Argentine Invasion

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Speaker 3 I want to rerun a story from 2012 for you about an epic battle happening here on planet Earth. And depending on where you're listening to this,

Speaker 3 possibly even underneath your feet right now. Because if you go solely by the numbers of individuals, this planet doesn't actually belong to the 8 billion of us.

Speaker 3 The creature we're going to talk about numbers not in the billions or even in the trillions, but in the quadrillions. That's the millions of billions.
So arguably, this is their planet.

Speaker 3 And I can only presume from their perspective, we are the trivial insect. And now, even though we reported this out over a decade ago, this battle is still raging right now all over this planet.

Speaker 3 The story begins with Jad and Robert on a suburban sidewalk in Southern California.

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Speaker 12 Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Speaker 13 I'm Robert Krilwich.

Speaker 12 This is Radiolab, the podcast.

Speaker 5 And today, it's nice out here.

Speaker 13 We're on a road trip in Escondido, California.

Speaker 12 Which is close to San Diego.

Speaker 13 Regular suburban neighborhood.

Speaker 12 Sprinklers, lawns, nice houses. Pretty ordinary.

Speaker 17 Except.

Speaker 12 This might be him.

Speaker 9 Do you think that's him?

Speaker 3 For David Holway.

Speaker 5 Hey, how's it going? Good. How are you?

Speaker 18 David is an ecologist and an evolutionary biologist from UC San Diego.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, you can just park.

Speaker 19 And when we saw him, he was standing in the street.

Speaker 12 Oh, he's got the things. He's got the things.

Speaker 12 Holding what looked like some kind of

Speaker 5 hookah pipe.

Speaker 12 When we got out of the car, he walked us over to the side of the road near a driveway and pointed down.

Speaker 20 You can see Argentine Argentine ants in the,

Speaker 5 along the curb here. There's a little guy here.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 That's an Argentine ant right there.

Speaker 20 So I'm just going to collect some Argentine ants from the side of this sidewalk.

Speaker 21 You are scraping the surface of the dirt with your fingers.

Speaker 20 Looks like there's a little nest here.

Speaker 12 As soon as he scrapes, about 100 ants just appear and start running in every direction.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so what we're seeing are just small numbers of workers that were probably in the leaf litter at the surface.

Speaker 12 It doesn't seem so small though.

Speaker 9 It looks like they're everywhere.

Speaker 20 This is tiny.

Speaker 10 This is tiny. There's a lot of them.

Speaker 12 First hundreds, then thousands.

Speaker 11 They are wrecking up their day.

Speaker 22 Look at you.

Speaker 18 Now, the reason the three of us, grown adults, are now squatting on this little patch of dirt in somebody's front lawn is because around 10 years ago, David and colleagues discovered that this very spot at this particular driveway

Speaker 18 in front of this house

Speaker 12 was the edge of a vast empire.

Speaker 20 Right about at this driveway.

Speaker 12 And that empire ends right at at that one driveway. Two to one eucalyptus.

Speaker 18 To demonstrate this, David takes this hookah thing that he's carrying.

Speaker 20 So there's a tube that you suck on that connects to a vial.

Speaker 12 He sticks the tube into the scrum,

Speaker 7 sucks up a few ants,

Speaker 12 drops them into the vial. Okay, you just put one at one.
It's that one right there.

Speaker 18 And then he walked just to the other side of the driveway, like 17 steps, sucked up some ants on that side.

Speaker 17 So here's a new, here is a new guy.

Speaker 12 Plopped him into the same cup,

Speaker 12 and waited.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah,

Speaker 21 so far nobody seemed to. So

Speaker 12 notice each other. Okay, so we're watching

Speaker 12 one guy, one look

Speaker 5 and then

Speaker 5 right away. Wow.

Speaker 12 The two ants just lunge at each other.

Speaker 5 Oh my god.

Speaker 12 They lock antenna, and soon they're in a ball.

Speaker 24 This isn't good.

Speaker 12 That is heavy-duty fighting.

Speaker 12 They're like

Speaker 5 rolling around.

Speaker 20 One's got looks like it's got a hold of a leg and the other one's got a hold of an arm.

Speaker 5 Look at them.

Speaker 21 It's got its antenna ripped up.

Speaker 5 It's also missing a couple legs.

Speaker 5 Because it got yanked.

Speaker 10 The entire one side. Look at that.

Speaker 21 See, one side of his legs are missing. He's going around in circles because he has nowhere else to go.

Speaker 20 It's no holds barred.

Speaker 12 Now here's the thing. What we saw in that cup between those two ants was a tiny version of what is happening all over the planet.

Speaker 25 This one family of ants, the one on on the left of the driveway, not the right, has fought its way not only across huge hunks of America, they now control enormous swaths of the globe.

Speaker 19 And how they pulled this off, well, that's maybe more frightening than the fact that they've done it.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 After the break, we learned about how exactly Argentine ants took over the world. Stick with us.

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Speaker 1 All they have left is a life raft and each other. How will they survive? The true story of a family's fight for survival.
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Speaker 3 Luthiff, Radiolab. Before the break, we learned about Argentine ants and their warlike brutality.

Speaker 3 But it turns out their secret to world domination isn't just that they'll fight indiscriminately to the death, they're also extremely loyal to their own kind.

Speaker 3 And it's a kind of loyalty that transcends physical distance and even time. And we'll get into all of that.

Speaker 7 But first...

Speaker 17 We have to go back to the mid-1800s, to a little place in the northeastern corner of Argentina.

Speaker 18 That's right. Have you ever been to this place?

Speaker 9 Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've been there several times.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah. Actually, on the first.

Speaker 19 That's Neil Tsetsui.

Speaker 17 He's an evolutionary biologist and says, if you're an ant, this place is kind of special.

Speaker 18 Meaning hellish. Because it's a place where two rivers come together.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's this region in the floodplain between the Rio Paraná and the Rio Uruguay.

Speaker 12 A lot of different kinds of ants live there in this little spot. And he says, when it rains,

Speaker 12 which it does there all the time, the floodwaters rise.

Speaker 9 Then everybody's home gets flooded and you have to flee.

Speaker 27 The ants are forced up into the trees or any high ground.

Speaker 6 That's ecologist Mark Moffat.

Speaker 27 And then as the water falls, all these different subgroups meet again and they have to start battling from scratch.

Speaker 14 That's my land. It's my land.

Speaker 5 And my land. My land.

Speaker 28 They battle relentlessly.

Speaker 12 Because this place is always flooding.

Speaker 27 And over time,

Speaker 27 eons of this, they simply, simply do not know how to stop killing each other.

Speaker 16 So you've got this breeding ground for incredibly nasty ants there in northern Argentina.

Speaker 19 All these different groups.

Speaker 12 All fighting and fighting and more or less keeping each other in line.

Speaker 5 But one day...

Speaker 11 In the 1800s, a steamship rolls up to Say Buenos Aires, which is a big port at the mouth of these two rivers.

Speaker 27 A boat pulls up, a ramp comes down, and somehow a couple of ants from one of those Argentine ant families. Are up the gangplank, probably, you know, within the first hour.

Speaker 14 You know, because they're always fleeing floods, so they're programmed to move.

Speaker 28 That's what they do.

Speaker 27 They're moving into coffee bags. You can imagine they're moving into all kinds of things.

Speaker 28 And then the boat pulls out.

Speaker 13 And this family of ants leaves their war-torn hillhole of a homeland

Speaker 24 behind.

Speaker 28 Until eventually.

Speaker 27 Sooner or later, it was bound to happen, 1891 is the first time they were seen there.

Speaker 15 They show up in New Orleans.

Speaker 14 And then,

Speaker 27 1907, they leapfrogged all the way to California.

Speaker 27 They were simultaneously found in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I believe.

Speaker 12 How did they get to California?

Speaker 27 Well, the Panama Canal wasn't open yet, so it seems likely they took the train.

Speaker 27 Wow.

Speaker 14 Now here's the thing about these ants that make them different from all the other ants.

Speaker 13 Because they grew up in this crazy, blood-soaked floodplain of death.

Speaker 12 Their survival strategy was pretty simple: kill everything. If it's not one of us,

Speaker 4 kill it, no matter what.

Speaker 18 Other ants will have occasional sex with other ant groups, capture them and make them into slaves, adopt their children.

Speaker 27 These ants, these ants don't fool around.

Speaker 12 They don't have sex outside the group, they never take slaves, and if they catch your babies,

Speaker 5 they eat them.

Speaker 12 And it turns out, there's a side benefit to being a cruel, segregationist, violent bastard. Because being that way allows these ants to stay pure.

Speaker 18 Genes stay the same.

Speaker 4 They're genetically pure. Yeah, genetically pure.

Speaker 12 When they stay genetically pure, they can stay unified as a group. And when they do that, they can spread in ways the other ants just can't.
Because see, ants use smell.

Speaker 12 Like, that's how they know who's in and who's out. First thing they do when they meet another ant is they sniff them.

Speaker 9 using their antenna. Something sort of like a tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Speaker 2 Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff.

Speaker 27 They register odor to parallel to the nationality in humans. As long as they sense that identity throughout the individuals they meet, they are happy.

Speaker 12 Now, with most ants, as they spread over vast distances, they start to commingle with other ants. Queens come and go, and inevitably that smell nationality dilutes.
It begins to change.

Speaker 4 But with these Argentine ants, the smell doesn't change from queen to queen or from nest to nest.

Speaker 7 Even if they go way off, conquer totally new territory, build distant nests.

Speaker 9 All All these different nests function as sort of a fluid network. They can fuse and fission through time.
For example, you might be nesting on the edge of a sidewalk and the sprinklers come on.

Speaker 9 Everybody evacuates and all the queens and workers and babies get moved to higher ground and may fuse with a nest that's already existing at the higher ground.

Speaker 18 So all these Argentine ants living across the South and the U.S., they get along.

Speaker 12 And if you don't have to worry about each other and you've killed off everything else, they can focus their energy on producing more Argentine ants.

Speaker 27 And all you have to do is outnumber the enemy enough, and you can wipe out anything.

Speaker 25 Even an animal 5,000 times their size.

Speaker 27 Horned lizards are dropping in abundance out in California because the ants simply run all over them and they can never sleep. These lizards normally eat ants, but they simply can't grab these ants.

Speaker 27 They're too fast and too small. And so they're literally being killed by their own food.

Speaker 18 To sum up, they are very nasty, very loyal, and they're extraordinarily numerous.

Speaker 13 Put those three things together, and what you get is Genghis Khan and an ant.

Speaker 2 See the

Speaker 20 USA in your chat roll, lady.

Speaker 4 During the 1950s, this tight-knit, brutal family of ants starts to spread deeper into California.

Speaker 12 Thanks in large part to all the new freeways.

Speaker 12 Because now they could spread faster and farther.

Speaker 9 Like, say you put out a potted plant on your front porch. The ants move in overnight.

Speaker 8 The next day.

Speaker 5 Pick up that plant and move it,

Speaker 9 you know, 100 miles away the next day.

Speaker 12 And there they are in this new place that's so far away from where they were yesterday, and they can conquer that.

Speaker 22 And not only that,

Speaker 19 it is, after all, the 1950s and 1960s, and you've got suburbs springing up all over America.

Speaker 12 Lots of lawns, lots of sprinklers that go on, off, on, off, on, off.

Speaker 9 Which, if you're an ant is in many ways very similar to home. Fresh terrain that's been exposed by the receding floodwaters.

Speaker 9 Humans have modified the habitat in California in ways that Argentine ants really like.

Speaker 12 So the Argentine ants are happy and most people don't even notice this is happening.

Speaker 25 Until we get to the 1990s.

Speaker 19 In fact, in 1998, Neil, our entomologist friend, and his colleague Andy Suarez, they're now studying Argentine ants around San Diego, and they begin to wonder how far can a family like this of ants spread and still remain pure and still remain loyal to each other.

Speaker 14 So in the summer of that year, Neil and Andy hop into a car and they go on a little road trip,

Speaker 15 starting in San Diego and heading north.

Speaker 6 They took a cup full of Argentine ants from San Diego, and periodically they would stop, get out of the car, kneel down with their ant puka pipes, and suck up local ants, whoever happened to be there, and then pop those ants into the cup with the San Diego ant.

Speaker 15 Now, if the ants think they're part of the same colony, they won't fight.

Speaker 18 That's right.

Speaker 9 So we put in ants from Los Angeles.

Speaker 4 Tap, tap, tap, sniff, sniff, sniff.

Speaker 9 And they recognize San Diego ants as being members of the same colony.

Speaker 15 So they know the colony colony extends at least from San Diego to Los Angeles, but they keep going.

Speaker 9 We go up to Santa Barbara. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
No aggression. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff.
Nothing. No fighting.
To San Luis Obispo. Tap, tap, tap, tap, same thing.

Speaker 9 Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff. They think they're all members of the same colony.

Speaker 4 Still no fighting.

Speaker 9 Up to San Francisco. Tap, tap, tap, tap, same thing.
Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff.

Speaker 28 And this continues.

Speaker 13 All the way to a little town 100 miles north of San Francisco.

Speaker 9 And that site displayed no aggression towards the ants that we collected at the very beginning of our road trip from over 600 miles away in San Diego.

Speaker 12 Just think about that for a second, okay? Remember those ant hills you might have had in your front lawn, you know, little mounds?

Speaker 12 Imagine one of those 600 miles wide, give or take, with trillions and trillions of ants in it.

Speaker 9 Scientists call this a super colony, the large California super colony.

Speaker 12 And as scientists kept tracking this colony, they realized These ants had hitchhiked far beyond California.

Speaker 29 They're all over Europe. Europe's got actually Europe's got the largest colony known.

Speaker 18 That's Australian ant scientist Melissa Thomas. In 2002 she worked with David Hallway to chart just how far this one super colony has expanded.

Speaker 29 Australia has some. Where you are? We've got some here in Perth, yes.
And over in Melbourne and Sydney area.

Speaker 9 Up and down Spain, all around Italy, around Greece, Japan, many Atlantic and Pacific Islands, Hawaii, Easter Island, places like that.

Speaker 27 They've taken over much of northern New Zealand. They've taken over parts of South Africa.

Speaker 23 All these places are occupied by the same family of ants.

Speaker 25 Are they the same colony?

Speaker 9 They think they're all members of the same colony. In fact, we imported Argentine ants from Japan, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, brought them to UC Berkeley.

Speaker 12 And they put all of these ants from all these different places in the same cup.

Speaker 9 Like we did on our road trip. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff.
And

Speaker 7 no fighting.

Speaker 10 You've got, say, an ant from Okinawa in Japan and an ant from Genoa in Italy. They're 6,000 miles distant, maybe 150 generations apart.

Speaker 12 And yet they still know each other.

Speaker 9 They still recognize each other as members of the same colony.

Speaker 12 Because the smell that bonds them together hasn't changed.

Speaker 9 At some point in the past, you know, one colony in Argentina got picked up and moved around and spread and continued to spread and continued to spread.

Speaker 9 The descendants of those ants we have now across all continents except Antarctica, they still think they're all members of the same family.

Speaker 12 So here you've got this monoculture, right?

Speaker 12 That's really violent on the edges.

Speaker 12 But then if you're on the inside and part of the group, very, very peaceful.

Speaker 10 And since there's only one other creature that can do this, that can create an allegiance across vast, vast spreads of Earth, I couldn't help but ask Neil,

Speaker 23 do you ever analogize to human history when you look at these things?

Speaker 9 It's tempting to, but I try not to because these sorts of situations are kind of a roar shark. You can see whatever you want to in them.

Speaker 9 And so for our Argentine ant research, we've had people say, look, the lesson from this is that we should all be like Argentine ants and get along and cooperate and we'll succeed.

Speaker 9 But then on the other hand, I've had white supremacist websites cite my research and say,

Speaker 9 this is evidence that

Speaker 9 the key to success is not mixing the races.

Speaker 17 The unsettling part is that, at least in efficacy, they're right.

Speaker 17 This has been a very successful formula for these ants.

Speaker 5 Well, if it lasts. Right.

Speaker 18 Which brings us to.

Speaker 20 Jill.

Speaker 4 What's your whole big name?

Speaker 30 Jill Shanahan.

Speaker 25 Jill Shanahan.

Speaker 19 In 1995, Jill was working with Andy Suarez in San Diego, helping him map the ant empire.

Speaker 30 And one day, as part of her job, she found herself in a park in a housing complex.

Speaker 6 Just outside San Diego, looking for Argentine ants.

Speaker 24 So do you find some?

Speaker 30 Yeah, I believe that there is a colony at the base of a tree.

Speaker 18 Now before she left, she'd grabbed some Argentine ants from the lab, and these tree ants, they looked exactly the same as her lab ants.

Speaker 30 They're pretty easy to identify.

Speaker 18 And she figured they would just meet the new ants and go sniff, sniff, sniff, get along.

Speaker 30 They were ignore each other.

Speaker 25 But when she plopped one of these tree ants into the cup with one of her lab ants.

Speaker 30 These guys were fighting.

Speaker 30 One was more aggressive than the other and started biting the other one. And then they'd rapple each other and get get into a tight little ball and just

Speaker 5 watching this

Speaker 10 and no one has ever seen Argentine ants fight before.

Speaker 23 You're seeing something nobody's seen before. Did you have any sense that that was happening?

Speaker 30 No, I guess not.

Speaker 17 Which may explain why Jill is now in the interior design field, but this is a big deal.

Speaker 12 Because what it means is that another family of Argentine ants had made it over from the old country

Speaker 12 and brought that old fight to America.

Speaker 12 So scientists like Melissa began to wonder, how big is this new empire? Interesting side. And where do the two meet?

Speaker 29 Exactly. Our goal is to find where that territory met in nature.

Speaker 18 So Melissa heads out with her standard ant gear, the hookah pipe thing to suck up the ants, the fight cup to plop them into.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 17 She'd do the fight cup test in all these different places in the area, trying to zero in on where that border might be.

Speaker 29 I'd slowly sort of get closer and closer and closer.

Speaker 12 And eventually, she finds herself walking down a street in a normal subdivision in Escondido. She looks down and she sees it.
This thick channel of death.

Speaker 29 Dead bodies.

Speaker 29 Hundreds, hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.

Speaker 12 And from all directions, live ants were pouring into this area

Speaker 29 and fighting to the death.

Speaker 29 Masses and masses of them fighting.

Speaker 27 Piles and piles of them, killing each other.

Speaker 29 It's pretty extraordinary to see, actually.

Speaker 20 There were times when we didn't even need to get out of the car to find the super colony boundary because you'd see the dead workers spilling over the curb.

Speaker 10 Spilling.

Speaker 12 Spilling. Which brings us back to where we started, with that driveway in David Halloway.

Speaker 5 Oh, my God.

Speaker 12 They're just like almost bouncing off the bottom.

Speaker 10 This, then, is the price of empire.

Speaker 22 These ants have conquered a huge portion of the globe.

Speaker 5 Oh. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 10 But every day, they pay the price in bodies at the border.

Speaker 24 Like, this guy has lost all of it. You see, he's only got limbs on one side now.

Speaker 12 And that price might be going up because scientists have now figured out that several more families of Argentine ants have hitchhiked their way over. Yeah, this is that this is what I expected.

Speaker 12 Are they gonna die?

Speaker 20 Yeah, the ones that are really injured probably won't live too much longer.

Speaker 9 Oh my god, those two.

Speaker 12 So in the end, this strategy of violence and intolerance seems to be pretty good until it meets itself.

Speaker 10 Or even worse, something badder than itself.

Speaker 12 Oh my god, those two.

Speaker 18 When you shook the

Speaker 24 other one, oop, he's just throwing into another fight.

Speaker 5 Oh look, Brother.

Speaker 21 They're going into a circle.

Speaker 7 Oh, they're in the ball of death.

Speaker 7 Well, not quite. They've just signed.

Speaker 12 They sort of locked.

Speaker 24 Big thanks to Douglas Smith for production help on this piece.

Speaker 12 Douglas, I'm Jad Abumrod.

Speaker 19 I'm Robert Krillwich.

Speaker 12 Thanks for listening.

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