Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It's fall and many kids are headed back to school and they're on the hunt for the perfect book to read. Don't forget to check out our But Why book series. We have two books perfect for young readers about age 8 to 10. Look for Our Llamas Ticklish and Do Fish Breathe Underwater wherever you buy your books. And if you prefer to listen to books, check out the audiobook versions as well. You can find out more at butwhykids.org books.
But why is supported by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average? Quote now at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings may vary. ♪♪
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm, and I'm standing outside my office at Vermont Public Radio right now looking for ants.
Well, if I'm truly being honest, I'm on my hands and knees, and I'm focused on a little anthill that's in a crack. It's right next to the sidewalk, but it's in a patch of dirt, kind of underneath a tree, so it's shaded. And there are all these ants going in and out of the little hole in this little anthill that they've created. And some of the ants seem to be taking little bits of stone or dirt out of the hole.
out from inside their home and dumping them on the outside, maybe spring cleaning or something like that. And then this one little ant that I've been watching picked up a piece of leaf, a tiny little piece for us, but for this ant, it's way bigger. The piece of leaf is way bigger than the ant. It's this dried brown kind of dead leaf. And the ant has been struggling to carry it back to her home because
But the leaf is flat and light, and it's very windy here today. I don't know if you can hear it. And at one point, the breeze picked up, and it hit the leaf, and it almost acted like a sail. The leaf almost acted like a sail, and the ant was almost carried off in the wind by this little piece of leaf. But now it's trying to get the leaf into the ant hole. The hole is not big enough, so I don't know what's going to happen. It's kind of fascinating to watch.
You may not think much about them, but ants are actually pretty amazing creatures. For one thing, there are trillions of them, maybe even a quadrillion. There are way more ants than humans. And these insects live almost everywhere in the world. Even in the Arctic, there are ants. The only continent that doesn't have ants is Antarctica.
Not all the ants that live around you are native species, though. Some are invasive. That means they came from somewhere else. And invasive species often cause problems for the animals and plants that are native to the area or that have come from or evolved in your area.
I never really paid much attention to all the different varieties of ants before. I mean, you kind of look at them in your yard or maybe crawling across your kitchen counter or on the sidewalk in your city or even in an ant nest that you come across in the cavity of a tree. And if you're like me, you think, oh, there are some ants.
But the myrmecologist we are going to hear from today says there are as many as 30,000 different species or kinds of ants. A myrmecologist is a person who studies ants. Most ants are really tiny. The biggest is about two inches long, which is huge for an ant.
But the one I'm looking at right now is tiny, way tinier than two inches. Maybe the length of a grain of wild rice. And it's kind of brown and shiny, orangey-red, brown and shiny. It's very pretty, actually, when you look at it closely.
You have sent us several ant questions, so today we're going to get in touch with that myrmecologist, that person who studies ants, to get some answers. I'm Brian Fisher, curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences. You know, as adults, well most adults, we've stopped looking at ants. But that's why I like talking to kids.
They're close to the ground. They see the ants. And like me, I love looking at ants. I just see them everywhere, in the garden. But more than that, I explore the world looking for ants. People call me the ant seeker. Brian Fisher has personally discovered himself about a thousand different species of ants. And his mission is to identify every species of ant that's out there.
But beyond that, he wants people to know more about ants and how important they are to our landscape and ecosystem. Ants are a really important part of making systems work. We call them kind of the leaders of the brown cycle.
Now, this is a really important concept for kids to understand. When you go into a forest, what do you see? You see the tall trees. That's the green cycle, that growth, that magnificent beauty of life. But behind all that, there's the turning over of life back into nutrients, nutrients,
So it can become life again. And that's the brown cycle. And insects, especially ants, are the ones cleaning up. They're like the vacuum cleaner in nature. They're just kind of picking up after everybody and turning it back into juicy nutrients like soup that can be eaten up by plants again and grow bigger and bigger. How do they do that? They chew leaves and then poop them out? Well, yes, ants do poop. But it's a little bit more complicated than that, you know.
We need a little ant biology lesson here, and I'm going to set you off on a little idea. Like, imagine if you were an ant, and it was a hot day, and you're thirsty, you're hungry, you've been out looking for food all day, and you finally find a juicy little caterpillar.
What would you do? Would you maybe hide behind a rock and eat it yourself? Or maybe eat just half of it before you take the rest back to the nest? I think we all know we see ants taking food back to the nest. But what would you do if you were so hungry? Well, I bet some of you may want or be tempted to eat half of it. But actually, you don't have a choice. Ants can't eat solid food. That's why they take it back to the nest.
The stomach of an ant colony is back in the nest. So the only way to think of an ant is to think of it as a colony. It's not the individual ant.
That's the ant. It's the colony that's the ant. It's like a tree. You don't think of the leaf as the tree. It's the whole everything, the trunk, the branches, the leaves. It seems an ant colony. It's all working together that makes it an organism, the ant colony. And they take the food back to the nest and they feed it to the stomach and the stomach are the babies.
All the larvae, we call it the brood, those babies growing up need to be fed, and they have mouths that can eat food. And then they spit up liquid, which the workers and the queen can drink up, and that's how they get fed. They can drink, but they can't eat solid food. So all the workers have to visit their baby sisters.
and have the baby sisters regurgitate food for them. It's like the opposite of what you see birds and some other animals doing where the parents regurgitate the food. Exactly. It's just the opposite. You know, I won't recommend trying this at home, but it's an interesting concept of how all social organisms, like humans, have had to figure out kind of food transfer. You know, they have extended communities,
Not everybody has to be in charge of getting food around, but there has to be like a network of, you know, we have trucks that deliver food to stores and we go to the store and pick it up. And in fact, in ant colonies, it became kind of like too hard for everybody to go to a larva to get fed. So there's these feeder ants. They actually go to the larva, stuff all that food into their social kind of stomach, which
which is like a balloon, gets filled up like a water balloon, and they walk around asking everybody, hey, you hungry? I got some juice here. And they just spit it out. So only a few workers have to be like the food transporters. And so they meet them in the trail. They meet them at work, kind of, and they get fed. I have to say I'm kind of glad that I don't have to get my food that way, though. Well, it's like a food truck, you know? I suppose. You never know what you're going to get. Yeah.
All right, so we have a lot of ant questions that our listeners have asked. The first question then comes from Luna. I'm six years old. I live in Fairhope, Alabama, and my question is, why do ants bite? Oh, why do ants bite? Now, it's interesting because most people, when they say they got bit by an ant, they really got stung by an ant. You see, ants as a group...
They've come from wasps. So wasps, as you know, have stingers. And then from wasps evolve and diversify 30,000 different species of ants. And those ants, most of them have a weapon to kill their prey. And what they usually do is they use their mandibles, their jaws, to grab onto their prey. That bite usually doesn't hurt. And then they hang on to you.
and stick a stinger into you. And that's what you, it's venom, right? So it's going to hurt. You're going to scream. And that's what fire ants have. And people who have allergic reactions get little welts all over their bodies after they get stung.
But the other fancy ants that have kind of gone past this stinger idea and have chemical warfares. And some of them, like the formica ants, these are the ants that have mounds, and they actually spray an acid. So they bite you to hang on, but also to scratch you. And then they spray acid into your wound, and that also makes you sting. And what's the purpose of all this? Well,
Well, the purpose is to subdue their prey. And that's what's interesting about ants. They all, in a sense, are very specialized in what they hunt. And they may have special adaptations in their venom, how they hide. Some of them are like bear traps that are just left out in the forest. These ants just stay there motionless with their mouths open. And something just walks into their mouth.
They close their jaws, hang on, and then they just sting. Others are in pursuit. They just track you down and they snap their mandibles shut. You know, it's a dangerous world out there in that little tiny scale of the ant world. And these ants are top predators and they're looking for food everywhere. Couldn't they tell, though, that I'm a lot bigger than they are and one little ant stinging me is not going to subdue me so that maybe they should just move along?
Well, I think ants are just these great optimists. No, they may not know how big you are, but they do know how to respond. And they're trying to protect their nest. They're trying to protect their food source. And they're trying to defend their territories. And they'll respond accordingly.
We got a question from Jack, who's four. And I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. My question is, do boy ants have stingers? Do boy ants have stingers? Well, unfortunately, if you're rooting for the boys, they don't have anything, except they've got the rotten deal in a sense. You know, all those ants you see walking around, foraging, we call them, looking for food, they're all sisters.
So it's really a female society. You have the queen and thousands of workers, which are all sisters. And they have an interesting life. They are foraging for food to feed the queens who can lay the eggs, have more sisters, and grow bigger and bigger. Now, it's interesting that they can live actually a long time. The queen could live like 40 years. That's amazing, right? It's like an elephant. And the workers may only live a couple of years.
But the males, they're there throughout the year, but they only live maybe three days. They don't even have mouthparts, and they don't even have a stinger. They don't eat as an adult at all or drink. They just fly out of the nest, they mate, and then they die. Well, then that helps us answer Lily's question. Lily is Jack's sister. My question is, are red ants just boy ants, or are they girl ants and boy ants?
The ants that you're seeing are all going to be girls. And there are different species that are red, different ones, different kinds that are black. But most of the types of ants you see are going to just be females. Only rarely do you get a male ant that comes to a light in your kitchen or flies into your house during the spring, during the rainy season. But that's very rare. Most people have never seen a male ant. Are there female ants with wings? Are there female flying ants?
Right, so most of the ants don't have wings, right? But they're female too, but they're just workers. And then the queen, most queens start off by having wings. They leave the nest to go find a new spot to start a new colony. They mate, and then when they get to the ground...
They don't need wings anymore after they've mated. So they just take them off and then they dig into the ground and hide there. And that's why ants can live a long time. Once that queen is hidden in her new nesting site, she's never going to leave. And so she's protected. In fact, she turns all those wing muscles. That's why she's kind of have a big ant. She's got lots of wing muscles. She'll turn all that into food to feed her first babies. You know,
Somebody's got to feed the babies, and there's no workers to do that. So she uses her muscles, she regurgitates that into a liquid to feed her first batch. And then the first workers that get hatched and become adults, they go and forage for the next batch. Coming up, we're going to discover how ants use chemicals to communicate and whether or not ants hibernate, as well as how you can start to identify the ants that live around you.
This is But Why, and today, myrmecologist Brian Fisher is answering your ant questions. Hi, my name is Iris, and I live in Salem, Massachusetts, and I'm five years old.
And my question is, why do ants crawl? Why do ants crawl? That's an interesting concept. What is crawling? I guess walking around. So ants, why do ants walk around? It's because they can't stand up, I guess. And they can't stand up because of their body shapes. Almost all insects are segmented, and they're divided into kind of the front, the middle, and the back, and that's where the legs attach. And so they're just kind of well-positioned there.
But there's a lot of advantages to crawling. You know, they get to go into very kind of tiny little cracks. And they can, like a child, they can crawl into any place in the house, under the bed. They can even climb onto the sofa. So crawling is a really good thing if you're small and want to get into cracks. It's a good thing they can't jump. You know, there are some ants that jump. Whoa. There's a couple of ants that have kind of spring-loaded legs. And they...
I think they use it to actually capture some insects that they want to eat. My name is Campbell, and I am five, and I live in Washington, D.C., and I want to know, do ants have a better sense of smell than dogs? Do ants have a better sense of smell than dogs? Well, that's a good question.
You know, dogs have a big nose and I've never seen a nose on an ant. So maybe they can't smell. Well, actually, they can. They actually smell with their antenna. So their nose, in a sense, are these little things that come out of their head and dangle kind of like an elbowed string that's in front of
their heads, those are the kind of the nose. That's where they smell. And smelling like perfume, that's a chemical. And ants actually speak with chemicals. They speak with perfume. Each species, each kind of ant produces a unique set of smells, chemicals, and they communicate with each other saying, hey, I found some food or hey, danger or
And they use that and they talk with hearing, in a sense, through their antenna. That's so cool. So if I were an ant and I found that caterpillar and I wanted to take it back to the nest but needed some help, I would send out a chemical and that's how my fellow sisters would know to find me to help me with that caterpillar?
Yes, and now it depends on where you're at. That chemical may not travel very far. So you may have to go home and kind of bring that chemical with you to share with your sisters and say, hey, follow me, I got food, and they'll follow your chemical trail back to the food. My name is Oscar, and I'm five years old. We live in Bradable, Vermont, and my question is, do animals,
So do they wake up at nighttime and are they active at night? Well, ants are pretty much a 24-hour business. They can be working at any time, day and night, feeding the family. But I think an interesting question is, do ants sleep at night?
And I thought that was a silly question before, but now it's a whole area of research, and they're finding that ants sleep and insects sleep. I can't believe it, but ants sleep in these short little bursts, just like we do in a sense, throughout the day. And, you know, it is harder to do some types of jobs at night, so there may be more stationary, but it may be colder sometimes.
And so they have to wait until it's warmer. But like in the warmer areas, ants are active 24 hours a day. And they sleep throughout the day too, but they just keep working. That's fascinating. Have any animals been found to not sleep? No. In fact, that's a strange thing, you know. We don't really understand it in humans. Yeah. We do know that if we don't get it,
will die. And we don't, I don't think anybody's tested that on ants yet, but keep them awake, tickle them or something every time they want to fall asleep or tell them ant jokes or something. But it's something we need. I think it has to do with having an organism that has a functioning brain and so forth. Ants do have brains. Do they have eyes?
Ants have eyes. Most ants have reduced eyes unless you're a male or a queen because they fly. Visual cues are more important. But they don't rely on their eyes like we do to get around. They are more tactile and they rely on smell and chemical cues. And they also, for orientation, they sometimes use many different types of
UV cues and so forth to orientate them around when they're walking to come back. And I mean UV is like the sun, the direction of the sun and so forth. That's so cool. My name is Raleigh and I live in Colchester, Vermont and I'm almost nine years old. And my question is, what do ants do in the winter? Now obviously this comes from a kid who lives in a place that has a cold winter, but are ants seasonal? What do they do when it's cold?
Yeah, that's what's amazing about ants. They're everywhere in the world. They've adapted somehow, like humans in a sense, to figure out how to make a little nice nest somewhere where they can survive, right? But what do you do when you live in the cold? They have to kind of shut down, but they don't freeze. In fact, ants produce an antifreeze.
in their blood system that allows them to kind of go dormant but not freeze. So when summer comes along, they kind of pump out the antifreeze and then start going around. It's amazing that those are just one of the many, many adaptations that ants and other insects have to adapt to these local conditions, which can be harsh.
So you said you have gone all over the world to look at ants and to identify them and to study them. Do you have favorite species of ants? Oh, I have many favorite species of ants, and I have favorite places. Just last week, I was in Madagascar.
Madagascar, that's an island off the coast of Africa. And my favorite is to go there and to find just like new species that live in little cryptic or hidden away places up in mountains. So I climb up mountains and look for new species and figure out how they survive there. What adaptations do they have to survive on this mountain in Madagascar? And it's always an interesting story. How many ants have you been bitten by?
Or stung by. I don't count that. I don't know. But I've collected thousands and thousands of different species. And usually when you're collecting them, there's a good chance that one might bite you. So I predict at least a thousand different kinds. Did you hear that? He didn't say he's had a thousand bites or stings. He's actually been stung by a thousand different kinds of ants. Wow.
So are you at least a little more interested in ants now than you were 20 minutes ago? I certainly am. Ants are truly social creatures. They divide up their colonies, so some ants have the job of getting food, some ants defend their home, some ants feed the babies, and then there are those food truck ants, the ones that walk along and feed the other worker ants so they don't have to trek all the way back to their nest every time they get hungry. That's wild.
And you can actually study ants yourself if you'd like to observe some of the behaviors Brian Fisher was telling us about. The next time you see an ant outside or on your kitchen counter, you just stop and watch it for a moment. And instead of, like, wanting to kill it, you go and get some cookie crumbs and you just put it out next to it and watch what happens. Soon those ants will find those little white specks.
and start doing something with it, taking it back to the nest or telling their sisters to come and help them carry it. And I think you'll just start realizing these are fascinating organisms. And, you know, nature is getting farther and farther from us. But sometimes it comes right to us, like an ant. And why push that away? Embrace it and you can watch and you'll be enriched by what you see, I'm sure.
If you want to learn how to identify ants, there are websites that have great pictures. Brian has the goal to take a picture of every single species of ant on Earth. You can find his work at antweb.org. And if you find an ant but you aren't sure what kind it is, you can actually take a picture of it and have an adult help you use a website called iNaturalist.
There, you can upload your picture and ask for help identifying. Once you know what the name is, you can actually learn more about the particular kind of ant you've found. Also, there are books. I have a book that helps me identify the ants in my neck of the world. It's called A Field Guide to the Ants of New England.
And Brian says we still haven't found all the different kinds of ants that are living around us. So maybe you will find an ant that is new to the world. Maybe even in your own backyard, you can make an important discovery about ants because we just haven't bothered to look before. And now we have to because we're running out of time. We don't know how long forests will be like in Madagascar.
or in the Congo Basin in Africa. Many places, the forest is slowly shrinking because it's being cut and because of climate change. And maybe in 50 years, we won't even have forests left in these places. So if we want to know...
who we share this world with. We have to start now by documenting and discovering. And I'm convinced the more we understand, the more we'll appreciate and the more we can actually then live together. Well, this is really wonderful and exciting to learn about all of these ants and to think about how you can actually go outside and go just onto a sidewalk or maybe even in your own apartment if you live in the city and find these ants. So Brian, I really appreciate you talking with us about them.
It's been my pleasure. That was Brian Fisher, curator of entomology, that's the study of insects, at the California Academy of Sciences.
We have the ant resources we mentioned up on our webpage, butwhykids.org. We'd love to hear if you enjoyed this episode and how it's made you think differently about the ants around you. So send us a note or maybe draw a picture. You can get messages to us by emailing or have an adult email questions at butwhykids.org. You can also get in touch with us on our Facebook page, where we post pictures of all the kids who ask questions in our episodes.
Those are also the places you can go to send us your questions. Remember, you can ask a question about anything. Just be sure to tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are. Have an adult record you on a phone. Or if that feels a little too scary or maybe talking is difficult for you, you can have your adult write out the question instead. And then send your file or your question to questions at butwhykids.org.
Hey, by the way, adults who are listening, if you enjoy this podcast, would you mind writing a review for us on iTunes or wherever it is that you listen to But Why? It helps us rise to the top when people are searching for kids' podcasts. Even better, any of you can spread the word to other families who you think might enjoy hearing this show.
But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. We get help from the great digital team at VPR, including Emily Alfin Johnson, Meg Malone, Jonathan Butler, and Noah Cutter. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. And I'm going to keep looking at these ants. That's a big piece of leaf.
From PR.
