A swarm of unstoppable, ravenous ants, viciously capturing and tearing apart the prey they capture, what happens if a human gets in their way? Will they too be consumed? As a child I remember hearing stories about great legions of flesh eating ants in the Amazon Rainforest. These tales depicted an insect capable of skeletonizing a large vertebrate rapidly. Where do these stories come from, and does such a terrifying creature exist? From H. G. Wells' Empire of the Ants, to Leiningen Versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson, and that scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the crystal skull, swarms of ants have been shown to be a real danger in the tropics. Today I will be heading to the Amazon Rainforest to see if army ants are truly dangerous to people...
#ants #learning #wildlife
Sources
1. Wells, H. G. (1905). Empire of the Ants. In The Strand Magazine
2. Stephenson, C. (1938). Leiningen versus the ants. Esquire Magazine.
3. Brady, Seán G. (2003). "Evolution of the army ant syndrome: The origin and long-term evolutionary stasis of a complex of behavioral and reproductive adaptations". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100 (11): 6575–9. Bibcode:2003PNAS..100.6575B. doi:10.1073/pnas.1137809100. PMC 164488. PMID 12750466.
Franks, Nigel R.; Hölldobler, Bert (1987). "Sexual competition during colony reproduction in army ants". Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 30 (3): 229–43. doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.1987.tb00298.x.
4.Couzin, I. D., & Franks, N. R. (2003). Self-organized lane formation and optimized traffic flow in army ants. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 270(1511), 139–146. [ Ссылка ]
5. Lutz, M. J., Reid, C. R., Lustri, C. J., Kao, A. B., Garnier, S., & Couzin, I. D. (2021). Individual error correction drives responsive self-assembly of Army Ant Scaffolds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(17). [ Ссылка ]
7. O’Donnell, S., Bulova, S., Barrett, M., & von Beeren, C. (2018). Brain investment under colony-level selection: Soldier specialization in Eciton Army Ants (formicidae: Dorylinae). BMC Zoology, 3(1). [ Ссылка ]
8. Sazima, I. (2015). House Geckos (Hemidactylus mabouia) and an unidentified snake killed and devoured by army ants (Eciton burchellii). Herpetology Notes.
9. Savage, T. S. (2009). I. on the habits of the “drivers” or visiting ants of West Africa. Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London, 5(1), 1–15. [ Ссылка ]
10. Martínez, A. E., Pollock, H. S., Rodrigues, P. F., & Touchton, J. M. (2021). Army-ant following in Neotropical Birds: A review and prospectus. Ornithology, 138(1). [ Ссылка ]
11. Austin, CT, J. P. Brock, and O. HH Mielke. 1993. Ants, birds, and skippers. Tropical Lepidoptera, 4 (Suppl. 2): 1-11
12. Rettenmeyer, C. W., Rettenmeyer, M. E., Joseph, J., & Berghoff, S. M. (2010). The largest animal association centered on one species: The Army Ant Eciton burchellii and its more than 300 associates. Insectes Sociaux, 58(3), 281–292. [ Ссылка ]
Music:
"River of Io" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
[ Ссылка ]
0:00 Intro
0:20 The Silly Framing Device
3:04 The History of Killer Ants in Fiction
8:26 The Biology of Army Ants
15:34 Finding an Army Ants BIVOAC
16:57 Are Army Ants Aggressive?
17:44 Bitten and STUNG by an Army Ant Solider
19:59 Will a Swarm Attack a Person
21:24 Why Army Ants are Important for the Rainforest
24:58 Outro
26:50 Next Time...
27:04 End Screen
