Awesome Animals (2020) s01e05 Episode Script

1
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.
Captioned by Point.360