The Insane Biology of: Ant Colonies

Here's the link to the podcast! watchnebula.com/modulus/working-under-pressure

"They're found on every continent except *Ant*arctica." ironic

Imagine being a baby and your aunt decides to use you for arts and crafts.

"Using their babies like a hot glue gun" is not a sentence I would ever imagine of hearing

Wow, you unblocked a memory! When i was like 6-7 years old and i was playing somewhere outside i saw one group of ants that were standing still, without moving, and even if i threatened or touched them they would still not move. I didn't think much of it since i was just a little child, but the memory of this odd event sticked to my mind apparently. Today i've watched this documentary, and as soon as i saw those dying ants all still at 12:06 this childhood memory immediately popped up! Now, after about 30 years, i understand what happened. Those guys had lost their queen and they were letting themselves go. Thank you!!

Dude where did this amazing channel come from Absolutely flawless sound design, script and editing

Aren't they awesome?! True rulers of the Earth! Ant love forever! ❤🐜🐜🐜 PS - Hate to be that guy but the creatures at 0:38 are actually termites. Not your fault; whoever catalogued that footage thought they were ants. I've seen the exact stock footage used in tv shows and videos about an

"And been the subject of every kids backyard curiosity" That reminds me of when my youngest sister was a toddler. We went to visit one of my mom's college friends, and my sister was totally engrossed in watching an anthill out front. My mom's friend's husband thought she was the coolest little kid for being so fascinated by the ants. It was super cute.

Scientists cutting open ants and spreading their juices on the ground to see if the other ants react... Imagine how terrifying it would be if aliens did that while trying to study us. :[

"Maybe you Immediately thought of the blue whale." Nah mate, thought of ants. It's the title of the video

Wow ants have more plans and ideas for their lives than i do lol

When I was a kid, I used to observe ants in my neighborhood. Occasionally I would see two ants touching their antennae together, but I thought that maybe I was imagining it. But this video shows that ants really do that as a form of communication. So I was right after all.

Very informative video! But I wish you would have mentioned, the underlying mechanism for eusociality among some insects (ants, bees etc.) probably is the sex determination via "haplodiploidy" a.k.a "arrhenotoky", where male drones hatching from unfertilized eggs have half the chromosome set of her queen mom, while the queen and the infertile female workers have the full (diploid) set. Ultimately this makes the workers more related to each other (75%) than to her mother or their male siblings (50%). This favor eusociality: helping the queen laying more eggs spreads the workers' genes more effectively than they could do on their own.

that method for using larvae as biological hot glue gun is some next level child labor stuff lol

Ants are truly insane! Did you know that wood ants even sacrifice their own lives to save their colony? The territorial battles that break out between neighboring anthills each spring are warfare of the highest order, involving thousands of casualties and chemical weapons. Our film team was thrilled when they watched two colonies how they conduct scouting expeditions and subdue their enemies.

As I found out too late with the cucumbers that I was growing this year, some ants will even farm aphids for the juice that the aphids produce. Ants are pretty amazing... though I'm still upset at them for causing my cucumbers demise.

if the colony is born from 1 queen, they are all siblings, so I think the Dawkin's kinship theory still stands for ants...

Using their babies as a hot glue gun 😂

first thing that came to mind when talking about the most dominant creature was funghi and lichen... we need to know more about funghi and lichen _

I knew about weaver ants, but I didn't know the extent of their colony building process. That's actually amazing. Everytime I watch something on ants, I understand why scientists say if they were bigger they'd take over humans lol