, but far more peaceful,

the leafcutter ants.

If army ants are like a single predator,

then this is a single, giant herbivore.

Like their name suggests,

they cut and eat leaves.

Sister ants by the millions,

all born to one queen,

and all in service to one enormous colony.

This surprising clearing

in the understory of the rain forest

is the result of the work

of leafcutter ants.

What we're looking at here is the surface

of a huge nest.

This is the soil that's been excavated up

from underground,

and it's been done by millions of workers

that are toiling away

under my feet right now.

Below ground lies an ant city

as big as a school bus.

A vast network of arteries

links hundreds of separate chambers.

Each room has a specific purpose

and each ant has a specific job to do.

Leafcutters create the most specialized

workforce of all ants.

Scouts are the eyes

of the super-organism

searching for that perfect leaf.

They leave a scent trail behind them

so the foragers can come

collect their prize.

Nice, crisp, and healthy.

Exactly what they're after.

Big forager ants clip the leaves

into portable sections.

And smaller inspectors check the leaves

for dangerous bacteria

that could ruin their meal.

The first job done.

The foragers lift their clippings

and pass them down into

the belly of their nest.

But after all this heavy lifting,

they don't eat the leaves.

They don't care too much for their greens

and instead prefer the

funky taste of fungus.

The leaves nourish the fungus,

the fungus feeds the ants.

It's a win-win situation.

Maybe we humans could learn a little

about farming from

these agricultural ants.

After all, they've been doing

it for 50 million years.

But if the colony is

viewed as a super-organism,

the fungus is just another part

of the digestive system.

It acts like the acid in our stomachs,

breaking down the leaves

into a form of energy

the ants, the cells of

the organism, can use.

Each fungus garden grows to about the size

of a head of lettuce and

weighs about a pound.

A single colony can hold

over a hundred gardens.

To these ants,

it's a massive skyscraper city

of edible goodness.

But where there is food, there is waste.

And some unlucky members

of the caste system

have the dirty job of clearing it out.

They are banished to

the bowels of the city.

Foragers, gardeners, sanitation workers,

all of these individual ants are part

of a single metabolism.

This supremely organized

society could only be achieved

through total cooperation.

And they cooperate because

they recognize each other

as members of the

same reproductive organism.

Whether it's a complex

society of leafcutters

or smaller colonies like harvester ants,

sisters of the same nest cooperate.

Ants from different

nests are mortal enemies.

Even if they're the same, exact species.

This competition helps keep

ant populations in balance.

But some ants have managed

to overcome this rule,

merging super-organisms

into super colonies

with the power to conquer the world.

This quiet street in Barcelona, Spain

has been occupied by invaders.

Tiny, unassuming and wholly

unstoppable Argentine ants.

As the name suggests, they don't belong

outside of South America.

But now they've taken over.

With a little help from us humans,

they've become the most

widely distributed ants on Earth.

From their homeland, they stowed away

in cargo ships to Europe, North America,

even Japan and New Zealand.

Our irrigation and development give these

invaders an ideal habitat,

and with no natural

predators to keep them in check,

their populations exploded.

But it wasn't all luck.

They could never have spread so quickly

without a little smarts as well.

Instead of fighting, neighboring colonies

form peace treaties and join forces.

Argentine ants can live

miles apart from each other

in separate colonies,

but they don't recognize

that they're different.

They all act like they're the same,

creating a massive super-colony,

stretching 3,700 miles

along the Mediterranean coast and beyond.

Ants from Japan, to California, to Europe

all belong to the same super-colony.

But in North America,

there's another rival

ant super-organism on the scene.

Fire ants.

They do more than form an army of allies.

The colonies completely

merge into one nest

under one queen

as one gigantic super-organism.

Fire ants came from South

America to the United States.

Once there, they spread like a plague,

invading homes and attacking livestock.

They have all the advantages

of a top super-organism.

Sterile workers, a system

of organized labor,

and a network of chemical communication.

But they also get a lot of help from us.

This habitat in Central Florida

is hostile to most organisms,

except fire ants.

And they love land that

has been disturbed,

like this building site.

Biologist Walter Tschinkel

expects that they've

already seized this ground.

When we turned

the forests of this area

into parking lots, and lawns,

and all kinds open areas,

we make the perfect habitat for fire ants.

And this site here, where we are,

will attract colony-founding

fire ant queens

by the thousands.

The infestation starts just like

any other ant colony.

A fertile fire ant queen

mates, digs a burrow,

and lays her eggs.

But this is where the similarity ends.

What happens next is the secret

to the fire ant's super-colony.

Three weeks after mating, the young queen

has the makings of a colony.

And if she moves fast,

she could build an empire.

The first generation is a sisterhood

of tiny workers called minims.

They immediately have to care

for the next round of young.

But the queen is also desperate for food.

Lucky for her, fire ants

know how to get it, fast.

Just about anything will do.

When a forager finds a morsel,

she runs back to the nest,

leaving a trail of pheromones.

When she arrives, the mix of pheromones

and food odor gets everyone excited.

And they're off.

Dozens of her sisters race down the trail

to grab the meal before anything else can.

But food is not all they're after.

They found a rival nest,

and they walk right in.

Fire ants don't have many manners.

They're really only here

for one selfish reason;

this is a mass kidnapping.

The raiders take the young back

to the stronger nest.

When the weaker colony

realizes it's defeated,

the workers surrender and

help the winning side.

Even the vanquished queen

follows the scent trails of her children

and joins her conquerors.

If the weaker nest were allowed to grow,

it would eventually compete.

A losing situation for all.

Instead, the surviving nest

just got a lot bigger.

In the nest of their captors,

the kidnapped eggs hatch,

mature into adults,

and are welcomed as one big happy family.

It's a very confusing

and dynamic process

that can last for, anywhere

from days to weeks.

I saw one raid that

lasted for a whole month.

And included, ultimately,

80 nests that I saw.

After many raids,

the nest is full of workers,

and many queens, all laying eggs.

The colony grows at a rapid pace

but this doesn't end happily ever after.

It's just the calm before the storm.

The queens begin to fight for top ranks.

And for the good of the

colony, the workers revolt.

They decide which queen

will reproduce for them,

sometimes even turning

against their own mothers.

Rejected queens meet an ugly end.

Over time, ants from dozens of colonies

combine under one queen

into the ultimate

fire ant super-organism.

Using this strategy, fire ants can seize

new territory

and spread faster

than we can stop them.

If we have a problem with ants,

it's a problem we created.

Their societies are hardwired

for efficiency and expansion,

destined to dominate everywhere they live,

from city street,

to rain forest, to desert.

And it's lucky for us they do.

A study done in

Eastern North America

showed that insects

dropped on the forest floor

disappeared within three minutes.

And 100% of them were taken by ants.

Almost everything out there gets recycled

through the ants at some point.

They really are hugely important.

Ants are our

ultimate trash compactor.

We tend to ignore them

because they're everywhere,

but they're everywhere

because they're so successful

at doing what they do.

Getting millions of minds to think, work,

and live as one, they're genius.