You're Living On An Ant Planet
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- Опубликовано: 25 сен 2023
- How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.
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Everyone summon AntsCanada
Love that channel.
He'll be here, I believe.
Ant love forever ❤
Exactly what I was thinking
He will be summoned
I did some research for one of Bert Holldobler's PhD students during my undergrad, then worked in their lab caring for ant colonies. Bert found out I kept leafcutter ants as a hobby my first day and before the day was out he had presented me with a copy of his and EO Wilson's book about leafcutters. Bert was just so excited to meet a young person who is passionate about the same things as him. He's an all-around nice guy. I wish I'd had a chance to meet Wilson before he passed.
That's adorable I love that for you two
Add this information to how ground ants cultivate specialized fungus, it's like ants themselves are the real OG farmers from deep time. 😅 It is crazy to think how much biodiversity we can thank the ants for. 🎉 🐜
Fungi were the first large beings on land. Their threads broke mountains to mud while the rest of life still was still comfortably down in the water.
They have farming, animal husbandry, slavery, and war! Basically full-on civilization
@@comicomment "Do not cite the deep terrestriality to me, bilateterian. I was there when it was written." - some fungus probably
And they keep cattle: lice.
Yup! I made a comment about it. 😅
I used to watch ants for hours as a child, they are truly amazing
Same. And every now and again even today I’ll get lost watching ants at their never-ending work. Mesmerizing!
With a magnifying glass and a sun ray or jug of boiling water
Same. I used to want to follow them into the anthill to see what went on in there.
That one ant carrying the seed through the desert gave me life. Like, go you little champion you got this.
As someone who is currently writting a scientific note on the topic of expanding the known range of an invasive ant species in a town with 6 invasive ant species, I can confirm the the ants have taken over.
let them fight
What species?
No uncles? That's what's wrong with ants today- no traditional male roles..
I visited that town in Fallout 3. I had barely any ammo left or supplies left. It was terrifying.
@@Nikki0417 That lady was nuts!
Something that brings me peace is that no matter how badly we mess up and destroy the planet, ants are still probably going to survive and thrive just fine despite the state of the world.
The ones dependent on above ground conditions could be devastated by desertification, erratic weather patterns, stagnant water, irradiation, and pathogens on plant species, but the ones evolved to grow their food, specifically hardy fungi, algae and yeasts, in conditions deep underground might just persist long enough to then re-diversify when above-ground conditions improve. Or they go an extreme route and develop a caste of ant that doesn’t graduate from larval stage but grows much larger, and these just become cattle to the other castes. That would be one way for some strictly carnivorous lineages to survive, but I think the vegetarians will have greater diversity initially.
@@ADTillion
Vampire ants kinda do that
@@ADTillion Could just have ants that store food within themselves like honeypot ants
"Something that brings me peace is that no matter how badly we mess up and destroy the planet, ants are still probably going to survive and thrive just fine despite the state of the world."
If all humans somehow disappeared from Earth forever today, ants wouldn't know that humans even existed in the first place. Humility is always the best policy.
It always makes me smile when a new Eons video pops up. Thank you for making and sharing these :)
Ants are the humans of the insect world
Okay not sure about you all but this is literally my favorite RUclips channel. Helps put my existence in perspective with the bigger grander picture of life on earth
It's difficult to tell from this vantage point if they will consume mankind or merely enslave them but one thing is for certain; the ants will soon be here.
Someone call Leiningen
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
@@spookywoop Don't be too sure! I remember THEM! ;)
Neat! When I was a kid in the early 2000s, my dad would take my brothers and me out to the clay pits in Sayreville, NJ to hike and explore. Sometimes, we would run into paleontologists digging for amber. I wonder if one of them found that ant
Your sound person, Callie Dishman, does an amazing job.
I’ve said this for years: “if aliens come and scan the planet for life forms, their machine will tell them that ants are the dominant species”
I hope this is sarcasm
@Fractured_Unity it's the truth, I am saying same thing often too
I highly doubt it. Ants don't have as much ecological footprint as us.
Take this analogy a bit further and it would be bacteria.
Depends on what they define as dominant. If they're looking for certain things and in certain areas, they might easily decide that the orca is the dominant species. Or the crab.
If the T-Rex had paleontologists, they too could've dug up Stegosauruses: that's how displaced in history they are from them and us.
Humans convergently evolved ant-like societies, when you think about it.
Farming, war, cities, architecture, etc.
Only Humans overcomplicated things and are now actively hurting our environment instead of healing and taking care of our home unfortunately.
@@stealthmangerNo species heals or cares about their environment. Habits needs balance to exist. For example overgrazing is a serious issue. If an animal doesn't have a predator, their population with grow unchecked and destroy their environment. Humanities problem is that we eliminated all of our predators and competitors. The balance has been thrown off.
@@perceivedvelocity9914 I'd argue all care about their environment (every organism has preferenced environments), but not all have sustainable lifestyles. ,(Or ability to alter their environments)
Bees don't harm their food sources and can grow to massive population levels. They also like clean hives, eliminating disease.
Humans can live sustainably because we plan ahead. (Bees store honey for the bad times and eliminate drones during scarcity).
If organisms can't self regulate, they need external balancing.
Like caterpillars and moths/butterflies or dragonflies/nymphs eating different foods, so no competition.
Planning, coincidence, or external balancing :)
@@TragoudistrosMPH - When I was little, I somehow get it into my head that caterpillars were scorpions. (a Florida education?) I went around stomping on every caterpillar I saw until I finally learned the truth. I have born the guilt ever since.
But ants don’t have to pay the price for electing stupid politicians.
Hey PBS Eons, can you please make a video about ceratopsians on like how they got their frill and horns and or something else.
The irrational happiness when I see a new video about ants is real
Great insights; ants are so interesting! Our crew got on camera a tropical fanged pitcher plant that has as its main partner carpenter ants. So you really see footage of ants that live inside carnivorous plants! It's so fascinating!
THEY WERE WASPS!?!?!?!
Yes
They still are cladistically speaking.
THis is a sily question but is thre any link between how Ants build their hills and Wasps make their hives?@@monkeymanchronicles
Just a note of appreciation for the acknowledgement of the Lenape peoples, especially given how the federal government required their modern art works to be marked as "Lenape heritage", denying their existence.
Are you one?
I'm not sure I see wrong with it being marked Lenape heritage, even though modern it is still heritage.
And how is that "denying their existence"?
My mind has been blown yet again by PBS...
I had no idea that ants were just flightless wasps. The way ants inject venom now suddenly makes so much sense.
They aren’t “just flightless wasps” any more than humans are just mammalian fish. Wasps, bees, and ants all evolved from the same lineage.
The ways which angiospermes had influenced the last 150 millions life on earth with the co-evolution with animals is amazing. Another example could be rapresented by lepidocter (butterflies)
That's mind blowing! I always wondered about ants, meeting a vast variety of them every time I go to the forest. Sitting on the log I can see at least two or three different species running around neverminding each other. As if they don't compete at all, and from some childhood nature documentaries I assumed they were living much more violent life.
Ants are such interesting little guys!
A few weeks ago, I saw a tiny ant struggling ti drag a much bigger, dead, bug to its nest. A bigger ant came by, ran its antennae over tiny ant and cargo, picks up the dead bug, and carries it to the little guy’s nest entrance! And then trundled away. I’ve never seen an ant do that before!
Bro has never seen fireants interacting with literally any other ants
@@dilophosaurusking7437 territorial little bastards. They stuck with their wasp roots of attack first and multiple times. Rather than running away.
@@icarusbinns3156prolly from the same nest
@@ethanlackey8048 nope. Different nests entirely. The little one was a sugar ant, the big one a common city any
6:58 UHHHH is that a Gecko?!!
I would never guess ants are in cahoots with flowers.
Ants are so cool! I had an ant farm when I was a kid and I used to spend hours just watching them go about their business, digging burrows, collecting food.
They’re so important to our soil that it’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t everywhere. I guess flowering plants thought the ants were pretty important, too.
Gastornis: *sweating intensifies*
Walking with beasts reference?
@@monticore1626 Correct!
I'll never forget the acrid smell of formic acid from a nest of wood ants. Must be 40 years since I smelt it but the memory is do vivid even now
There is an entertainment venue in Hamtramck, MI, called Planet Ant. 🐜
Kind of crazy to think that ants used to be confined to a single environment when today, they are absolutely EVERYWHERE!
Phenomenal video. I had no idea ants were descended from a common ancestor with wasps. Also fascinating to hear how they were only able to spread globally due to their relationship with angiosperms, such as using extrafloral nectaries. Its so incredible what is happening just beneath us if we only take the time to see. Thank you for sharing this knowledge.
They're not just descended from a common ancestor with wasps. They're descended from wasps, directly. If you want to make "wasps" a monophyletic clade, then ants ARE wasps. Same goes for bees. They're right in the middle of the wasp group, so you can't make a monophyletic group that includes all wasps without also including ants and bees.
The thing with people's perception of taxonomy is that when a group becomes hugely successful, we tend to stop thinking of it as part of its group and more of its own thing. Even though that's not how modern taxonomy works. For example, because ants are a stupidly successful family of wasps, we tend to think of them as their own thing, ants, and not wasps. Even though they still are, unless you insist on making "wasps" a paraphyletic group... But I guess making it paraphyletic is fine, when it's just used colloquially. It just doesn't represent evolutionary history accurately.
It's like if chameleons became ridiculously successful, with thousands of species, and as a result we start thinking of them as their own thing and not just a type of lizard. Oh wait... this already happened with snakes (although that's probably not just because of the success of snakes, but also their weird morphology).
well. if you want to get technical, everything shares a common ancestor with everything else
@MalcomCooks LUCA agrees
Be careful when you bring a potted plant into the house. I was gifted one once and it had an ant nest inside and ruined my week
This happened to me too. Got an African Violet that a friend grew outside. I wanted to grow it as a houseplant and went to repot it. When I took it out of its pot, ants poured out of the dirt the pot had. There was a whole nest in the dirt for me too.
By the time I got into the 3rd grade, my favorite book was from Scholastic Books, called "The Tall Grass Zoo" which opened my eyes to the little Earthlings that shared the lawn with us. I loved that book. ^_^
A great video. I also will never be able to wrap my head around the fact that plants didn't just plop out of the seas, flowering all over the place.
Amazing content as ever.
I remember this story from my early school years, great read.
"Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson is a classic short story published in the December 1938 edition of Esquire. It is a translation, probably by Stephenson himself, of "Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen" which was originally published in German in 1938. - Wikipedia
Ants are little monsters
And now we have a world wide war between ants and it is magnificent
I feel like it's more like co-evolution, plus they should have look at fungus relationships with ants.
Probably a lot to be explored there. They're not the only ground insects after all, why weren't others as successful with the new plants?
Another great post, thanks!
It’s scary how few ants we see nowadays here in London UK compared with my childhood in the 70s and 80s. They were literally everywhere you looked (and stepped!) then. Now we barely notice them until Flying Ant Days.
Subject leap: I hope PBS Eons has a tribute post for the late W. Jason Morgan planned. You’d do a great job of it and your viewership is perfect.
This was the best pbs eons episode, hope they produce similar content
As an ant keeper I really enjoyed this video
@max_robak_mrowki - An ant keeper!?! For why do you keep ants? (Not that it doesn't sound cool....)
@@MossyMozart in short- keeping ants is pure satisfaction. You need a lot of patience to raise them but once the colony grows in numbers you literally have a small city in your room
Informative, engaging,delightful. Well done! Thank you. Best wishes, health, joy, wellbeing 🤸🏽♂️ 🖖🏼
Please tell us the money given to study this was called the "Pl-ant Grant"
I love ants 😊 all giddy over this 😅
Sounds like you get into some ANT-tics
Tasty ants
Nice!
An episode over my favorite specics
Love it!
Do you want ants? Because this is how you get ants.
Super interesting episode!
It's funny that the wasps wings came back in flying ants. Shows you how evolution likes to keep genes around just in case.
One of my favorite episodes!
1:27 I really like this 'yet', watching Lindsay Nikole accustomed to the fact that our knowledge is incomplete, as reflected in her catchprase "that we know of"
This video makes me want someone to write a book/make a video about speculative evolution where ants take over a planet and be its dominant species, diversifying to fill almost every possible niche.
Let me add that I want it to be on a planet that would allow ants to grow to any size or allow them to develop the proper systems that would take the limits off of their sizes.
This makes me want to rewatch THEM! again.
I meant the 1954 movie, not the awful blaxploitation/torture porn cesspit of a series Amazon churned out awhile back.
came here to see if anyone else would mention THEM! 😁
Oh man, the part of the story on ants divergence from wasps reminded me of Mutillidae! They're our planet's CURRENT flightless wasps (maybe they too will convergently evolve into ants 2.0 someday, though some might say they already are.) Google them. THEY ARE SO CUTE! Also, this was a very very good episode.
Arent they called velvet ants😅?
You guys make great videos and they are so educational. Thank you for your time, I greatly appreciate it.
Here in N. CA near SF, I've watched the catastrophic decline of not just all insects, but all terrestrial/soil invertebrates, and the vertebrates (newts, wild mice) that fed on them, and most of the birds as well, over the past six years. Nearly the only insects left to see are the invasive Argentine ants Linepithema humile. I strongly suspect this very species is the primary culprit. They eat everything they encounter, and once they removed all the native ants, they went to work on the eggs and larvae of every other insect and soil invertebrate. Them, along with the fact that no one is irrigating their lawns any more (producing near-sterile soils where we used to have about 1/3 of our suburb covered with moist humus, the other 2/3 being houses and streets). Those irrigated lawns supported non-native insects, it's true, but they fed our native birds, mice and newts, at least, forming the basis of a food chain. Now it's near sterile.
Finally, we're getting rid of the vermin!
Fascinating!!! 🐜🐜🐜💐💐💐
I know this video presented the topic like angiosperms drove the rise of ants, but I have to suspect that it was more complicated than that, and that ants, in turn, drove the rise of angiosperms.
The story of my kitchen
8:03: "Oh boy, I gots a flower. I can't wait to give it to Marsha! I know she's gonna luv it! I just know it. Oh boy oh boy oh boy!"
looks more like a dandelion seed than flower
@@DJFracus Marsha will think it's a flower.
You can't spell plant without ant, neither would have been so successful or diverse without the other. Amazing video!
What next? RISE of The Planet of The Ants?!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Imagine this diversity of ants WHITHOUT losing the wings...😭
The world where humans never evolved (why would we, the intelligence brings greater understanding of the horror of ants)
Everything is connected
The more I learn, the more I agree with this statement to my core
Angiosperms. Or shall I say Ant-geo-perms? 🖐🎤
Coincidence or blind luck another species also hooked up with Angiosperms, Homosapien. Much later both farmed together. thank you ALL stay safe
hooked up with 80% of the ecosystem? Almost anything that didn't would be dead by now.
I wish PBS Eons would make a video about pythons/boas and their evolution across thousands of years.
Ants are really interesting. Nice episode as always :) Would you guys consider uploading to another platform or syncing your channel with a place like odysee?
This episode's pun made me laugh, I always appreciate them.
Plants really adapted to bribe ants into being their bodyguards.
If you want protection, you'll have to sweeten the deal... ... It'd be a shame if something happened to you...
Aphids. Ants protect plants infested with Aphids for their honeydew.
flowers are bribing animals to help the plant have sex, and fruits are bribing animals to help the plant disperse their seeds, flowering plants tend to do that sort of thing a lot
I love the music in the background, as well as the ant information 😊
To quote Kent Brockman: I for one, welcome our new Ant Overloads
Ants are amazing...when they are OUTSIDE my house. Not when they are in my kitchen.😑😒😫
Some wasp really looked down at the ground while flying like: "Yo it's free real estate."
Kallie saying Kyromyrma neffi: "Kyromyrma neffi."
Me ordering a coffee: "I'll have a cabbage uh captcha I mean you know the one with foam please."
Ants seem like the original nepo babies with angiosperms making sure they got all the right connections to thrive
I love these videos so much! I wish I had the funds to donate. these videos have been such great stress relievers.
It's ants' world baby, and we're just living in it.
great video! thanks a lot.
This is quite a collection of sources in the References. You could say it makes a nice Ant-thology.
Excellent viewing... well done.
I have a particular hatred of ants (horrible infestation in my childhood bathroom and room, I used to come to school with ants on me and crawling on my books and binders). I’m currently living back at home where the infestation isn’t as bad as it used to be but they’re still in the bathroom and let me tell you there is nothing more unpleasant than an ant running across your butt while you use the toilet.
So knowing that I’m currently living in the age of ants right now is…not particularly thrilling information lol.
Ants, I’m sure you’re lovely and objectively very cool, but please stay away from me 😭
loll i feel the same way with cockroaches...i feel you bro
I think a crucial part of ants’ success is their sociality….I’m surprised that wasn’t mentioned in the video.
Well, they surely took over my home !
What type of ants? At first I had carpenter ants, now I have these little tiny red ants, can't find their nest at all. Persistent buggers.
Joy is mowing over a fire ant nest then stepping in the middle of them. A bad time was had by all.
0:45 Are we sure that ant got stuck in resin, and not at the merge on the New Jersey Turnpike? 😜
I click on the video "when the ants took over":
"Wednesday, October eleventh is-"
Thanks! *Closes video*
*adds gelatin*
"i think the cream is a little over whipped"
Yeah totally not the gelatin lmao.
S/o to E. O. Wilson the real OG. Dude changed my life
I found your podcast (mysteries of deep time) I loved it! But why was it so short lived😢
Eggcellent video; and Great yoke
It's like the Ants overlord scene from the Simpsons
I believe some recent genetic evidence puts ants phylogenetically closer to bees than modern wasps.
Totally interesting.
Greetings from Switzerland.
Me who's playing _“The Ants: Underground Kingdom"_ :
*This video is a win for me 🤭*
The day of my birthday is fosil day?... really? Can't I find yet another way to feel older and older? T_T
Yeah of course, fossil day was named after you
@@Rylact. too hard to understand an irony?
"It's an ugly planet. A bug planet" - Starship Troopers
Love the topic and the episode, but my current question is where did Kallie get the awesome fossil shirt?!
Ants are extremely intelligent creatures. They bother me for a long time till I decide to leave them tetramethrin treat. The unexpected part is that they have not become extinct in the area; they still live around my place, but they do not touch foods in the house or bins; we have lived in peace for a decade. Until recently, I think the younger generation does not understand why older generations does not touch food in this house. Forcing me to repeat the process, and peace has been forged anew.