What if the most enduring civilization on Earth has six legs?

Ants have been organizing, farming, waging war, recycling waste, and engineering ecosystems since the age of dinosaurs — and most of us barely notice them.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences to explore ants as superorganisms: colonies that eat, share, and decide as one body. Larvae function as the stomach. Adults pass energy mouth-to-mouth. Queens can store decades of future in a single organ. What looks like a simple trail across your counter is actually logistics, chemistry, and collective intelligence in motion.

We meet honeypot ants that serve as living food storage, Dracula ants with one of the strangest feeding strategies in nature, and queens capable of determining the sex of their offspring. We unpack chemical language, colony takeovers, and the quiet but essential role ants play in recycling nutrients through what scientists call the “brown cycle.”

But this isn’t just fascinating biology. Ants hold ecosystems together. As global insect populations decline, monitoring and protecting these tiny engineers may be more urgent than we realize.

By the end of this episode, you won’t look at the ground the same way again.

Because ants?
They’ve been running things for a very long time.

AntWeb
MadagascarBio
iNaturalist
Breakfast Before Conservation
AntCat

Interview with Dr. Brian Fisher, Entomologist - Explorer, Scientist, Teacher

Things that make you say "Wow"!
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Big thanks to our Producer, Casey Kennedy.