OH MY GODS! How many more stunning YT channels I still don't know!!***** You are freaking amazing! :) Finding new channels at this rate, will inevitably end in me not sleeping at all. ;) But yours at least are kurz, so I won't sue you for my insomnia. LoL Cheers!
If you loved this Rom"ant"ic video be sure to check out all the other fun ant-related resources (including more videos and a cartoon!) under the "Show more" section above.
***** Farmer ants! My yard is full of these. Leaf-cutter ants strip all the leaves off the plants in my yard (aaaaaugh!). I understand they don't eat the leaves; they use them to farm a special kind of fungus, which they eat. Please come study my ants, Corrie, and take all of them (ALL of them!) back to Chicago for further study.
Monique Pihl Hi to you again. We had a conversation with a bunch of racist dick heads on Vice's report of Compton one time. I see you around here and there on quite a few of the channels I like.
For me, one of the best ever episodes, which is high praise indeed. Dr. Corrie Moreau was fantastically engaging and fascinating. The subject could easily sustain further episodes (hint, hint!).
This is why the movies Ants and A Bugs Life annoyed me so much, the automatic assumption that only men could be soldiers/warriors/useful/lead characters -even in insects... Sigh. Great vid, great information, great presenter!
I have a feeling that ants on their own are so complex that you could do a whole RU-vid channel just to deal with them! - or if, somehow, ants are not enough, then at least a channel on all the social hymenoptera, e.g. ants, bees and wasps. Though termites, equally social but not as closely related, would be amazingly interesting too.
Since these male ants are haploid, one might argue that they are more like sperms than complete beings. I've always been puzzled by the life of sperms. They are not born from the passionate union of male and female, but rather are fathered only by a testicle. Then they lounge around in the lobby, waiting for an ejaculation. Eventually, if all goes well, they find themselves frantically swimming upstream toward a fallopian tube. But their taste of freedom is short and fateful. Like the vast majority of their millions of brothers, they routinely die (of sorrow, perhaps) after a fruitless quest for The Great Egg. To me it seems the poor spermies are only half alive.
good for you - i didn't realize there so many different species of ants. where i lived in the country (early 1950's) there was a huge ant colony which no one bothered at all. it was about 3 feet high and probably four feet diameter. i know i was little, but that was one big ant hill :}
I notice that the Cephalotes with the door head has pores or pits on the top. Are those receptors for chemical signals, so he knows who to open the door to?
so i started watching all the episodes yesterday and im aall the way here i feel so accomplished but at the same time i feel like im procrastinating somehow.... yay!
I wonder how the individual ants get so specialised, especially seeing as they're apparently genetically very close. Is it just small genetic differences which happen at random; or is it perhaps something post-natal like hormones which determine their specialisation?
Jelle van Merrienboer thebrainscoop32 minutes ago "From what Corrie told me during our interview, this is determined primarily by diet. Larvae are fed more or less depending on the requirements of the overall colony. For example, if there are a lot of worker ants, they'll feed the new batch of larvae more in order to get the big solider ants, and vice versa. So, it's pretty interesting that the ants as a collective whole are able to determine and enforce the colony dynamic from generation to generation. "
I think that was actually on of the most mind blowing episodes ever. I CANT EVEN PROCESS ALL OF THAT NEW INFORMATION. And I feel I have been mislead about ants!! Great episode!
I love everyone's enthusiasm about their topics. I never liked Biology when I was in high school/college, but I really enjoy watching these videos because everyone's excitement is so catchy. Thanks!
Hello Emily, greetings!! I have a doubt to be clarified, You said that the fertilised eggs become the female ants (the workers) and the unfertilized ones become the mailes (the drones) so my clarification is required in the following!--->, how is a queen ant get birth ? in the unfertilized egg or in the fertilized egg where some sort of more genetic code is dominant to become a queen ant in the colony?! Pls shine light on this so I cud understand better ;) :) Thanks in Advance!!!
Somehow I was expecting that, if the queen can produce male offspring without sperm, she'd build the colony out of them and save the sperm (of which she only has a limited amount) for making females every once in a while. Is there a deeper reason for this (like morphological differences between male and female ants) or is it just, well, because nature?
Loved it, loved how the scientist lady had a humor about it. sometimes scientist types are very matter of fact she's laughing talking about ants shitting in each others mouths
This was so fascinating, I had no idea that they lived in all female colonies and could get so evovled they can't feed themselves. Nature sure is wonderfully strage through our eyes and perception some times. Is the all female colony thing something that is a trait for all kinds of ants? If so, that just seems so out there to me. Wauw!
Things I didn't expect to learn about when I woke up this morning: ants licking sister-ants butts. There's a TLC program here somewhere, I just know it...
I've been hearing about the whole gut bacteria transfer type stuff a bit more recently. I bet it is the case, and wouldn't it be interesting if it was totally true, that quite a few of our health issues are being caused by how sterile our environments are becoming. So that natural transfer doesn't take place as often.
Jack, good thinking, you're describing the "hygiene hypothesis" for allergies and other autoimmune diseases. There's a lot of research investigating it right now. Read on here if you're interested: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22090147.
