Hey Eons fans, We just want to let you know that we’re aware of the ethical issues surrounding Burmese amber in paleontology. The specimen of Ceratomyrmex that we describe in the introduction comes from a paper by Barden and colleagues published in 2020, and the authors included the following note about it: “The specimen - from the Hukawng Valley, Kachin State, Myanmar - was deposited in the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) prior to the 2017 military control of some mine regions (work on this manuscript began in early 2017). The fossil acquired by NIGPAS was collected in full compliance with the laws of Myanmar and China including Regulation on the Protection of Fossils of China. To avoid any confusion and misunderstanding, all authors declare that the fossil reported in this study was not involved in armed conflict and ethnic strife in Myanmar. The specimen is deposited in the public repository NIGPAS and is available for study." We also tried to follow the guidance of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology on Burmese amber in choosing our images for this episode and not use any images of fossils/amber “collected in or exported from Myanmar since June 2017.” Thanks for watching!
@@eons I was thinking late 70s and early 80s where we had an influx of huge insect horror movies. We even had an ant one where they herded humans as cattle. They were bigger than elephants. Length-wise.
Oh, LOVE this video! Ant have definitely come a long way through Earth's epic history and these Hell Ants are proof! Ants are definitely our elders in the geological timescale! Ant love forever!
Fun fact: their horns are also infused with iron. Also technically there's another insect with vertically moving headgear - the rhino beetle. And we know that small colonies of solitary hunting ants of lower eusociality are viable because they still exist in many parts of the world, for instance: Australia's bull ants.
Australia’s bull ants are not the best example as they do form colonies of hundreds and sometimes thousands of workers with higher levels of eusociality. Again there are some species of them with lower levels but I think not the best example. Better examples are Nothomyrmecia, Harpegnathos , Dinoponera as well as Gigantiops destructor some of these will even fight sister workers for prey items and are strictly solitary foragers.
@@user-yj4qz5lo6k yeah it's probably the fact the these ants where strong enough to forge on their own and the hell ants some species probably had a powerful sting to effectively take out their prey or utilizing their jaws to kill their prey
I like ants they aren't bad creatures. If u want to see how great they really are watch the channel antscanada. It honestly made me change my mind about most insects
Fire ants may be painful, but then there's bullet ants, who rightfully earn their name. Honestly I'd rather get burned by a match than get fricking shot.
Yep! Generally speaking, all ants, and some bees and wasps (honey bees and stingless bees for example) are eusocial, and therefore the only reproductive of the colony is the queen and any of the males, or drones. This is because the worker caste develops such that the ovaries aren't as large and they don't develop the canals capable of mating. Workers can therefore not produce diploid (female) offspring, but they can produce male offspring on occasion (as males in Hymenoptera, which are bees, wasps and ants, are actually diploid). Most of the time male offspring born from anybody but the queen are killed though. There is some exceptions, for example there is a parasitic subspecies of honey bee in south Africa that can produce thelytokously, essentially cloning itself to create another female that can also clone itself, but for the most part only the queens are capable of laying eggs.
So interesting. I wonder, since the jaw-horn combo seems pretty useful for grabbing and holding on to prey, maybe the ants left their small colonies to go on solo hunting trips, trapping and carrying their prey back to the nest? It's such an odd adaptation.
"The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress." ~Pyotr Kropotkin, Zoologist and the father of Anarchism
@@cheaterman49 The "kin" subculture basically refers to people who claim to be carrying the spirit of something else. It's weird and complicated and tends to crop up in the more "terminally online" sectors of the internet.
This goes for all the episodes you’ve produced: I LOVE THEM! This is easily one of the best channels on RU-vid. True, informative and always interesting. Thanks 🙏🏻
Ants are incredibly interesting and I think it's is important to note that modern ants include species that are more like a basal wasp ancestor than other ants. Colony size depends on the niche occupied by a a colony and on the colony lifecycle. I think that hell ant foragers being less common in amber than other species could indicate that they occupy a niche or lifestyle that has a lower chance of foragers coming in contact with resin
One of the major ant family structures that you haven't really mentioned is that in most ant species there is only 1 queen and she produces mainly infertile daughters sometimes of different sizes to take care of the colony. Only when a colony reaches a certain size and at certain times of year do they produce potential queens & male drones whos only purpose is to wait for the nuptial flight to spread their seed to other colonies queens. Some species allow multiple queens in a single nest forming super colonies while others use a gamergate system. Colonies don't interbreed. Some super colonies might but its not sustainable over to many generations. I believe that hell ants may have been part of a gamergate system. A system where all the daughters / worker ants are born fertile however when a dominant worker is chosen as queen all the new workers have their reproductive organs ripped out right after emerging from the pupa making them infertile and not a threat to the ruling queen. When a gamergate queen dies a new queen is chosen from the new batch of brood. Its believed that the gamergate system was one of the oldest and most primitive social structures in ants. These types of ants are generally more independent from the colony and are effective solo hunters and have better vision than other ants. Based on the structure of the Hell ants I'd guess they were of this variety. But thats just a guess. I watch a lot of Ants Canada and raise a colony of Camponotus tortuganus. Which I've noted that in the founding stages they will accept multiple queens of the same species for a time. There were originally 6 queens in my colony and they seemed to get along fine but after about 4-6 months the queens started showing up dead & in pieces until 1 healthy strong queen remained. My guess is founding colonies will work together until they reach a certain level of stability then the queens spread out claiming new territory. In a formicarium there is no other place to go so they kill the competition.
Guys I've received a package from Satan and I can't wait to show you this flaming skull terrarium. Guys I can't wait to show you this brand new colony. Welcome to the AC Family.
I really wouldn't mind seeing an animated reconstruction of how those jaws worked, because I am having a hard time figuring out how they consumed their prey.
With relish, one supposes. Unless they had a tendency to experience poor digestion, in which case they always carried around a roll of -- wait for it.... ....ant-acids.
1:14 Those ants are farming aphids (the little green bugs you can see if you look close). If you grow peppers and tomatoes you'll sometimes get these little critters. They suck your plants dry and they poop out a sticky sugary substance that ants like. Ants, being the incredible life form that they are, have figured out they can farm aphids to collect more of their poop. They'll carry the young to various parts of your plants or even across your garden bed to other plants. It's rather remarkable, and quite annoying because when left unchecked aphids can kill your plants and limit your yields!
It made me think about the mammals that have also gone extinct which used a similar hunting method such as the saber toothed tiger, etc. and wooly mammoth from before the Quaternary extinction event.
My guess is that hell ants formed small colonies in which they rarely relied on each other for foraging and did hunting parties on their own, similar to bull ants. I assume this b/c bull ants r relatively closer to wasp than most other ant species. Maybe what happened is since they didn’t reinforce each other more social ants were easily able to overwhelm them with their greater numbers and their vertical jaws gave em a harder time in combat compared to horizontal jaws.
Isn’t the point that ants care for the children of others a moot point since all ants are basically siblings so they are technically even closer related to the larvae then they ever could be to their own offspring.
Hell ants?! I know I've said this more than once but I love it when there's an episode on a taxonomic group that I never heard of, before! Now I'm off to search for any more visuals and scientific literature on the jaw mechanics of those Hyphydrus elegans beetles.
Could be food. They had vertical jaws and were focused on eating other insects, plus they might hsve been able to fly. The KPG extinction happens, wipes them out and modern ants with horizontal mandibles arrive. Most can't fly so they make ground nests and focus on ground shrubery for food. Also used to cut through any dead animal, and bring back to the massive colony, which Hell Ant's didn't have. Modern ants could have evolved to break down the leafy greens as the other insects and mammals died, relying on the flora to survive. Getting into bigger colonies means bigger chances of survival and reproducing, natural selection through survival of the fittest, and now we have modern ants.
The relatedness of individuals in ant colonies (and in other hymenopteran insects like bees and wasps) is complicated by the presence of haplodiploidy in these organisms. Because males in these groups arise from unfertilized eggs, they are haploid (only one copy of the genome) and their genetic contribution is essentially identical in each of their progeny. Because of this, female progeny (workers), which arise from fertilized eggs and are thus diploid (two copies of the genome), carry 100% identity with their father, and 50% identity with their mother, the queen. This makes their relatedness to each other 75%, which is greater than their relatedness to their mother. If care for the young is a function of genetic kinship, it follows that workers will care for their baby sisters more than the queen, and are not actually being altruistic in caring for "another's" offfspring.
How is Hell Ants not a movie title from the 1970s? Old Hollywood is something I am missing more and more because this would make, well, one hell of a movie.
So glad that you guys did another video on insects!!!!! Was waiting for one for ages. Would be great to see a video on wasps someday. Maybe that'll help clean their bad reputation among the general public!!!!
It’s possible that Hell ants as colonies survived mostly using hunter-scavenger strategies, as they were better suited to hunting small insects (or even other ants) alone and bringing them back to the nest. This would explain why after a large extinction event, their food sources were no longer available or they were unable to nest, reproduce, etc. Modern Usocial ants hunt in packs, by using team strategy to take down their prey with sheer numbers. This has the benefit of being able to take down larger and more difficult prey. Having a more rounded multi-use mouth structure also allows modern ants to use strategies such as agriculture, advanced nest-building, and carrying and moving things, including food, in addition to hunting and scavenging. Hell ants were unable to keep up after the extinction event made their survival strategy ineffective, while the ancestors of modern Usocial ants adapted and ultimately survived, with a lot less competition.
In my opinion U-sociality evolved either from A - Nest clustering, or B - Hatchling cooperation: A - Even today we have living species of bees and wasps exhibiting the steps towards sociability. We have solitary nest wasps fiercely fighting competition, then we have bees that produce nests in stems of reeds that create nest clusters in thatched roofs, not working together, but like colonies of birds they create clusters of nests for mutual protection, it wouldn't be hard for this coop to evolve into having them build 1 single nest instead of many individual nests. Modern honey bees or wasps make single nests but still all workers are able to reproduce, ants are the final step. B - There are species of gull wasps that lay multiple eggs in growing nuts or leaves to mutate them into a larval clusters, every summer those clusters burst and release hundreds of offspring, most insects lay eggs in clusters, babies hatch all at once in batches. Just as we have species that abandoned nymph stage to live 100% as caterpillars so perhaps some species of wasps began to extend the duration in which the hatchlings stay together for mutual protection t a point at which they always stay together as a family colony.
I’m wondering if they might have had an alarm pheromone that acted to warn other ants that an ant was trapped. 🤔 That could indicate social activity but limit the fossils?
Hamilton's rule is essentially: "I'd die for my brother... or four of my cousins." It's a bit of cost-benefit calculus that weighs the likelihood of their shared genetic information being passed on. The "goal" is for the genes to be passed on and in the greatest number of copies in order to increase the likelihood of its lineage surviving into the future; the organism simply functions as a means to that end by acting as a vehicle. A single ant might be able to pass on more of its own genome if it were to breed, but if those genes instead code for a sterile individual, the closely related sisters to the ant will also have a high probability of being sterile, allowing them all to devote themselves to the queen's reproduction. While the queen's offspring are less related than the aforementioned individual ants' own would be, the eusociality of the colony dramatically increases the likelihood of a large number of the queen's offspring surviving. So many, in fact, that the thousands born _far_ outweigh the benefits of the single ant bearing fewer offspring with greater genetic fidelity. So, counterintuitively, sterility means more of a worker's genetic information will be passed down; just through a parallel, but closely related lineage.
Please discuss Darwinius (the Ida debacle from 2009) while also discussing strepsirrhine evolution in Africa and how modern strepsirrhines (toothcombed primates or lemuriforms) evolved. This is important because it demonstrates that Scala Naturae thinking is still alive in science. Too many researchers consciously or unconsciously see evolution as directional, with humans as the pinnacle.
As a training Myrmecologist I thing this highly interesting, the Scythe Mandibles give me Army Ant or Reverse Trap-Jaw vibes, but they look like they’re made for trapping rather then raiding. The horn is unique, I have never seen anything like it from ants alive today. Oh and the only cast of workers that are not sterile Gamergate species, they have no queen cast. Edit: with the note on small colonies, the Australia Dinosaur Ants and South American Cyatta Genus have colonies of upto 20 workers. They’re called living fossils, they give us a view into what ants of old look like. Ants are very similar to Wasps and Wasps are often referred to as an ancestor of ants, perhaps Hell Ants are more related to Wasps then modern Ants.
Just a thought: for tightly organized but large colonies to form, there has to be a kind of immunity for a colony. This would prevent hybrid colonies with mixed genes and perhaps as a result clashing social structures. Modern ant colonies have a system where each ant emits a scent specific to the genetic makeup of the queen. Soldier ants, the equivalent of macrophages, will attack and destroy any ant that doesn't match the scent that identifies the colony. Note that big colonies didn't develop until after the appropriate scent gland appeared.
there is an error I believe @ 5:50. Following the logic it would be extremely unlikely for multiple ants of *_different species_*, not the same species. This is confirmed later in the same sentence. It's like the two parts of the sentence were spliced together in post.
Just a guess, but modern ants have a feature where ants that live in trees have large mandibles, but those living in soil do not... likely there was an event that caused ants to live in soil more, thus making large vertical mandibles a disadvantage. This may be related to the extinction event as that event happened to coincide with tree die off, this would have forced ants that lived in soil to flourish, especially those that lived in large colonies able to sustain each other through gathering rather than hunting.
At 2:09 I can't get over how closely the mandibles and jaw structure in fig. G look and even function compared to the modern skull structure of something like a snake. I wonder just common convergent evolution is among other insects?
