Life on Planet Ant - Learning Zone

This is Planet Ant, a giant,

man-made ant home,

built especially above ground to allow us

to investigate the incredible lives of these tiny creatures.

These glass boxes and tubes have been built to replicate

the underground tunnels and chambers of an ant colony in the wild,

and they're full of busy, leafcutter ants.

This is the first time that a man-made

ant colony has been built on this scale.

I've brought some young scientists along to Planet Ant, to see

what we can discover about one of the world's

most fascinating insects.

And like all good scientists, they have lots of questions.

-Where did you get the ants from?

-Where did they come from?

Well, we dug these up underground in a place called Trinidad,

and Trinidad is just off the coast of South America.

Because we needed such an enormous number of ants for Planet Ant,

I was sent on a special mission to Trinidad to find them.

Leafcutters are native here.

That means they belong in Trinidad,

but farmers think they're a serious pest

because they damage their crops.

This colony was about to be destroyed by a farmer.

We wanted to rescue it and take it back to the UK.

The tricky bit about this mission is to make sure that we find

the queen, as she's the only

ant that lays eggs that will hatch into the next generation of ants.

So without her, the colony won't survive back in the UK.

When I see ants in my garden, they go under the, like, mud.

How come they're not going, like, under the mud now?

Well, that's a great question.

They're not going underneath the ground here for two reasons.

The first one is that, actually, it's quite shallow,

so there's nowhere for them to go.

But the second and most interesting answer is that they don't think of

this area out here as being somewhere

that they want to make a nest.

Their nest is over there.

Ants are very particular about where they build their nests.

Back in Trinidad, this is our first close-up look at the ant's

nest that we found in the wild.

The outside of one of these ant nests really doesn't look like much.

It's usually a load of spoil, a load of earth. You can see a few holes.

And you'll see those ants coming in if you go out at night.

If you come during the day, you'll see nothing.

As we dig, what we see is a maze of chambers,

connected by a system of tunnels.

This is what we've tried to copy

when designing and building Planet Ant...

..with glass boxes and tubes replacing the chambers and tunnels.

By copying a real-world design,

we hope to encourage the ants to behave like they would in the wild.

Do they eat each other?

They're very friendly to each other

because they're all part of the same family.

The soldier ants are big ants who defend the colony.

And here, you can see they're attacking us.

This is pretty much the first blow of the spade.

We've been digging for about a minute.

And already, on the surface here,

I can count at least 20 or 30 of these big soldiers.

It's sort of made our life a bit more difficult, in a way,

because we're going to be now under attack, digging this trench.

And it's not just ants we needed to rescue from this nest.

The underground chambers are packed full of vital fungus,

which is what the ants eat.

So far, we've recovered thousands of ants and a large quantity of fungus.

But we've still to find the most vital ant of all, the queen.

The queen is huge compared to the other ants,

and she'll be covered in smaller ants who look after her.

There's something really smart here.

-Oh, yeah.

-OK?

-Yeah, yeah.

We're all hoping that this is the queen.

This looks very promising.

-So this could be the queen in the middle.

-Think we're in here.

-There she is.

-Oh, yes!

-Excellent.

One ant in two million, we found her!

Through tons of earth, we've managed to find the most important

ant of all. It's a great relief to the whole team.

-Well done, Malio. Well done.

-Nice.

Our young scientists have been very excited by the large-scale

Planet Ant, and they decide to have a go at building

their own mini version.

Just as I had to go on a mission to find a colony for Planet Ant,

the first thing the team have to do is to find some ants of their own.

Oh, there we go, look! Yeah.

-Can you see them carrying their eggs?

-Yeah.

-That's, like, wee white ones.

-That's the eggs and the larvae.

-That's the young eggs.

-That's amazing!

-That's really cool.

So we've got special permission to collect this nest.

And we'll take them back with us.

So the first stage of building an ant colony is complete,

finding the ants.

Already, we've learnt that ants live together in colonies,

a bit like families.

And they build underground chambers, like rooms,

which are connected by tunnels.

We also know that they can be found in other parts of the world,

not just the UK.

We're going to be studying the ants in Planet Ant in more detail,

as well as building our own mini version,

the kind you could make at school or at home.

And with my team of young scientists, we'll be discovering

more about the fascinating lives of these tiny creatures.

Adam, what are they doing before they go in the mud?

That's a really good question. When they're out here,

they're treating this area like it's a place to go and feed.

So they're probably just getting a bit hungry

and trying to carry anything they can find back.

One thing they're not doing is digging down into it to find

any new nest space, cos that all happens back up there at the colony.

So out here, it's all about feeding.

The leafcutter ants on Planet Ant

were collected from South America and carefully transported

thousands of miles to the UK,

where they began organising their new home.

The young scientists wanted to find out more about the ants'

habitat for themselves, so they collected some ants of their own,

and now, they're ready to build their own

mini version of Planet Ant.

-What sort of things do you think ants need to be able to live?

-Water.

Yeah, water's important. They certainly need a bit of water.

-Food.

-Food. Yeah, food's really important. We all need food.

-Air.

Ants need air, just like we do. What you think the soil's for?

It keeps them warm.

Yeah, it keeps them warm and it protects them,

so it's a little bit like living in a house.

It protects you from the weather, it keeps you nice and warm and cosy.

So what we're going to try and do is make a nice, warm,

cosy nest for these ants.

First, we're using three large see-through plastic cups with

a little plaster in the bottom.

This will hold a bit of water and weight the cups down.

Next, we're putting a smaller plastic cup inside the big one.

We're going to build up a layer of soil around the cup

that's in the middle, but it will also mean

that we'll be able to see them through the outside of the cup.

Billy has the fiddly job of putting the soil in the gap

between the two cups.

What would happen if you try and pick them up with your fingers?

-Squish them.

-Yeah, you might squash them. What we can use is this.

And this is called a Pooter. And you can make one really easily.

It's just a couple of tubes going into a little jar.

And one of the tubes... Can you see?

One of the tubes has got that filter over the end of it.

What you're going to do is suck on one tube,

and it's going to suck the ants up through the other tube.

So it's like a little vacuum cleaner.

It's a really, really good way to collect delicate things like ants.

So shall we have a go at collecting as many as we can from one

of these colonies here, so that we can put them into our nests?

You need to get Pootering now.

We surround the big cups with water to stop the ants escaping,

like a moat around a castle.

So we've got our nest set up.

The ants can't escape cos we've got a moat.

What's the next thing we're going to do?

Take the ants out and put them in.

Yeah. Put the ants in. So one at a time.

There we go. You've got a few on the lid.

Once the leafcutter ants have been collected from the wild,

they were introduced to their new, man-made home.

We put the ants and some fresh soil onto the top of the nest.

This is our ground level.

From here, they made their own way down into the nest boxes,

which are like the chambers they build in the wild.

The queen ant is the only ant that lays eggs,

so she's vital to the colony.

Excellent!

She's put safely in the nest.

Yep, she's in.

Planet Ant has two main areas, the nest boxes and the foraging table.

Our young scientists are going to replicate this with their own

mini Planet Ant.

-What else do you think they need?

-Air.

-Food.

-Yeah, food.

They've got lots of air, the soil's quite moist,

so they've got a bit of water, but we need to give them some food.

Smell. What does that smell like?

We're giving these ants water with some honey in it.

-Is that enough?

-Yeah, that's enough.

We can check on them every day, just to give them

a little bit more food if they need.

But we've got ants in here, and we've got food in there.

-So what's our problem?

-How they're going to get it.

Yeah, how they're going to get from one to the other.

-So how do you think we might solve that?

-We might need some tubes.

Yeah, we can put some tubes in, we can build some bridges.

Once the ants had settled into the nest boxes in the big Planet Ant,

it was time to let them loose on the wider world we'd built for them.

This was our first chance to see how they organised their

leaf cutting together.

Zoologist George McGavin was there to give me a hand.

What we want to do now is to allow them

to forage in a natural way they would do in the real environment.

And to do that, we need to join up the colony with the virgin

foraging lands beyond.

For the ants, it's finally time to explore.

Well, we've only just put the bridge in,

and already, we've got workers swarming up as far as here.

So I don't think it'll take very long for them

to find the other end of this bridge.

Tentatively, the ants start to make their way down the bridge,

although it's not exactly a massive trail just yet.

In the wild, you see them foraging all over the ground.

But how far will they forage from their main nest?

Up to 100 metres, sometimes more.

So you can follow these trails deep into the forest.

And, in fact, this colony was foraging deep into a citrus grove,

and you could follow them back for 100 metres or more.

Our time-lapse cameras reveal that

the trickle of ants across the bridge quickly becomes a flood.

More and more ants head out to explore the foraging areas beyond.

Now we'll have to wait to see how quickly they discover the plants

and get their leaf-cutting operation underway.

Back at the mini Planet Ant,

the young scientists need to help their ants find their food.

-OK, shall we try and connect these ants up to their food?

-Yeah.

So there's a stick there.

If you want to connect that side up and lay that one down.

So do you want to just plonk that in? There we go.

And, yeah. We've already got an ant crawling up here.

So they're already exploring.

We've only made this up for a couple of minutes,

and we've got ants moving along these bridges.

They're really, really good at finding new places,

finding nests and finding food.

The ants on Planet Ant and the ants in our mini ant colony

now start exploring their new homes.

For our mini ant homes, we used three large plastic cups with

a bit of plaster in the bottom to hold water and weight them down.

We put smaller plastic cups inside two of the bigger ones,

and filled the gap with soil. These are our mini nest boxes.

We used Pooters to collect the ants.

In the third cup, we put some honeyed water to feed the ants.

This is our mini foraging table.

Lastly, we connected all the cups up with some twigs.

Both these colonies have been given the food,

water and shelter that they need to survive.

How come some ants are big and some ants are small?

It's really, really useful for this ant colony to have ants of these

different sizes cos it's like having a really complicated toolkit.

It means that you can do lots of different things.

So the ants that are very small are very good at doing gentle

little delicate jobs, whereas the bigger ants are really good

at doing things like defending the nest and carrying big objects.

So it's about having lots of different ants of different sizes

to do lots of different jobs.

Now, the first thing that's really obvious when you look at an

ant colony is that the adult ants seem to be of different sizes.

Now, it's not because they're not fully grown.

It's because there are different castes of ants, and under here,

I've got three different castes of worker ants.

In the insect world, a caste system means there are lots of body types

of different shapes and sizes within a single species or group of animal.

And they're different sizes for a good reason.

Each of these castes of ants have a different job to do.

Soldier ants are bigger than the other castes.

That head isn't filled with a large brain

but a massive set of muscles to power a fearsome pair of jaws

or mandibles, strong enough to cut through leather.

Going down the size scale, this smaller ant

is called a media worker.

These are the ants that collect and bring leaves back to the nest.

Its serrated jaws are just the right shape

for cutting into tough plant material.

At the very bottom of the scale are the minima,

the most numerous ants of all.

They use the leaves to grow fungus to feed the colony

and they look after the young.

The work is divided between all the ants.

Each cast of ant has a role to play.

Our young scientists are examining some ants more closely.

All right, we had a nice chance to look at these ants.

I reckon we should try and draw them.

Drawing the ants is a really good way of focusing

on the detail of them.

Make a nice, big, clear sketch so that we can see all

the structures and all the way that these animals are put together.

These ants are insects and you can tell they're insects

because they've got these three body sections.

At the front you've got the head, just like we do.

-You've got the middle section. What do we call that?

-The thorax?

Yeah, the thorax.

The thorax has got three pairs of legs, so six legs coming out of it.

That's all about moving around.

And then we've got this big, chunky bit at the back.

-Do you know what we call that?

-The abdomen?

-Yeah, the abdomen.

Now, this is OUR abdomen. What are we doing here? What's this?

-We put our food in there.

-Yeah, this is our tummy.

So you've got the head,

the thorax and then you've got that big third body segment at the back.

The hundreds and thousands of ants on Planet Ant

are organised in a very special way.

Inside are different castes or kinds of ant, from the minima to

the soldiers, and they each have a job to do for the colony.

But although there are different castes,

there's something that's the same. They're all insects.

That means they have six legs and three body parts,

a head, a thorax and abdomen.

Just like in our world, on Planet Ant

there are jobs that need to be done, and having all the different

castes means that each job can be done effectively.

-How would an ant be born?

-How would an ant be born?

Inside the colony, there's a queen.

She's a really big ant and she lays all the eggs that produce

all of the ants in the colony.

Where is the queen?

Well, we don't know exactly where the Queen is

because she might move around a little bit

but she's definitely in one of those boxes over there.

We can't see the queen on Planet Ant

as she's hidden deep inside the nest, but I can show the young

scientists a leafcutter queen just like here from another colony.

ALL: Eh!

-What can you see?

-Ants.

-Fungus.

You can see the fungus.

-You can smell the fungus a little bit.

-Beetles.

What are you pointing out that's a beetle?

-No, that's not a beetle.

-Mushrooms.

-What do you think she might be?

-The queen ant.

-That's the queen, yeah.

That's the queen ant, so leafcutting ants have this really big queen.

Our ant colony will only ever have one queen living in it.

She is huge compared to the other ants

and is cared for round-the-clock by smaller ants.

They tend to her every need, because she's the most important

ant in the colony. She's the mother of all the ants.

That means she lays the eggs that hatch into the larvae which in turn

become the adult ants.

The ants in the colony are not all the same.

There are different types of ant and each have a different job to do,

from the queen that lays the eggs to the soldiers that defend the nest.

All the eggs the queen lays are almost identical.

So how can they become all the different kinds of ant

that make up the colony?

The workers are in control of this.

What they feed the larvae and how much they feed them

determines the kind of ant that they will become.

They tend to respond to the world around them.

If the colony comes under attack, they will need more soldiers

so the workers will ensure the larvae become soldiers.

If they need to gather more leaves,

then they will feed more larvae to grow into foragers.

It's amazing to think that the queen is the mother

to every one of the hundreds and thousands of ants in Planet Ant.

Wow!

So there's the queen.

Look at her abdomen.

-Why do you think her abdomen is so big?

-Because she is laying eggs.

Yeah, she's laying lots of eggs

so there are lots of ovaries in here that are making all those eggs.

What would happen if she dies?

If you killed the queen in this colony,

they're not going to get any more eggs.

So what's going to happen is the workers that are there

are going to live their lives but there's going to be

no-one to replace them, so the colony will come to an end.

There are lots of different types of ants in our colony

but the most important one of all is the queen.

This is because she is the ant that reproduces.

She lays the eggs that hatch into the larvae

that become the adult ants.

Without her, the colony would die.

-Are they friendly?

-They're friendly to each other.

It's like a big city and they want to defend themselves

so they're really friendly in the city.

But they're really aggressive to anything that's not

part of their city.

Our young scientists are investigating how ants

communicate with one another.

Can you hear anything?

Actually, some ants can use very, very small sounds.

Our ants in Planet Ant are producing very tiny sounds.

Using a special piece of equipment called a microphone,

we discover the ants are communicating

with each other using sound.

Not only can we hear the sounds of footsteps and leaves being cut,

we can also hear a special chirping sound.

This is called stridulation,

a sound the ants make by rubbing two sections

of their abdomen together.

They make this noise to call other ants to the best

leaves on the plant.

Ants also use stridulation if they're in trouble,

to call to other ants for help.

What would happen if we plug up Jack's ears?

-What's going to happen now?

-He can't hear us.

Yeah, he can't hear us so it's more difficult to communicate with him.

-But how could we communicate with him?

-Sign language?

Yeah, we could use our hands, couldn't we? So how about...

..if we blindfold Jack, as well?

-How can we communicate with him now?

-His sense...of smell.

Let's say we went to Jack to move around, just using these lemons.

How could we do that?

Put them to his nose and then tell him where to walk

and then he could follow the smell of the lemon.

Let's see what we can do.

He's picked it up, look.

First that way... Can we move him back the other way?

An ant's sense of smell is vital to them

but they don't use noses like us.

They use their antennae to detect special chemicals that they

lay on the ground, called pheromones.

To find out more about how this works,

I'm setting our ants on Planet Ant a challenge.

I've given them a Y-shaped trail.

At one end of that Y is food and at the other is nothing.

They have to decide whether to go left or right.

After just 20 minutes, virtually all of them

are heading down the path that leads to the food. Leafcutter ants

don't have very good eyesight, so how do they know where to go?

When an ant goes out looking for food, she leaves a pheromone trail

on the ground behind her that her sisters are able to follow.

If she finds food, she'll then lay down even more pheromone

on her way back to the nest, making the original trail even stronger.

If she doesn't find food, she won't lay any more pheromone

and the trail simply evaporates away.

The stronger the pheromone trail, the more likely an ant is

to follow it and in turn, add her own pheromone to the route.

When hundreds and thousands of ants are doing this,

very strong trails are produced that link the nest directly to food.

The way that ants communicate with one another allows them

to be a highly organised group of insects.

They use chemicals called pheromones to lay trails to food

that other ants can detect using their antennae.

This is why we often see lines of ants marching backwards

and forwards to food.

They also use stridulation,

a noise made by rubbing two parts of their abdomen together, to call

other ants to the tastiest leaves or to help them if they're in trouble.

So to us, Planet Ant might seem to be a quiet and peaceful world

but in reality, it's full of the sounds of ants,

constantly communicating with one another.

-Why do they cut the leaves?

-Yeah, they're leaf-cutting ants.

They're not leaf-eating ants.

What they're actually doing is taking these leaves

back into the nest and once they're there,

they use the leaves to grow a fungus.

Leafcutter ants, despite their name, don't eat leaves.

They bring them into the nest as a food supply for the fungus

they're growing inside.

And it's the fungus that they eat.

Our ants are farmers and the fungus is their crop.

The fungus contains just the right balance of nutrients to feed

the colony and its developing young.

This crop alone, grown in just a few weeks since the ants

arrived from Trinidad, will feed thousands of new ants.

Oh, look at that. They're not happy about this.

We can really see the structure of the fungus garden.

I mean, this is their very reason for being, isn't it?

That is the major resource.

It's a bit like a mushroom on toast. It's very fragile.

It's more like a sponge.

There's a huge surface area in here so there's lots of little

-chambers and cavities and places for them to feed.

-It's unbelievable.

-It's a really beautiful structure.

-Really soft.

-Yeah.

Why do they have spots on them?

Well, those spots you can see aren't actually spots.

What they are is spikes that come out of the middle of them

so they're really spiny. That stops them from eating them.

Our ants eat fungus but some animals eat ants.

I set our young scientists a challenge,

to find out which animals ants eat and which animals eat ants.

That will definitely eat the spider.

The ant can eat him and...

THEY TALK AT THE SAME TIME

..down to there.

OK, so what we've got here is a big tangle of interactions, haven't we?

We've got lots of animals eating lots of other animals

and being eaten by them. What do we call that?

Food chain?

Well, a food chain is one animal eating another,

eating another but we've got something more competitive.

We call this a food web because everything is interconnected

and the ant might have been eaten by some things

and eat some other things, but we've got all these complicated

relationships around the outside, so everything is linked up.

Studies have shown that ant colonies can increase the variety

or diversity of animal life around them.

Nutrients released from their underground nests fertilise

the surrounding soil, which in turn helps the growth of plant life

on the surface.

And more plants mean more animals.

For this reason, ants have been called ecosystem engineers.

On Planet Ant, the colony is thriving.

They've devastated plant after plant,

cutting leaves to use to feed the fungus.

And it's this fungus that's used to feed the colony.

They are fungus farmers.

Ants, like other animals, have their own part to play in the ecosystem.

They depend on the leaves and in turn,

nutrients from the ants' nest are released back

into the surrounding soil,

which encourages plant life to grow, which helps other animals to thrive.

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