Photography courtesy of Dr. Alexander Wild.
Images used with permission.
View more of his work at https://www.alexanderwild.com/
Ants, invasive species, climate change, cicadas, biodiversity, ecology, supercolonies, and ecosystem science reveal a hidden world operating beneath our feet.
My guest today is Dr. Sean Menke, Professor of Biology at Lake Forest College, and after this conversation, I don't think I'll ever look at an ant the same way again.
We tend to think of ants as tiny individual insects crawling across a sidewalk.
Sean argues that we should be thinking much bigger.
The colony is the organism.
Those individual workers are more like extensions of a larger system, gathering food, defending territory, redistributing nutrients, farming other insects, dispersing seeds, and making decisions without anyone actually being in charge.
And that's only the beginning.
Ants quietly perform jobs that help entire ecosystems function.
They clean up dead insects.
They move nutrients through soil.
Some species essentially farm aphids for sugar.
Others protect plants from animals much larger than themselves.
And then there are invasive ants.
Sean explains how Argentine ants can create enormous supercolonies where ants separated by hundreds of miles behave as though they belong to the same colony.
Instead of competing with one another, millions upon millions of ants effectively work together.
That advantage can completely reshape native ant communities.
We also explore what climate change is doing to ant populations, why warming temperatures can push species into new territory, and how human behavior can unintentionally make an environment perfect for an invasive species.
Then we get into something completely different: periodical cicadas.
Billions can emerge within the same period, overwhelming predators with more food than they could possibly consume.
Sean and his team wanted to know what happens to ants when suddenly there is free food everywhere.
Do they abandon their normal ecological jobs?
Do they change how they behave?
And how do cicadas emerging underground somehow know where the nearest tree is?
This episode ultimately became about something bigger than ants.
It became a conversation about curiosity.
Sean makes an important point about science: some of our most important discoveries didn't begin with someone trying to solve a specific human problem.
They began because somebody noticed something strange and asked why.
Sometimes understanding an ant, a lizard, a cicada, or an obscure biological process can eventually lead somewhere no one could have predicted.
That's one of the things I love most about science.
You don't always know where the question is going to take you.
