Why It REALLY Sucks To Be Born As a FIRE ANT...

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Why it sucks to be born as a fire ant.

[00:00:03]>> A worker is licking you before you finish hatching. You're not even fully out of the egg, and she's already cleaning you head to abdomen. Fast and methodical, not gentle, not slow.

[00:00:13]>> Buy me dinner fast.

[00:00:14]>> 900 other larvae to get to before the hour is out.

[00:00:18]>> 30 seconds to smell right. If the chemical coating on your body matches the colony, you live. If it doesn't, if something is slightly off, if the humidity in this chamber shifted your egg chemistry just wrong enough, the same workers who cleaned you will carry you to the refuge pile. No second check, no warning, just the pile.

[00:00:38]>> They just kill people if they smell wrong.

[00:00:41]>> You smell correct. The worker moves on before you've taken your first step. A few weeks from now, this colony is going to need a life raft. It will build one out of its own workers linking bodies together, stacking them across open flood water. I've seen them do this clean dry in the center while the outer edge holds the water line. The colony will survive. The workers on the outer edge mostly won't. You're going to be on the outer edge. You're a larvae. You can't walk. You can't see. You open your mouth and workers feed you. And that's the entirety of your existence for the next 2 weeks.

[00:01:17]>> Well, that doesn't sound too bad. It's like being fed grapes and not moving.

[00:01:21]>> While you sit there eating, a decision is being made. The workers controlling your food supply are deciding what you'll become, not the queen. The queen lays the eggs. That's her whole job.

[00:01:33]What comes out of those eggs, soldier, worker, reproductive, that's up to whoever is rationing the food. More food means a soldier. Soldiers have jaws that can shear through beetle shell. Their heads are wide enough to plug a tunnel entrance. When enemies break through, they lock themselves in place and hold the gap with their own skull while workers pack around them from behind.

[00:01:55]They live to fight. They're genuinely terrifying. Less food means a worker.

[00:02:00]Small, fast, the kind the colony needs in the hundreds of thousands. You get less food. Nobody chose this for you specifically. The colony needed more workers and soldiers this week, and you were next in line. live to fight icons 100%. I forgot the last one. I you know we watched the hummingbird one. I I know what the problem is and I don't think it's the video. It's the way the guy speaks, but it puts me in some weird existential trance. It It's a superpower I didn't think could be people could have over me, but it apparently exists.

[00:02:38]>> That's the whole decision. You pupate.

[00:02:40]Two weeks pass.

[00:02:41]>> I do what? You bite through your casing.

[00:02:44]You're soft and pale and still hardening when the first larvae lands in your legs.

[00:02:48]>> Still soft and pale.

[00:02:49]>> You tend larvae. You lick them clean.

[00:02:51]Feed them from your own stomach. Rotate them toward heat or away from moisture depending on what the chamber needs. You make the same trips through the same tunnels in the same direction for 14 hours at a stretch. Skip >> 14 hours.

[00:03:05]>> When a larvae dies and some die every day, you carry it to the refuge chambers. Same motion you use to carry food. The dead ones are lighter. One morning, a worker in the tunnel ahead of you stops. She doesn't fall. She just stops walking. Midstep in the middle of the trail. The carva she was carrying rolls gently off her. Another worker picks it up without slowing down. She's 5 weeks old.

[00:03:29]>> Workers live about 5 weeks. That's it.

[00:03:32]No injury, no attack, no particular reason. The fuel just runs out and the legs stop and that's the end. There's no like warning sign that Can you imagine going to work and like it was perfectly normal for you to just be like, "Oh, how long are you going to be at that that that printer, mate?" And they're just like over it like with their hand on it and you're like, "Come on, come on, mate. I I need to get back to work. Can you hurry up?" And you like tap them on the shoulder and they just flop.

[00:04:05]Can you imagine how weird that would be?

[00:04:06]Why is this Why is this You step around her. Someone will carry her to the refuge chambers in an hour or two. Whenever the trail signal close enough, >> she won't wait long. You have the same 5 weeks. You're 3 weeks in. The trail keeps moving. You keep moving. Then one day, the trail splits.

[00:04:26]>> Why not?

[00:04:26]>> Section of tunnel has partially collapsed. Soil shifted overnight. The passage narrowed to almost nothing. The workers ahead of you are routing around it, taking a detour that adds 4 minutes to the trip. You watch them go, then push into the gap anyway. Your body fits barely.

[00:04:43]>> You drag the larvae through sideways, one leg at a time, and come out the other side in the main passage with the trail running straight ahead. You beat the detour by 4 minutes. Nobody noticed.

[00:04:55]The trail doesn't reward you. No signal says, "Well done." You just arrive at the nursery first and set the larvae down and turn around.

[00:05:02]>> Well, you don't need praise. If you live for 5 weeks, 4 minutes is quite a substantial amount of time. You've you you you've sused it. That's your own reward. You don't need a congratulations or a pat on the back. That's 4 minutes saved.

[00:05:13]>> Then go back through the gap again. But you found it and now you know it's there. Your assignment changes. You're a forager now. You come out of the tunnel and the world is enormous. You spent 3 weeks in the dark in tunnels you could measure in centime. Out here, a blade of grass is taller than a building. The heat is immediate and total. The sky is just open in every direction and running through all of it. Clear as a road, the trail pheromone path laid by the workers before you. Thick with information where to go, how far, what's at the end. Your antenna read it and your legs follow.

[00:05:49]You don't decide to forage. Foraging just happens to you.

[00:05:52]>> Okay. Leads to a dead cricket.

[00:05:54]>> It's this part of the video. It is. It's the second we get halfway through one of these videos, it breaks my brain. I I don't particularly know why, but it breaks my bloody brain.

[00:06:05]At one point, his voice just stops saying things and it just sounds like it's attacking me. 100 body lengths out, you bite in. Your stinger dries venom into the tissue, a chemical your species makes that almost nothing else on Earth produces that burns on contact with skin that makes every animal in this ecosystem take a wide path around any mound they recognize. You weigh less than a grain of rice, >> but the colony you belong to has made armadillos run, driven deer away from water sources and killed animals the size of newborn calves when they stepped on a >> That doesn't suck. That's a >> fear is real. It's just not yours. It's the colonies. You personally contributed one sting to a dead cricket. You tear off your piece and carry it back down the trail.

[00:06:50]>> Every little trip 60 or 70 times before your legs give out. You feel it before you hear it. A vibration in the tunnel floor, rhythmic and heavy and getting closer. Then the ceiling cracks. Light floods in. The alarm pheromone hits the air and your body is already running toward the gap before you've processed anything. Fire ants don't flee. Every other insect runs from a threat. Fire ants run at it. You reach the brereech with hundreds of others and pour out onto the anteater snout. You bite. You sting. The venom hits skin and burns.

[00:07:22]And the anteater flinches. 400 workers stinging simultaneously is enough. The anteater swings its head, drags itself backward through the grass.

[00:07:32]>> When it just runs, >> you're back in the >> Wait, they can actually fight off the thing that evolved to just suck them up like a Hoover now. That that is kind of a flex. I'm not seeing a whole lot of reasons why it sucks.

[00:07:45]I think they're quite a cohesive unit, a force to be uh to be reckoned with.

[00:07:51]That thing evolved over millions of years to suck up ants called an anteater, right? And you can just go up there like, "Nah, going to hit you with my ass. How about that?" Tunnel before the gap is sealed. Workers are already packing soil into the breach relay lines, moving dirt from the inside out.

[00:08:09]Mandible load by mandible load. The mount has been attacked and repaired in 8 minutes. 8 minutes. That's the colony's entire response to a predator the size of a building. Not a retreat.

[00:08:20]Not a regrouping. 8 minutes and the trail is running again like nothing happened. You were on that snout. The colony's takeaway is 8 minutes. The trail is still running. You get back on it. The next few days are quiet. No vibrations. No alarm pheromone. The trail runs. The food comes in. The mound keeps growing. You take your gap in the collapsed tunnel every time, saving 4 minutes off the trip. Arriving at the nursery a little ahead of the workers who don't know about it yet. This is as close to good as >> rarely a situation you can't bite your way out of. That's the life lessons I I'll live by. And if if if any police ask me, I will say that Izzy in my chat said that.

[00:09:02]That is going to be my thing. Can you imagine if these things were humanized?

[00:09:06]Like how coordinated they'd be.

[00:09:12]Like can you imagine? That sounds terrifying. If someone found a way of making these the size of us, we are [ __ ] >> As it gets down here, the trail runs, you run it, the colony hums. You don't know it yet, but this is the last quiet stretch. It's been raining for 6 hours when the water comes in through the entrance tunnels. You feel the cold before this makes a lot of moving up through the soil, reaching the lower passages, then the nursery. Lara start to float off the chamber floor. Workers grab them immediately and the signal fires colonywide and 50,000 workers are running before you finish your thought.

[00:09:49]You grab a larva and the lower chambers fill behind you as you climb. You don't look back. You reach the surface. Skip forward.

[00:09:58]>> At the surface, workers are already linking. Mandibles grip legs to bodies.

[00:10:04]>> No signal for this. Or maybe the signal is just the flood itself. The shared pressure of 10,000 workers arriving at once, all doing the same thing they've done for a 100 million years. The raft builds from the outside edge inward. You set down your larvae. A worker takes it and pulls it toward the center. You feel a grip on your foreg behind you locking in. You grip the worker in front of you.

[00:10:29]You are placed on the outer edge. The water rises. The raft lifts. You are below the water line. The cold hits your body all at once. Not gradually, just suddenly wrong. But you hold the workers around you.

[00:10:43]>> I I I actually have a question. I have a question. And I don't know if anybody will be well versed in this. And and and say say we have some smart ant, you know, obsessed people in the comments.

[00:10:57]Why do they not have like an instinctive response to let go?

[00:11:02]Like like I I I feel like it's all well and good that they're almost like hive mindesque, but like that's that's a thing that is now being well I guess it's dying, right? Why is there why why do they not have the thing that goes run?

[00:11:19]Like is is there a reason I I'm I'm so lost. How they're just basically like okay okay this is my life now. death.

[00:11:31]I am I I I am I am a floating tube in a pool.

[00:11:37]Survival of the hive.

[00:11:41]But like, how is that stronger? I don't understand. How is the survival of the hive stronger than than their their but do they not even react to their drowning? Do they just stay locked on?

[00:11:52]Not in their programming. It's save the queen. She creates the hive. And they don't they don't have anything else.

[00:12:02]That's what >> hold. Air is trapped in the spaces between your bodies and you breathe from those pockets slow and still. The raft is alive.

[00:12:11]>> Oh, they are breathing.

[00:12:12]>> It holds itself together by the grip of every worker in it. The queen is somewhere near the center. Eight workers around her at none of them letting her feet touch the water.

[00:12:22]>> She doesn't know you're here. She doesn't need to know. You are the wall between her and the flood. Rich fish rises beneath you and presses its mouth against the edge of the raft. Workers sting it. It leaves. Even here, half submerged mid flood, moving on open water, the colony is not something that gets eaten. I I just love the idea that anything that they don't like comes near him, just a a bunch of them just go, "What the [ __ ] is that? What the [ __ ] is that?" And they just they just immediately ye sting it and just go back. I love that. I I I don't know why, but I love it.

[00:12:58]>> Feel real. Hours pass. The cold works deeper into your body. Workers rotate on the surface, but the cycle is slow and the flood is long, and not everyone rotates back up before the raft catches on a route. Workers at the front start climbing. The signal moves back through the mass. You feel the bodies ahead of you begin to release, and you release two and pull yourself up onto the route, then the bark, then dry ground. You climb water, >> slower than you should be. Your legs working but not right. Something in the cold that doesn't fully reverse.

[00:13:31]>> The colony is on dry ground.

[00:13:33]>> The queen is already surrounded by workers scouting for a new mound site.

[00:13:37]The trail is reestablishing before you've stopped dripping. The colony doesn't stop. The moment workers find solid ground are digging nursery chambers first, then the queen's room, then food storage. The trail reestablishes in hours. By morning, larvae are being fed and foragers are running routes and the mound is rising from soil that back to normal.

[00:13:59]>> You carry a larvae to the nursery and set it down. A few weeks ago, before you knew what a flood was, before you knew what a raft was, you were told the colony is going to save itself by using your body as a life raft. The workers on the outer edge mostly won't make it. The colony survived. You get back on the trail. There are 300 fire ant colonies in a single acre of infested ground.

[00:14:24]Each one holds up to half a million workers.

[00:14:27]>> Can they kill you?

[00:14:29]>> Like, can they can they can they kill a a human or no?

[00:14:35]>> The queen lays 1,500 eggs a day without pause.

[00:14:38]>> What?

[00:14:38]>> The colony doesn't track individuals.

[00:14:40]Does someone need to have >> tracks density tunnel the chemical trails the volume of the food supply when density drops the queen produces more the number stays constant what's inside the number changes constantly 3 days after the flood your legs stop cooperating the cold held too long and something in your body doesn't come back from it your front legs work your middle legs are slow your back legs drag you carry one more larvae from the nursery to the food chambers, >> slower than the workers behind you. One of them steps around you, then another.

[00:15:16]>> The larvae is heavier than it should be.

[00:15:18]You set it down, you stop. A worker steps over you. She has somewhere to be.

[00:15:23]15 minutes later, another worker picks you up and carries you to the refuge chamber.

[00:15:28]>> You go in the same pile as the larvae who didn't make it, and the workers who ran out of weeks before the flood, and the ones who held the outer edge until they couldn't. The trail doesn't pause.

[00:15:39]In the nursery, an egg cracked open while you were being carried to the pile.

[00:15:43]>> That's a haunting thumbnail. One second.

[00:15:47]I've see it, so you have to, too. What the hell? Sorry, it's completely taken me out of this one.

[00:15:54]I hate everything about that. Okay, back to it. A worker is licking it clean right now. Head to abdomen. Fast and methodical. It smells correct. Life as a fire ant might be rough, but there's another animal out there that has it way worse.

[00:16:11]>> These videos never get any less of a mind [ __ ] for me.

[00:16:16]>> They they they it I don't know if I find it soothing or it's kind of like nails on a chalkboard, but for like the inside of my brain, I I really can't tell if I enjoy them or absolutely hate them.

[00:16:36]Do you know what? I I I kind of [ __ ] with it. I [ __ ] with it. Anybody Anybody Anybody that beefs you, bite them, guys.

[00:16:43]Sting them. Get him. Right. And then And then Yeah. You smell incorrect. Get out of here. Which, to be honest, I think we could we could we could steal that one.

[00:16:54]That's not the worst thing in the world.

[00:16:55]I don't think that's not the worst thing at all. You you smell wrong.

[00:17:01]Leave.

[00:17:04]That's what it was like working in an Amazon warehouse.

[00:17:09]I think that's what it is. It's the parallels with um with with with society that that I think it depresses me.

[00:17:18]But alas, alas, another mind [ __ ] I have no extra input for this one, just like I didn't have one for the hummingbird. If you like these videos and you like seeing a man completely perplexed by them, we have a another one and from this guy and it's why it sucks to be born a hummingbird.

[00:17:37]So check that out if you want to. But I appreciate you. I will see you in the next