I am now convinced that fire ants are the most amazing creatures on earth and they must die let’s talk about that this is Gregg and Ian from Detroit Michigan running the turkey trot good mythical morning good mythical morning this episode is brought to you by catalyst the guys with good Goods like the electric lantern lamp is it a lamp is it a lantern well sort of both if you’re into that kind of thing which I am I’m gonna go camping with this but I need a generator no it’s for rustic office environments or lodges or things like that if you just fit your decor go for it Oh skip mythical morning thanks for knocking oh I’ll tell you about so what have you had somebody you’ve had a fake person on hold well that was great I’m glad I kept my head turn this way just for that joke yep and I could be like quite a payoff to that one I’m doing that every episode I cannot say that I’ve been doing research but I have been watching movies and one of which was about fire ants and that’s what I want to talk about today I think there’s opportunity for us to learn things for us to be in awe of nature and there may even be an application for us creatively or inter-site the end of this whole thing interestingly enough this past weekend as I was a flippant to the Netflix I saw this documentary you’re talking about this at fire so this guy should watch that’s called fire ants no more no less but now I don’t have to watch it because just sitting here with you talking about it is like watching it well if you want to watch it link will be in the description sounded weird especially she didn’t say a link a lane length but it will be in the description if you want to watch it but anyway so yeah I mean it’s I wanted to watch something with Lincoln because Lily had a friend over and they were watching like Barbie movies in the other room and I was like oh we can do some man bonding over like some Barbie movies yeah that but barbie has a movie they have put oh yeah like whole series of movies and you let your daughter watch that we have you reinforce that kind of the way that they’re women she’s a great actress body image and that she can be like a mermaid or she can be she can be but yeah they’re all in terms of body image she’s pretty it’s pretty much always Barbie let’s not go there that’s another my my best another episode my point is I had to click on the fire ants but now because I have a personal connection to fire ants now if you don’t know what fire ants are you didn’t grow up in the south or you didn’t grow up in South America or Africa you grew up somewhere that has a colder climate but if you’re walking around barefooted in your yard in the summertime and you’re in one of these warm places like where we’re from all of a sudden you’ll come upon a place in your grass that wasn’t there yesterday and all of a sudden it looks like freshly tilled earth like a bulge like a mound like could this be a groundhog under there or some sort of under earth creature no it is a fire ant mound and if you disturb that thing Rhett tell them what happens well I don’t disturb them as a policy but if you step upon this all little fire ants will come out or it will attack you if you poke it with a stick say if you disturb it any and they have this reaction I might kill the human kill the human and they come up and they bite in the claw and they sting and this has happened to many people in the south one of my mom’s earliest memories is falling off a swing into a fire ant hill and nearly dying yeah these things in Maine die but you could nearly die no there are a few reported cases of fire ants killing people because I mean they’re called fire ants because they bite you there is venom in there in that fangled Fingal’s I don’t think they’re called and it’s just it’s just dangerous my Poppa stepped it stepped in one it they engulfed his whole left leg and bit him all over the place and he’s swell up like a hippopotamus it’s like he was dragging a hippopotamus but it was his leg it’s crazy so I wanted I wanted to educate Lincoln about this he’s already in fear of him but at least you know he could have knowledge which maybe defer the fear a couple of things that I learned right off the bat is these things they came from Argentina to North America they are not native species and they just take over here they’re invasive they take over and they don’t just go underground they fly the Queen flies to place yeah they do I saw it I saw the wings and everything but these fire ants do amazing things they start at one point they said ok they showed water rising and they said ok if there’s a flood the fire ants have to have to leave their Mound and escape so that they don’t drown and they have to search for higher ground if they don’t find higher ground people these fire hits glom together and form a raft made out of nothing but themselves and there’s footage of this there is footage of this they make it’s just a glob of fire ants floating on top of water and it’s not a ball it’s they make us a certain level of thickness of a of a raft and then there’s ones on the bottom swimming and then they put all the babies and the larvae and the Queen on top and they’re crawling around on top and they just go around go around they could go around for weeks Oh what about the dudes on the bottom they died no they’re not dying they’re moving around it’s like a rotation it’s like volleyball they didn’t really I’ve got another 15 seconds George and tap out and the other ones comes down these are so smart and keeping their head they are so smart but the fact is they’re not smart they just all know their roles they’re like bees they’re collectively smart they’re collectively smart like like me and you like bees have their roles and stuff like that alone we’re very stupid but together we’re almost as smart as a smart if we grab onto each other with every appendage which let’s not do it again sense whim we would float you get the body if we were ants and it’s amazing I’m Amy and the babies are on top they did this they did these experiments where they would take one ant away at a time and the ants would immediately redistribute themselves to stay the proper amount of buoyant and then the scientists would take the raft and they would push down on the middle and it would just walk it would just go down in the middle and it was as if it was reacting like Kevlar or some sort of fabric that were just a wrong and if you push it too far the whole thing will go underwater and the raft will submerge whoop around on itself become a ball trap air in the middle of it and enough air that it will not they will not drowned it’ll burn out look they will not drowned used to drowned it’s dry dralon that’s what I said it will not drown so at least and then if you let it go the bubble comes out and then it goes back up to the top how amazing is that so weeks they could do this this is all special and then they finally find land and then they start crawling off and they take the babies off and they make a new nest for for for a little bit time these things cannot be eradicated yeah I mean until scientists say you know they did all these things and they came over like the 30s and then in the 70s they did all this just put corn flakes out there they did all that yeah they put some frosted mini-wheats Joe he knows and they say this rice there’s all kinds of like prison frosted mini-wheats out there and you kill them all have you heard that actually because I’ve heard rice you got some corn pops throw some corn pops on their hip take about 48 hours and I got a good problem that I don’t or rice that doesn’t work and I’ll think Lewis my mom’s husband he says the only way to kill them is to put fire on mr. Burnham burn em out that’s what I call firing yes we yeah he doesn’t talk like you one of us just did but he’ll take a blowtorch out you see him in his front yard not with a weed whacker or like is he doing lawn work no he’s like got a full blowtorch as a welder burning these things out but that probably kills him that kills him but tsiyon I think a lot of them go so deep that I’m sure that doesn’t get that could be underground like forming some like fake water fountain thing that’s repelling the fire because they’re so smart yeah you don’t know what’s going on out of there what they did yeah I’m not going to deny that that could happen but scientists have found the Silver Bullet that the reason why these things don’t go nuts in Argentina or in South Africa or places like that is because there is a fly a phorid fly there’s many different species that only attack firing the forehead floor for it phor ID but let’s just call it the forehead flap fo r e atat unpredicted so you can remember it listen to how these things eradicate fire ants first of all they’re like 1/8 the size of an ant and they’re like going around and they don’t look for the little worker ants they look for the female ants they wait for the female aunt to come out and then boom they hit that thing don’t they hit that thing boom they hit that day what they sting it I’m just saying they stick it but they well they lay a tag in it so you know what I’m saying hold on they lay an egg on the phorid fly egg in a living ant in the female in the female so this is a female forward fly laying an egg yes and it does not kill the ant the ant lives on goes about its business until one day so nasty till one day the phorid egg decides to hatch it goes up into the head of the ant hatches decapitates the head that means take the head off the ear and then the first meal of this phorid fly larvae is to eat the brains and inner workings of the head of the firefly don’t be grossed out be like yeah that’s right I attacked your mom when she was a kid man you should be like yeah for it flies yeah you’re right give me some of that eating the inside brains of a fire ants and so then once that the muscle you’re not gonna be making any more rafts I’m gonna eat your brains and like the zombie and then the client zombie the Queen dies and then that caught the colony dies the colony doesn’t know what to do without a queen yeah it’s like the British and what you can do is there’s certain certain places in South Texas where it’s too too hot for the forward flies to live you can take if you live in South Texas what you don’t but let’s just say you did I bet you do there take your fire ants in a box take them up to North Texas let the for advice because they’re up there now where they’re helping to eradicate fire ants let them impregnate the bodies of the fire ants then bring your fire ants back down and/or kill is there footage of this impregnation process it’s it’s just like BAM it’s just like what I said it’s just that quick stat it doesn’t take long it’s amazing and they must die um what now what can you and I learn from this while I was hoping you would have that application by the end of this thing well I just think we should we should hold hands wherever we go and float and we should we should hold hands wherever we go and be prepared for anything I won’t even think about that no thanks they know how to pull with just the right amount of pressure so that they don’t pull each other’s limbs off they will let go before they break each other’s limbs if I can do that no but if you let go I know I would know when to let go like let go your but I mean you’re not about to break late turns into a cow more oh something’s happened it’s before this makes a lot of what on I’m Rhett something something more Murr something’s wrong I think I’m turn turning it to God I’d love the canteen you need your brains right now but I’m not I’m not a teacher fly okay move it fly you’re not a fire