okay today I'm going to be trying to
trick a harvester ant into thinking it's
dead I call this the Night of the Living
Dead experiment okay so if you've ever
watched a colony of ants you may have
noticed that when an ant dies if it's
not crushed by anything if it just dies
of natural causes and it's bodies just
left there the other ants don't really
care about it they kind of just walk
around it and don't really do anything
with the body that is until about two
days afterwards then the ants pick up
the dead ant and they take it to a place
in their colony that's called the
graveyard so the graveyard is a place in
every colony where all of the live ants
take the dead ants so in 1950 a young
assistant professor named Ed Wilson at
Harvard noticed this fact he noticed
that the ants don't really care about a
dead ant until around two days later and
so he started to wonder about that he
said why don't they take it to the
Graveyard right away if it's dead why do
they wait till two days afterward and
that made him begin to think that maybe
it's because the ant begins to decay and
it lifts off some chemical that lets the
other ants know that it's dead so ed
went on to revolutionize the study of
ants
he found that ants communicate through
mostly smell and in his research he set
out to discover what smell it is what
chemical is it the ants actually lit out
when they died so with trial and error
working with different dead animals
trying to extract different chemicals
from rotting bodies he discovered the
one specific chemical that triggers ants
to know that they're dead
and that chemical is called oleic acid
and so how he tested this is he grabbed
a little dab of oleic acid he put it on
the back of a ant that was passing by in
one of his colonies and he noticed that
almost immediately some of the other
ants grabbed that ant and took it over
to the ant graveyard
and the ant that had the oleic acid on
it was pretty willing it just accepted
its fate it thought I'm dad take me to
the graveyard and it stayed in the
graveyard until eventually it cleaned
itself off and joined the colony again
so in order to test that today I have
myself some oleic acid and a nice colony
of harvester ants so I got these ants a
few days ago I was actually really
excited because for some reason my whole
life I've always wanted a nap
but I never got one so I finally got a
nap farm is pretty cool I got a kind
that's filled with gel so you can
actually see the tunnels and as soon as
you put them in they just go right to
work and they start digging and what's
really cool just like in that story I
told as soon as some of the ants started
dying naturally the other ants started
making a graveyard for the ants so as of
today there's about ten apps that have
died you can see their body in the
refuse pile here
so the question is what happens when I
put a lahic acid on one of them is it
gonna think it's dead itself well the
other ants think it's dead what will
happen and I should mention this
chemical that I'm putting on it does not
hurt the ants at all it has acid in the
name but it's actually just a vegetable
oil or an animal fat so it definitely
won't hurt the ant okay first let's try
to capture one of the harvester ants
okay
that was easy it's so easy because they
get so mad when something enters their
cage they just start biting it so you
just biting the straw right now okay so
now let's put some oleic acid on him and
see if we can trick everyone into
thinking that he's dead okay so in order
to be able to work with him a little bit
better I'm gonna put it in the freezer
so this doesn't hurt them at all in fact
when you get the ants from the store
they come in a tube and they suggest you
put the tube in the fridge for a little
bit in order to transfer them to their
new environment so it definitely doesn't
hurt the ants but it slows its
metabolism down so can I so then I can
apply the oleic acid okay there you go
mr. ant enjoy your time amongst the ice
cream and fresh frozen raspberries okay
we got her out in there he's not dead
he's just cold okay now let's put some
oleic acid on him I'm just gonna do a
little dab
okay let's put him back in
oh he's starting to wake up let's put
him back in and see if they think he's
dead
so I was gonna try to mark the one that
I was going to put the oleic acid on but
what's easier than that is I'm just
gonna track it digitally so I'll mark it
with kind of a dot or an arrow as we go
and that's the one that has the oleic
acid on it okay he's in the back there
right there let's see how they treat him
looks like he may be volunteering to go
into the graveyard
he thinks he's dead
it's interesting it looks like he thinks
that he needs to be over in the
graveyard area his chemical senses are
telling him to bring the dead thing over
to the graveyard but it's on him there
he is again he really just wants to hang
out in this graveyard area you can see
the bulk of the other ones stay over in
this area they usually they usually
congregate around here but they don't
really hang out in this area unless
they're bringing a dead ant over but
he's just hanging out on the pile as if
he were dead so that's really
interesting in the study it was the
other ants who brought it over but in
this case it looks like he's hanging out
in the area of the dead ants
maybe the impulse is just to go to that
area because it senses the oleic acid
those are three other dead ants right
there and this is the one who thinks
it's dead so you can see that he'll
eventually clean himself off get all the
oleic acid off and then just return back
to his normal Society
okay so after a while they've all
resumed their normal activities it's
been about an hour since I put the oleic
acid on and they all seem fine they're
just crawling around still building
their tunnels now and don't forget I'm
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you