Some insects lick each other's butts. You’ve probably never seen a male ant. If that sparked your curiosity, joins us as we explore the natural world with Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau. We talk evolution, biodiversity, conservation and animal behaviors that will blow your mind. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Insects.
Interview with Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau
Speakers
Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host
Dr. Corrie Moreau: Evolutionary Biologist and Entomologist
Show Notes
What is the most evolved animal on Earth
What is happening to the Earth’s biodiversity
What do Evolutionary Biologists study
Why does our world look the way it does
Why are certain animals only in certain locations
What is the most interesting ant species
Why is there only one male ant
What is the most dangerous ant
What can insects tell us about ourselves and our world
Nick VinZant 0:13
Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, insects and evolution,
Dr. Corrie Moreau 0:22 we're just trying to understand how the natural world around us came to be. So how did all the species form? Why are they distributed where they are on the planet, many of their baby behaviors are so similar to behaviors that we ourselves exhibit that it was easy to connect with them, right? They wage battles, they care for their young, they gather food, they build architecture, so long ago, ancestor some primordial sludge in the you know, soup of the sea. That's where all of life on this planet came from their big conspicuous ants, they actually will actively watch you in the forest. So it's always a little freaky to like, stumble into one of their nests.
Nick VinZant 1:03 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So do you ever just kind of look around and wonder why. Why did these animals live in these places? Why does this insect look the way that it does? Why do we look, the way that we look? Our first guest studies exactly that. And she has this fascinating insight and a masterful way of explaining things that I just during this whole interview. I just found myself going. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's amazing. There's so much that goes into the world around us. And I think that, that just kind of peeling back that little bit, even a later layer of that just reveals so much fascination, I think and you can kind of walk away with just this marvelous wonder at the world around you. After listening to her, oh, and she knows a lot about ads. Like a lot about ads, stuff that you had no idea could possibly be true. And this makes you go what this is evolutionary biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau. So when we talk about evolutionary biology, like what, what exactly are we talking about?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 2:28 In my mind, when we're talking about evolutionary biology, we're just trying to understand how the natural world around us came to be. So how did all the species form? Why are they distributed where they are on the planet? I mean, if you think about it, why isn't everything just equally found across the globe and an equal numbers and all of the different organismal groups? I mean, if you think about just insects, there are more species of insects than there are of mammals. So trying to figure out those sort of patterns and understand the processes that lead to the diversity of life we see
Nick VinZant 2:58 when when you kind of look at like evolutionary pressure. Is it evolutionary pressure from outside of the organisms group, like other organisms? Or is it from within, like, they're competing against themselves, so to speak,
Dr. Corrie Moreau 3:12 both of those things, plus one more thing, which is the environment itself, right? So you can think about, as you know, aerification happened in some of our desert regions, we had animals that had to now adapt to an entirely new environment, or they didn't survive, right. So things either went extinct, or they changed to live in these new habitats. But again, we also know that there can be interspecies competition and conflict, which might sort of drive either species to diverge away from one another, if it's things like, you know, conflict, or they might become well adapted to living together and become a mutualism. And even within species, you know, sort of conflict and cooperation can lead to this divergence, right? So now two populations may no longer interact, which in the longer term might lead to a speciation event.
Nick VinZant 4:01 I don't know how to ask you this question necessarily, but kind of give me some leeway. Like how big of a pressure does there have to be before something becomes an entirely new species?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 4:12 Yeah, that's a great question. Usually, what happens is you need some amount of time. So the way I like to think about it isn't imagine had a population it was all just one species. And it was distributed across a wide geographic range. And maybe a mountain rose up in between them or a river change course and split them into two populations now, but they're still the same species, right? They're just in different locations. But now if they have some sort of a barrier that doesn't allow them to mix anymore, mostly, of course, thinking about their genetics, what will happen is, each of them will start to accumulate new mate mutations, either by random chance, or maybe because one of them is on the drier end of the distribution, right. And so you start accumulating more mutations that help them be successful in this Dry adapted environment, and maybe the others in a wetter part of the environment. But either way, you need some amount of time for those populations to become so incredibly different from one another that if they were reintroduced to one another, they no longer can even mate anymore, they become distinct species. And so the amount of time that needs to pass, of course varies. Many people think it's probably on the order of a million years, sometimes it happens really quickly and could happen in you know, hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes it might take millions of years for those populations to drift far enough apart, that they're now no longer one species.
Nick VinZant 5:36 Is there one species that you look at and say that's the most evolved species of all?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 5:41 Well, that's a misnomer, because in evolution, nothing is more evolved than anything else. And so it's this idea that all of life on planet is equal, it's just who they're most closely related to. And so you can have relics that don't have very many close relatives around anymore. So they'll seem kind of bizarre. So if you think of something like a field account, right, it's, there's not a lot of things that are very highly similar to a seal a camp, where other things like you might think of fruit flies, and they kind of all look alike to you. But there's lots and lots and lots of species. And so, you know, how would you sort of decide which is is, you know, more at the pinnacle of evolution, they're just in different trajectories,
Nick VinZant 6:24 they kind of each go as far as they need to. Right. Is that? Does that make sense?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 6:28 Sure. And of course, you also have to keep in mind, lots of things are going extinct through evolutionary time as well.
Nick VinZant 6:33 When you look at kind of, from the aspect of biodiversity. Do we have as much biodiversity as we used to? Is that just going away? Like what's happening to all these species?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 6:46 Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, I would say, unfortunately, humans have a pretty negative impact on biodiversity. And we know that we're losing species because of, of, you know, our involvement on the planet. And not always an unnecessarily intentionally bad way, right. And so we know some organisms just don't do well around human built environments where others actually thrive, right? So we can think about things like cockroaches and, and they've done extremely well in the human and made environment where lots of species actually go extinct, either locally or globally, when, you know, their environment is perturbed too much. So do I think our planet holding all the biodiversity? It could? Absolutely not. And unfortunately, that's probably our fault at this moment. But if we were to sort of back up, you know, a few thousand years, I would say that we probably were, you know, holding quite a bit more biodiversity.
Nick VinZant 7:38 I mean, is there something that we, as a human species can do to save this? Or is it just like, our mere presence is going to have some kind of effect, right, like, no matter how much we tip toe, something's bad is going to happen, so to speak?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 7:52 Well, I mean, of course, if we tiptoe, we're gonna cause less than negative pressures on on biological diversity. Then, of course, there are things that individuals can do right, you can be quite mindful about how you live on the planet. But I really think to sort of stop the the large changes that are happening, and we'd have to invoke policies at the global level, right? We know that climate change is one of the leading factors that's currently impacting species on the planet, but we'll certainly continue to in the future, where, you know, a lot of us have now thought about things like, you know, planting native plants in our gardens to attract pollinators, right. And so I think there's a level of knowledge that each of us individually can gain to make sure that we're promoting and helping support biodiversity. But then there's also things that just because of the sheer number of people we have, we're going to always have industrial farming at this point, right? As much as all of us would love to eat locally and shop locally, it's like impossible to do that entirely for the majority of the planet. So I mean, I think that each of us should do our small part, but we should also be advocating for policy change at the highest levels.
Nick VinZant 8:59 What kind of policy changes do you think that we need the most?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 9:03 I think we need to think about, you know, how do we how do we get our sources of energy, I think we need to think about how do we feed people effectively while still being mindful of the planet and not just being greedy? I think that we have to be thoughtful about where people live in reside. And, you know, and, and recognize that not, you know, not everyone can have, you know, equal sizes of property and, and, and still support, you know, biodiversity on the planet.
Nick VinZant 9:42 How was this something that you got into what attracted you to it?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 9:46 to biology, or thinking about our impact on the planet.
Nick VinZant 9:51 Well, I feel like one is just an existential crisis that we all have. So let's go with biology.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 9:58 Sure. So growing I loved nature, I thought it was just the coolest thing. I grew up in New Orleans. But I didn't. I didn't know scientists, my parents didn't go to university and or college. And so it wasn't like I had this idea like, okay, step one, you do this, then step two, you become a scientist, it was more just that I thought nature was cool. And back then, you know, I'm older than and then probably many of your listeners, we didn't have the nature channel and animal planet, we just had PBS. And I remember every single major show that came on on PBS, I was glued to the TV. But I also thought that, you know, that PBS had all the scientists in the world on it. And that's probably all the scientists that we needed in the world, I didn't realize all the ways that you can use research and science. And so it wasn't until I went away to university that I, my eyes were open to just all the cool things that you could do. And, and maybe it's because I grew up in an urban environment, I just love bugs, because I could find them anywhere. And so, for me, I went away to university and thought, Okay, I'm going to study nature, but I really want to focus on bugs. And I don't know what I'll do with that in the end. But, um, you know, I sort of thought maybe I could teach high school or maybe work for a pest control company. But you know, I didn't know that there were so many ways that you could use insects to study important questions on the planet.
Nick VinZant 11:18 What can insects tell us about our lives?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 11:23 Well, I mean, of course, in lots of different things, in one way, you know, many species are bio indicators for whether we have healthy habitats. And so that's important, of course, we also know that if you think about the impact of, of organisms, on human commodities, of course, insects are a giant pest, but they're also important pollinators, right. So they have lots of beneficial and harmful roles for things that humans care about. I don't do applied research, most of my research is actually much more fundamental, or basic. And what I'm trying to just understand is, why are there so many species? And why are they found where they are? And and how does species interactions explain how they may shift into new habitats or onto novel diets? And I'm just trying to understand the world around me.
Nick VinZant 12:08 So from an understanding standpoint, let's say one, is we basically know absolutely nothing about the world around us, the species around us. 10, we've got this all completely figured out. Where do you think that we are right now?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 12:25 Oh, goodness, maybe at a three. Yeah, I mean, think about the fact that how many species of invertebrates there are in a rainforest that we know nothing about are all the bacteria that are found globally distributed, we know almost nothing about. And let's not even talk about the bottom of the oceans, there's so much diversity down there that every now and then we get a glimpse of because maybe we send some sort of a submerge vesicle down there, or a fisherman find something bizarre, but I guarantee you, there's 100 fold more diversity out there than any of the things we've even just began to sort of study. I mean, I imagine biodiversity in my mind as much like an avalanche. We are only seeing what's above water right now. That's all the scientists have been able to discover and describe. And the majority of it's still hidden underneath the ocean. And really, like, you know, there's so much incredible knowledge to gain from studying that diversity.
Nick VinZant 13:22 So what was it about ants that appealed to you so much?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 13:25 Oh, well, I think for me, it was that even as a kid, I could watch them engaging in behaviors. So not that I was asking sophisticated questions, I might have been just putting out cookie crumbs and noting how many came and how many, how long it took them to carry them away. But I loved that I could actually studying them doing something in real time. And despite the fact that they often weren't as beautiful as some of the butterflies or beetles I saw. Sometimes in one summer, I might find one beetle and not see it again till the next year. So I couldn't actually like observe things about it. So I think that's what first captivated me to answer. I also think it was that many of their baby behaviors are so similar to behaviors that we ourselves exhibit that it was easy to connect with them, right? They wage battles. They care for their young, they gather food, they build architecture. So I think I just was naturally attracted to them, because they, they did all these amazing things.
Nick VinZant 14:20 I mean, they are kind of the coolest, right?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 14:22 Yes, definitely.
Nick VinZant 14:24 Which one? All right, though. Well, I'll ask you this later, because we have some listener questions that are kind of focused on that a little bit. But I was reading just some of the research that you did that the ants were 100 and 40 million years old or something.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 14:38 That's right. Yeah. And so we use a set of statistical, you know, tools to help us figure that out by using both molecular data DNA data coupled with the fossil record. So ants have an incredibly rich fossil record. There are 10s of thousands of ant fossils, and the oldest ant fossils about 100 million years old. And what's interesting is that belongs to a group that's still around today. So really, what it appears is that amps sort of appeared on the planet from their closest relatives. And we're kind of, you know, doing okay, probably not in high density or high species numbers. And then as the flowering platform is sort of expanded across the globe, this was a perfect niche for them to live in. So if any of you've ever spent time in tropical forests, you know that answer everywhere. And so it really provided a niche both in the places they could live, but also in all kinds of new food resources for them. So ants really sort of went through this explosion in species correlated with the expansion of the flowering plant for us across the globe.
Nick VinZant 15:42 Do we have any idea how many ants there are on the planet?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 15:47 individual or as a species?
Nick VinZant 15:50 I guess both.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 15:54 So, species wise, right now, scientists have given names to about 15,000 species of ants, we know that numbers at least double and maybe triple. So there are a lot of species of ants. And I want to sort of contextualize that, there are more species of just ants than all the birds and mammals add it together. And so, you know, there's a lot of really interesting behaviors and structures to study within them. Now, if we talk about individuals, there's been some like, you know, crazy back of the envelope calculations, and it's in the trillions that we actually believe are probably on the planet. Now, some people have speculated that between ants and termites they, they have more biomass than all the humans on the planet right now. Meaning that if we put all of the ants and termites on one side of a scale, and all the humans on the planet, on the other side of scale, the ants and termites would outweigh the humans. What, why are there so many? Do we need that many of them? Are they this that good at reproducing? Like, why? Why are they so dominant in that regard? Yeah, so they are living social structures, right? So since their social species, every nest is essentially one individual, right? So you have a queen in there, who's laying all the eggs, and then you have all the workers in the nest that are performing all the important roles, whether it's feeding the on or building the NASA or gathering the food or waging the battles, right. And so each nest is essentially one super organism with lots of individuals in it. Now, as to whether we need them all, I would argue We absolutely do. They're important ecosystem engineers. And so, you know, I often tell people that they're really important for soil health and likely more important even than earthworms. So you know, they're whenever you see an ad going into a hole in the ground, there's essentially an upside down skyscraper underneath that soil, right? So they are building tunnels, they're aerating the soil, they're letting nutrients flow in into the soil, they're bringing nutrients up towards the, the, you know, soil surface, they're letting water permeate that. And that's just the answer. They're living in the soil. And so they also perform lots of important roles for plants, like dispersing seeds, and breaking down and helping decompose organic matter. So I think we need them all,
Nick VinZant 18:06 when you look at kind of the evolution of species necessarily, is it still the remaining like, did we all come from the same place at the same time, and it just branched off, and eventually, we got all of us.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 18:18 That's right. So all of life on this planet, is from a single, you know, long ago, ancestor, some primordial sledge in the you know, soup of the sea. And that's where all of life on this planet came from. Now, of course, it broke off into different branches of the tree. So we can think about fungi and animals are more closely related than they are to plants. And of course, then there's all kinds of microbial groups that, you know, also, you know, diversified and have lots of species and important roles on the planet. But yeah, all from one evolutionary origin.
Nick VinZant 18:49 So I'm going to use the proverbial they in this, but like, how, how are they able to determine the difference between like, okay, we all originated, I'm just gonna name my hometown. We all originated from Derby, Kansas somehow, as opposed to like, Oh, no, no, this happened to different places at the same time, and they all came, like, how did they separate out the difference?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 19:10 Yeah. So of course, there's all kinds of hints of you look at external anatomy, but really the and so people had long been speculating that that was probably the case. But the DNA data is actually what's really sealed the case. So we can actually use DNA. So just like if you imagine if we wanted to say, Okay, how are all are you in all of your relatives related to each other? So you wouldn't have to tell me, you could just give me a sample of all of your DNA, I could figure out who your Dad Mom was, I could figure out who their dad mom was, I could figure out who their siblings were right, from using that genetic evidence. Well, that's just at the scale of one family. Now, we can sort of do that across the globe. And we can ask the question, how is life on the planet related to one another, and there's, of course hints in the fact that the genetic code is all highly similar, but in addition, we can reconstruct that family tree and actually see how life evolved on the planet. It's called phylogenetic, it's actually really an amazing tool to sort of understand the diversity of life,
Nick VinZant 20:10 Do human beings have much bio diversity, are we pretty much all right in the same place? Or is that a big controversial loaded? Question?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 20:18 Oh, I don't think it's a controversial loaded question. I mean, we're all one species. That's for a fact. Of course, just like lots of other species, we have population genetic level differences, right. It's becoming blurred, the more global and more mobile we are, we're mixing a lot of that diversity more and more. But of course, we know that, you know, humans originated from Africa, they migrated out some, you know, individuals sort of landed in Australia, right, essentially, became isolated there for quite a long time. So if we look at the DNA of them, we can see the distinct signatures of being from Australia versus being from North America. But we're still all the same species, right? If we put this back together, we can interbreed quite easily, we still share much of our DNA, it's, you know, some obscene amount, like 99.999% of our DNA between any two humans on the planet is identical. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.
Nick VinZant 21:15 When scientists first figured that out,were people shocked that it was that high.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 21:23 They were shocked. But then, of course, you know, coming back to that question you'd asked me earlier about, like, you know, which is the most evolutionary advanced species. When we first started having the technology to sequence genomes? Well, people had made predictions that because humans had these sophisticated social structures, because we had language because we had art and music, we knew that we probably need a lot more genes to encode for all of those unique things that make us human. And once we started sequencing lots of genomes and looking at gene content, we were shocked to find out that our gene content isn't much different from almost anything else. And that was something that people hadn't expected, we now know and even knew, then that one gene doesn't coat for one trait. Usually what you have is many genes contributing to particular traits. And so any one gene is more like a letter of an alphabet, you might use an E to spell one word this, you know, in this sentence, but you're going to use an E again, and then st next word in the same sentence. And it doesn't give you the same word. And so now we just know that sort of the interplay and communication between all of our genes is what leads to complexity, not the number of them,
Nick VinZant 22:37 like okay, how much of our DNA do we share with an ant? Like, do they have somebody measured that?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 22:45 I am, I'm not sure if anybody's measured it, we could measure it, I mean, but to give you perspective, like our next closest relative is a chimpanzee and we share like 97% of our DNA with our closest relative. So if we were sort of to extrapolate out, I would imagine, we probably share something like 60% of our DNA with ants, I mean, they're an animal, you have to remember that. So you know, all the things that are animal share a large proportion of their DNA.
Nick VinZant 23:12 So I'm dating myself a little bit, but in terms when I was growing up, evolution was still kind of this big thing. And full disclosure, I went to a Catholic school, and evolution is not real, is that still a thing that is around or people I've scientists pretty much dispelled that. And
Dr. Corrie Moreau 23:29 I would argue scientists have long dispelled that there are still people who question it. And you know, it's always interesting to me that people question evolutionary biology, but they don't question astronomy. Because really, we're not trying to solve How did the, you know world come to be and like, what's the origin of the universe? That's astronomers, but nobody pickets astronomy conferences, but they still do come to evolution conferences from time to time and try to, you know, say that, you know, our work isn't real, because they can't be related to a monkey. Right. And, and that's not how evolution works, Nick VinZant 24:08 Are we talking about just the same one person ormultiple people
Dr. Corrie Moreau 24:13 Oh, it's usually a very small group. And, you know, it's, it's definitely decreased through time. I think that you know, it's funny, because people who even question evolution, they have no problem trusting medicine. And where do you think most of that medicine comes from? Or how we understand how epidemiology happens, or how we have you know, pandemics that's all through the lens of evolution, we're watching how these things evolve. Nick VinZant 24:42 Are you ready for some of the harder slash listener submitted questions?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 24:46 Bring them on?
Nick VinZant 24:48 most overrated ant Dr. Corrie Moreau 24:51 oh, that's an interesting question. most overrated and maybe army ants. And I think it's because people like you know, they've seen You know, like, Temple of Doom or Raiders of Lost Ark, whichever one were supposedly like a human was consumed by army ants. And so people often ask me like, could army ants kill me? And the answer is no. So I think that's why they're overrated.
Nick VinZant 25:16 If we're an ant High School, what ant is the jock? Who's the nerd who's the cool guy? Who's the loner.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 25:27 So first, I'm gonna say if it was an ant High School, it would be a high school be an all girls high school. Because all the ants you've probably ever seen in your life, our female males are only produced once a year solely for reproduction. So if you've ever seen an ant out, waging a battle, or carrying food back to the nest or building the nest, those are all females. If you saw an ant without wings, it's female. So only once a year are males produced, they have wings, and so did the new queens and they go off on a mating flight, the male's never contribute to the care of the colony or gathering food. Their only job is reproduction. So after they copulate, or reproduce, they die almost immediately. So now you have a new queen, she flies off to find a suitable habitat to start her whole new colony of all females, and then digs down in the dirt and starts laying eggs. So if we go back to your high school analogy, that's a tougher one. Because thinking about the dynamics of an all girls high school, of course, you'd have the the jock would probably be the soldier ants, right? The ones that are just brute force. If we had the nerds that would be the scouts that are out trying to figure out where's the next best food source to come from? I don't remember all the other categories
Nick VinZant 26:41 who would be the cool kid of ant high school
Dr. Corrie Moreau 26:46 I think all of them. Nick VinZant 26:48 What if there was a coolant amongst cool ants, you had to pick one like this, this species of ant or this, this ant is the cool one.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 26:58 Oh, gosh, I guess I'd have to pick the queen, because the colony doesn't exist without her. That being said, I think she has the worst job of the entire colony because remember, once she sort of mates, she digs down the soil and then just lays eggs the rest of her life. She never leaves the nest, she never reproduces again, she never gathers food. She just sits there and lays eggs.
Nick VinZant 27:20 Yeah, kind of sounds awful for the Queen and the man doesn't. Yeah. What what would be the reason though? Like, what's the biological or evolutionary reason while only having this one man? Why? Why would that be advantageous to them.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 27:37 So this has to do with several things. One has to do with their meeting structure. So when we meet or reproduce, right, we have one set of chromosomes that comes from our mothers, our maternal line, and one from our paternal line or father's. And we could do get some mixing, but more or less, you're kind of getting one chromosome from each parent. Well, in social in the hymenoptera, which are the ants, bees and wasps, they have a different meaning structure. So when a queen lays an egg and sperm is united with it, it becomes diploid. So it has two copies of all of the chromosomes, and it becomes a female. If she lays an egg and does not unite sperm with it, it becomes male. So males are halfway, they only have one copy of all their chromosomes. So first, the genetic structure of determining sex is actually quite different. In addition, now you have these females that are deployed, right, they have two sets of chromosomes. And because of that system, all of the individuals in the nest and up highly related to one another. So they're invested in sort of taking care of both the Queen but also the older sisters, because of that high relatedness. So it's turned into this odd system where males are really only utilized for essentially reproduction.
Nick VinZant 28:55 Guys, kind of the same with us. In some ways. I feel like you really, you really don't need men. I mean, you really don't. Is that kind of true throughout the species? Like you only need one man for every how many women?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 29:10 That's I mean, reproductively. That's certainly true. I wish we could tell our global leadership that that
Nick VinZant 29:16 best movie about an ant.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 29:18 Oh, interesting. Wow. I mean, so I have so of course, my first thought is all of the movies that are not done well. Yeah. I mean, think about things like Bug's Life and ants, right? It shows this whole male Task Force on these strong male soldiers. And all of that is totally not true. Those are all females. I'll say that. Of course, I like classic movies. So of course them is really exciting to me. There's a few things I really like about it, partially because they use scientific names for ants, which is, you know, pretty nerdy, but I appreciate and they make the entiende, the entomologist studying them really an expert in ants, which of course i think is cool, but at As much as I often complain about Ant Man, because it's not at managed to be at woman, I did appreciate that a lot of storytelling around the skills and tools of these different ants actually was based in some amount of reality of what those species actually can do. So I liked that they did a little studying and so that you're actually learning a little bit about and diversity while watching the movie,
Nick VinZant 30:23 the species with the farthest evolutionary journey. I guess, technically the furthest because it's not a measurement of actual distance. But anyway,
Dr. Corrie Moreau 30:36 That's an interesting, there's lots of ways to answer that question. Because again, as I sort of explained earlier, no species is more evolved than anything else. So we could sort of talk about species that are these anomalies on the tree of life, right, meaning that they didn't leave a lot behind a lot of species and that we still don't understand much about them. So there's a species of a couple of pieces of ants that are early divergent lineages of ants that left not a lot of clues about what their life was like when they first evolved. So those ones are pretty interesting. Of course, the first thing that jumped in my mind was the Bulla ant, which is para poner cavada. And this ant is amazing, because it's just one species, but it has a distribution, essentially, from southern Mexico through all of Central America and all of South America. They're big conspicuous ants, they actually will actively watch you in the forest. So it's always a little freaky to like, stumble into one of their nests. They are incredibly painful things. So most people try to avoid interacting with them. That's why they're called bullet ants. It feels like you were shot by a gun. But what's really interesting is there's only one species in that not only the just the genus and the entire sub family, just that one species that survived. So it begs the question, sort of, why did the sort of relatives of that go extinct? yet? This one has been incredibly evolutionarily successful? Is that the Siafu ant? I still remember some documentary that like they carry away children or something. Oh, no. Siafu is the African army ant I think there's been like one case, supposedly, it's never been fact checked that a farmer had a newborn and put it out in the shade, but in the field, and then wandered off to do some work in the field. And then the army ants came along and found this plump, little juicy child sitting there, and stung it and bit it but didn't carry it away.
Nick VinZant 32:38 Oh, that makes me feel much better. Biggest thing you learned from E.O Wilson?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 32:45 Oh, that's a nice question. I think it's to appreciate curiosity. And to cultivate it in yourself. I think that we often think of science as this really rigid process where, you know, everything was sort of has to conform to some experimental expectations. And what he really promoted was that observing the natural world, and getting to know what's happening around you actually informed your questions. And so you can ask better questions when you actually know what things do in nature and, and being curious about organisms or being curious about habitats actually will lead to the most powerful insights. So I think that's probably what he taught me the most. Let me follow up that great question with would you rather be a wasp or a hornet? Well, a hornet is just a type of a wasp. So I guess the question is, doesn't matter.
Nick VinZant 33:48 Man, right, when our audience was looking really smart, then they came across this way to let us down. Um, I don't know if this is your area of expertise. But I remember I said our audience is a little quirky. It just says, What's going on with a platypus?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 34:05 Oh, that is a great question. I mean, I totally agree that has to be one of the most bizarre looking animals. And, I mean, with some really interesting life history, but I mean, I think to me, what sums up the platypus is that the first time one was collected by European explorers and and sent it back to to England. They thought it was a gas they thought that literally the as a joke, the Explorer had taken multiple different animals and glued them together, and then sent it on as if it was a real species. And what's interesting if you look at what now it literally looks like you've glued connected pieces of animals together still, even when they're alive, and I've seen one a live and it does not look real. So I agree the platypus is crazy.
Nick VinZant 34:53 I'm looking at one right now. Like he really does like what like Hey, watch this guys, I'm gonna send this out, see what this thing looks like? What are your research right now? What are you working on?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 35:09 Yeah, so we're doing a few different things. What I am most excited about is we're trying to understand how symbiotic interactions actually helped ants become so successful. So ants have symbiotic relationships with other animals, with plants, with fungi with bacteria. And what we want to understand is, when they engage in those symbiosis, is it always beneficial? Is it always negative? And then what impact does it have? So interestingly, some work in microbe we've looked at and plant interactions, but we've also looked at microbe interactions. And so the micro work is revealing some interesting new insights. So lots of animals, as we all know, now if you hear about the microbiome, we have bacteria that live in and on us that are important to our own health, right, of course, some are not helpful, but many of them we need in order to be healthy. And so we've been studying in groups of ants that have actually transitioned from their earliest diets, which were predatory. Some have become generalists, but then some have even become entirely dependent on plant based diets or vegetarians. And so we tried to understand, how do you make that shift, and in almost all the cases we've been able to study, they actually have to take on the symbiotic bacteria that synthesize the essential amino acids or proteins that they don't get in their own diet, in order to survive entirely on a plant based diet. But what's cool about that is that by transitioning on to this entirely plant based diet, you have opened up all these new niches that you no longer have competition with other ants for food resources. So now you can diversify or speciate again, so it's this sort of interaction, but the environment and the with the symbiotic microbes in this case, that have led to some groups of ants being incredibly abundant and incredibly species rich.
Nick VinZant 37:00 If you were wanting to impress somebody at a party, and you were going to hit him with your single greatest, in fact, what are you going to go with?
Dr. Corrie Moreau 37:11 Well, I probably would go with my fact that almost every am they've ever seen as a female, but since I've already shared that one with you, I'm going to go to my backup question my backup sort of an fact. And I'd share that, and that have these gut microbes that they need, they have to have a mechanism for ensuring that their gut gets seated with them whenever they you know, sort of our new individuals are born. So how do they do that they engage in something that's called truffle access. And so truffle Ax is is just sharing liquid sources back and forth. So you can have oral oral, social travel access, which is just social food sharing from, you know, one mouth to the other. But in the case of the ants that need these gut microbes, they have to do oral anal truffle access. So they have to have another individual to acquire the right microbes. Nick VinZant 38:03 So basically ants go around licking each other's butts.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 38:07 just the vegetarian ones.
Nick VinZant 38:11 hey, look, however you got to survive is how you got to survive.
Dr. Corrie Moreau 38:15 Exactly.
Nick VinZant 38:16 Um, anything else you think we missed or anything else like that? Dr. Corrie Moreau 38:21 Um, I would say that I hope all of you have developed a greater appreciation of the little things that run the world. And, you know, maybe in the next time you see an ant running around, take a moment to actually watch what it's doing, try to observe what it looks like, because they're actually remarkable animals.
Nick VinZant 38:38 I want to thank Corey, so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have a link to her on our social media accounts, where Profoundly Pointless on Twitter and Instagram, and we have also included her information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast.