05 Supersocieties | BBC Life in the Undergrowth
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00:30Leafcutter ants cleaning the refuse out of their nest.
00:43Every single one of these tiny creatures knows where it's going and what it's got to do when
00:49it gets there.
00:51And furthermore, there are about 10 million more of them in this huge underground nest
00:56beneath me.
00:57They're all members of one highly organised society, but they're not the blithely mechanical
01:05robotic slaves that we once thought they were.
01:09Indeed, we now know that every insect society is full of conflict, power struggles and mutinies.
01:23Some insects construct the tallest of all non-human buildings.
01:29Like these huge termite hills here in Australia.
01:34They protect their colonies with great ferocity.
01:38They increase the size of their societies at an alarming rate.
01:46And they're capable of mobilising huge armies to make wars on their neighbours.
01:54But how did these great communities develop?
01:57Most insects, like this little sand wasp here in the deserts of Arizona, live solitary lives.
02:05This one has just dug a hole in which she is going to lay her eggs.
02:12But then she does something else.
02:15She will cater for her as yet unhatched young by putting a caterpillar inside that hole
02:23on which they can feed.
02:25And that is a very important stage in the development of the social life.
02:34In fact, it's the very basis on which all the great insect societies are built.
02:41This species of wasp, however, is still at the stage of working alone.
02:48After stocking each nest with a caterpillar, she blocks the entrance to deter thieves.
02:56Her burrow may be several centimetres deep.
03:00At the bottom lies the paralysed caterpillar and on its back there is now a wasp grub feeding on it.
03:10The female wasp makes several of these nests a few feet apart
03:14and stocks each of them with living food for her young.
03:20Can there be a more hard-working mother?
03:24Despite all her attempts at parental care, the vast majority of her young will not survive.
03:32She's too busy hunting for more caterpillars to be able to guard all her nest sites.
03:41Back in the distant evolutionary past, other wasps started to build their nests alongside one another.
03:49And here on the coast of Panama, paper wasps still do so.
03:54Grouping their cells together means that even though you have to leave your eggs to collect food,
03:59there will always be someone around on guard.
04:04The wasps are all sisters, but as often happens, one tends to dominate the rest.
04:11She starts to bite her sisters with great brutality.
04:14She is the boss, the queen.
04:16The others may build cells, but only she will lay eggs in them.
04:24Many of the genes in these eggs are the same as those carried by her sisters.
04:28And the sisters look after the eggs as if they were their own.
04:32And now, because the nest is so well guarded,
04:34the family rears more young than if each female were to nest alone.
04:41So, as each egg is laid, the sisters take steps to protect it.
04:45To do that, they need building material.
04:51They chew wood into pulp and then use it to build a protective wall around each egg, a cell.
04:58So, a colonial nest begins to grow.
05:03With more and more young females needing to be fed, the adults go hunting.
05:29Each returning wasp bringing prey is greeted by the other workers.
05:37They squabble over food.
05:39The queen takes the lion's share.
05:41Those of her sisters and daughters who are high up on the social scale
05:45also get big helpings, because they get to eat.
05:49The wasps are not afraid of the queen.
05:53The sisters and daughters who are high up on the social scale also get big helpings,
05:58because they bully the junior females.
06:09In fact, the food isn't eaten by the adult who wins it.
06:13She feeds it to her developing younger sisters.
06:24This grouping, an enormous single-sex family,
06:28was the first step towards the development of insect societies
06:31containing millions of individuals.
06:34And it's still their basic structure.
06:40The forests in which the first wasps hunted
06:43were dominated by horsetails and conifers.
06:47They relied upon the wind to distribute their pollen.
06:50But then, about 100 million years ago,
06:53a new kind of plant appeared which recruited insects to do the job.
06:58And they did it with nectar-loaded flowers.
07:04Some of these recruits then abandoned hunting
07:07and concentrated instead on this new food.
07:10They became bees.
07:12Today, there are about 20,000 different species of them.
07:22This queen bumblebee mated at the end of last summer,
07:26before she hibernated.
07:28But now she's gone off to look for a new home,
07:32because she's ready, at last, to lay those eggs.
07:37She may take some time to find just the right place.
07:46A deserted mouse hole.
07:48Ideal.
07:52First, she makes a little wax pot
07:55in which she lays a group of fertilised eggs.
07:58In due time, the eggs will hatch.
08:01The queen now has her subjects.
08:03A colony has been established.
08:06From now on, she does little building herself.
08:09Her daughters take on that job
08:11and they use a material that no wasp ever had.
08:14It oozes from between their body segments.
08:17It's wax.
08:19The queen also produces a chemical substance
08:22that permeates the nest.
08:24It's a chemical substance called nitrate.
08:27The queen also produces a chemical substance
08:30that permeates the nest
08:32and keeps her daughters' sexuality in check.
08:35Their job is not to produce eggs,
08:37but to look after their younger sisters.
08:43More and more young workers
08:45are hauling themselves out of their cells.
08:57They don't have to travel far to find their first adult meal.
09:02In fact, to begin with, they stay inside the nest,
09:06helping with nest duties, feeding the young,
09:09keeping the place clean, building more cells.
09:13After a few days, they begin to venture outside the nest
09:17to help in collecting food.
09:21If the colony is to be properly nourished,
09:24they must gather not only nectar, but pollen.
09:36Nectar they transport in their crops,
09:39but pollen is held in a tiny ball
09:42by a brush of stiff hairs on their two hind legs.
09:45A worker can carry a lump
09:47weighing half as much as she does herself.
09:51Each bundle is carefully unloaded into one of the storage cells.
10:10The pollen isn't eaten by workers.
10:12They unselfishly bring it back for the larvae,
10:15for its rich in protein and essential food for their development.
10:21By the late summer, there may be more than 200 workers in the nest.
10:27Although the colony is now close to its maximum size,
10:31the queen is still laying.
10:33But these batches of eggs are different.
10:36She's now stopped producing the chemical substance
10:39that repressed the sexual development of her daughters,
10:42so these eggs will develop into new queens.
10:45The change affects not just her eggs,
10:48but her existing daughters, the workers.
10:51No longer restrained by the queen's chemical control,
10:54some workers have started laying their own eggs.
10:57This doesn't suit the queen, and she destroys them.
11:08The workers haven't made it.
11:10The queen is still laying eggs,
11:13The workers haven't made it,
11:15but their eggs can develop, nonetheless, and become males.
11:19The queen eats as many of these eggs as she can find
11:22because, as well as queen eggs, she's also producing male eggs
11:26and can't tolerate the competition.
11:31She keeps such a close watch
11:33that she manages to destroy the workers' eggs
11:36almost as soon as they're laid.
11:39The end of summer approaches.
11:44There's now anarchy in the colony.
11:47The social order has collapsed.
11:49Many of the workers, whose eggs are being destroyed by the queen,
11:52start to attack her.
11:55The onslaught is brutal.
11:57No quarter is given.
12:09ROOSTER CROWS
12:22Eventually, they sting her to death.
12:27The end of the colony has come.
12:31None of the workers will survive the winter,
12:35but the young queens will have left the nest and found males.
12:39It's they who will establish new colonies next spring.
12:46Bumblebees have a particular problem.
12:49In any given area, there's only a limited number of holes
12:52that are suitable for nests.
12:54European honeybees, which, in the wild, nest in holes in trees,
12:59have similar difficulty,
13:01but some bees have adopted a very radical solution,
13:05a very brave solution to that difficulty.
13:08They nest out in the open, but at the top of tall trees,
13:13sometimes very tall trees.
13:21These are the giant Asiatic bees, the biggest of all honeybees.
13:26They're found from the Himalayas all the way down to Southeast Asia.
13:30These colonies are in Malaysia.
13:34They defend themselves with stings, very, very powerful stings,
13:39which is why I have to wear a bee suit.
13:43And it's not just against one bee that you have to guard yourself,
13:49because if one bee attacks you, it releases a pheromone,
13:53a chemical signal which is detected by the others in the cone,
13:58and within seconds, there will be hundreds,
14:01indeed probably thousands of them, all around you,
14:04launching a mass attack and stinging you.
14:07And some of those stings can actually go through a bee suit,
14:11so something to be avoided.
14:29Stinging is a very expensive form of defence,
14:33because when a bee loses its sting, it dies.
14:37So it's better for the colony to warn predators off
14:40before they have to fight them off.
14:43And they warn them with some dramatic,
14:46very, very powerful stings,
14:49which is why I have to wear a bee suit.
14:52They warn predators off before they have to fight them off,
14:56and they warn them with some dramatic displays.
15:00I've got a reproduction of a hornet,
15:03which is one of the main enemies of bees.
15:06I'll see if I can get them to do it.
15:08Just watch. There.
15:11See, there's a moving wave
15:13which passes over the surface of the colony,
15:16and that not only produces an impressive pattern,
15:19but it also makes it very difficult for any aggressor,
15:23like perhaps a hornet, which eats bees,
15:26to actually land on that moving carpet of wings.
15:34The colony's great treasure, of course,
15:37is its huge store of honey.
15:43This is produced from nectar,
15:45which the bees industriously collect from flowers.
15:48They systematically expose it to the air
15:51so that the water it contains evaporates
15:54and the nectar becomes sweeter and thicker.
15:57Eventually, it turns into honey.
16:08The combs in which they store it
16:10are continuously guarded by the covering of bees.
16:13They cling so thickly
16:15that it might seem that nothing could get past them.
16:18But some thieves know how to do so, particularly at night.
16:28A death's-head hawkmoth flies over the surface of the colony
16:33and goes so close to it
16:35that the bees are alarmed enough to wave their warning.
16:44But the moth is not put off.
16:46It wants honey.
16:55Amazingly, it manages to land on the carpet of bees
16:59and quickly pushes its way through them.
17:04A quick sip of honey, and it's off.
17:08It succeeds because,
17:10although it looks nothing like a bee to our eyes,
17:13it has camouflaged itself with a smell,
17:16a pheromone that convinces the bees that it's one of them.
17:20But in spite of such raids,
17:22bees, thanks to their stings, retain their precious honey.
17:26Precious because it is that
17:28that enables them to survive a season without flowers.
17:32While some descendants of the wasps
17:35became flower-foraging bees,
17:38others remained hunters
17:40but went down to the ground to search for their prey.
17:43Their wings were more of a hindrance than a help,
17:46and these insects lost their wings for most of their lives.
17:50They're the ants.
17:53These are wood ants,
17:55and they build nests even bigger than those of the giant bees.
17:59This one is in the pine forests of the Alps.
18:06Hunting parties go out from the nest
18:08along well-established trails to search for prey.
18:16Anything their own size is quickly overpowered.
18:22But by working together,
18:24wood ants can tackle prey much bigger than themselves.
18:30Some caterpillars are covered with stinging hairs,
18:33but the ants cut these off one by one,
18:36and they can slice right through a beetle's hard armour.
18:54Now they are attacking another hunter, a spider.
18:58Everything they catch is taken back to the colony
19:01to be shared by those workers that stayed at home,
19:04looking after the young.
19:17The disadvantage of building a huge nest like this
19:20is that you're very obvious to predators.
19:23But these ants have a very effective way of defending themselves.
19:27Watch.
19:40Mmm!
19:42The unrestrainable, acrid smell of formic acid.
19:49Most ants, like their wasp ancestors, have stings,
19:52but not these wood ants.
19:54Instead of injecting poison, they squirt it,
19:57and very accurately too.
20:08They don't eat just meat.
20:10They also visit aphids that sit in the branches above,
20:14drinking the pine tree's sap.
20:16This contains more sugar than the aphids need,
20:19so the ants drink the excess.
20:23And they collect it just as fast as the aphids excrete it.
20:30They carry it back to the nest,
20:32but in this case they transport it inside their swollen stomachs.
20:36In fact, this liquid, honeydew,
20:38makes up more than two-thirds of the colony's diet.
20:45All these wood ant nests are connected to one another by trails.
20:50And indeed, they're also genetically related to one another.
20:54There's some 1,200 of them in this one patch of forest.
20:58And that makes this what is thought to be
21:01the biggest supercolony of ants in the whole world.
21:07By mid-June, the supercolony is ready to reproduce.
21:11Out of every nest among the workers come individuals with wings.
21:16Some nests produce only males.
21:20They take off in droves.
21:31Other nests produce only females.
21:36Both sexes, now that they're winged, look remarkably like wasps,
21:40a reminder of their ancestry.
21:47Unlike wasps, however,
21:49these flyers are not very confident about getting into the air.
22:12Males and females assemble in the nearby meadows.
22:16The queens lay down chemical trails
22:18so that the males may quickly discover exactly where they are.
22:22And the males are quick to take the hint.
22:38The males only live for a few days
22:40and they mate as quickly and as frequently as they can.
22:49A queen, on the other hand, may live for as long as ten years,
22:53and a single mating will provide her with enough sperm
22:56to last for her entire life.
22:59For a female, mating is often a bit of a battle.
23:03Sometimes she has to bite a male to make him release her.
23:07Sometimes she has to hang on to him
23:09because he's impatient and wants to move on.
23:18The newly-mated queens gather together in the undergrowth.
23:21Here they shed their wings.
23:24They've found their males, so their travelling is over.
23:34Now each must find an existing nest in which to lay her eggs.
23:43This one encounters a column of workers.
23:46A wood ant nest may contain as many as a thousand queens,
23:50but will these workers allow her to be one of them?
23:53If they don't, they will bite her to death.
23:58She's been accepted.
24:00The workers have detected chemical clues on her body
24:03that tells them that she's originally from one of the nests in their supercolony.
24:08She's large and fat. Walking is not easy for her.
24:12A single worker carries her along the trail back home,
24:16perhaps even to the same nest in which she started life.
24:23Ants live almost everywhere.
24:26The water falling in this mangrove swamp in Australia
24:29exposes in the wet mud an ant's nest.
24:35Every time the tide recedes,
24:37the ants must repair any damage the water may have caused.
24:43Collapsed entrances must be reopened and blocked tunnels cleared.
24:58Now that the mud flats are exposed,
25:00the ants hurry to collect what food the tide might have delivered.
25:07But there are still some stretches of water to be crossed.
25:13The surface tension of the water supports them as they dance across it.
25:20Sometimes they actually swim.
25:43And there has indeed been a new delivery of food.
25:54But the tide has also created a problem.
25:57It has washed away the chemical trails that mark the frontiers of their territory,
26:01so there's now no clear boundary between them
26:04and ants belonging to a neighbouring colony.
26:07The interrogation of a stranger is complex and detailed.
26:12Who are you? Where do you come from?
26:17Answers are readily given and accepted.
26:31But every now and then they have to fight.
26:34But every now and then they have to fight to settle a question.
26:48They may have sorted out their disagreement,
26:51but now there is a bigger threat to both of them.
26:54The tide is turning again.
26:56They must get back to the safety of their nests.
27:05While the tide has been out,
27:07larvae and pupae have been moved around the nest
27:10to keep them at the temperature needed for their proper development.
27:13Now they must be moved again, for the nest is not watertight.
27:17Many of the tunnels and chambers are flooded with every tide.
27:21There's no time to waste.
27:24But the water doesn't reach every part of the nest,
27:28for the ants have constructed bell-shaped chambers
27:31that trap pockets of air and so create refuge for their larvae.
27:36The water is very bad for the larvae.
27:39The water is very bad for the larvae.
27:43The ants have built a large enclosure in the middle of the nest
27:47where they must move around.
27:49shaped chambers that trap pockets of air and so create refuges where the adults and the
27:54young can sit out the high tide.
28:14Here in Arizona, the problem for an ant is not too much water, but too little.
28:19The rainfall is so low that there's hardly any vegetation and very little to eat.
28:25So an ant has to be prepared to eat whatever it can find.
28:29There are seeds, but seeds are very tough and you need very powerful jaws to crack them.
28:35But then that's exactly what these harvest ants have got.
28:46They make an intensive search of the sand.
28:49Almost any seed will be collected.
28:51Food around here is very scarce.
28:53They can't afford to be fussy.
29:08They carry their gleanings back to the nest to store it in larders, many of which are
29:12several metres below ground.
29:18But like the mango ants, they must work fast.
29:22The desert warms quickly and before long the heat will be intolerable.
29:29By nightfall, the harvesters are back inside the nest.
29:34But there's still a lot going on out in the desert.
29:38There's another ant here too, the night ant.
29:41This is one of their nests in front of me.
29:43They normally only come out after dark and they're generalists.
29:47They'll eat pretty well anything.
29:49But they have a particular taste for seeds.
29:52The trouble is that the harvest ants will have gathered all the seeds during the day,
29:57unless the night ants can do something about it.
30:04Just after dark, the night ants start a major spoiling operation against their rivals.
30:13They start to shift stones and fragments of plants to block up some holes near their nest.
30:33By morning, it's clear what they've done.
30:37They've trapped the harvesters inside their own nests.
30:48The harvesters now have a lot of work to do before they can get out to collect more seeds.
30:54They clear away the rubble as quickly as they can.
31:08But this takes time.
31:09If they're seriously delayed, the day will be too hot for them to spend time out in the open.
31:15So today, they can't collect as much as they normally do.
31:22And that means that by nightfall, there will still be seeds on the ground for the night ants to collect.
31:35Not all ants live in permanent nests.
31:39In the tropical forests of Africa and South America, there are some that are nomads.
31:45These army ants in the rainforests of Central America are camped in the base of a tree.
31:51They've been there for three weeks.
31:52During this time, the queen has been laying eggs, several thousand a day.
31:57The army has also been ransacking the surrounding forests for prey.
32:01But now it's time for them to find new hunting grounds.
32:05So once more, they start to march.
32:20The site for the new bivouac has not been picked by the queen, but by the workers.
32:26Scouts have been exploring the neighborhood and they've decided on a new place.
32:31And now their chemical trails are leading the whole colony from the old bivouac to the new one.
32:40As in an army, the soldiers are prepared to risk their lives for the common good.
32:45A group of them interlock their bodies to form a safety barrier that will catch any
32:50of their companions that might slip off this sloping trunk.
32:54They take everything with them, larvae, food, and in this case, as very rarely seen, winged males.
33:00By the time daylight comes, the army has established a new bivouac.
33:20Its walls and tunnels are formed by the interlinked bodies of hundreds and thousands of individuals.
33:34But this is only a temporary camp.
33:37They still haven't reached fresh hunting grounds.
33:40Even so, they must eat, and the workers set off to find food.
34:11There are probably a million individual ants in this one colony, and together they're collaborating
34:19and cooperating so that the colony has become one great superorganism.
34:24There's no central controlling intelligence as such.
34:27Instead, the behavior of the superorganism is the cumulative result of thousands upon thousands
34:33of tiny, mini decisions by individual ants.
34:36The worker moves forward into new territory, leading a chemical trail behind it, and then
34:41another following in its trail advances still a little further.
34:45So the superorganism as a whole is moving through the forest, searching for food.
34:58These hunters can subdue almost any other creature in the undergrowth.
35:02Some predators may be armed with virulent poisons, but their attackers are too small
35:07to sting.
35:09A lizard has no defense at all.
35:14A special cast of workers with particularly large jaws protect the smaller workers as
35:40they sting their prey and butcher it.
35:54The venom in their stings liquefies the tissues of their victims so that the bodies are more
35:59easily cut up into smaller pieces to transport.
36:10The chemical trails laid down by the first scouts have now been strengthened and broadened
36:27by the passage of many, many more workers.
36:30And now those trails are serving as highways along which booty is being brought back to
36:35the bivouac to feed the young brood.
36:58Remarkably, almost as soon as these workers return with food, scouts begin to search for
37:04a new bivouac site.
37:07The colony will move again tonight and every night for the next few weeks until the queen
37:12is ready to lay more eggs.
37:17When it comes to creating a permanent home for a colony, the champions by far are these
37:24tiny creatures, termites.
37:28Unlike ants, all termites are vegetarians.
37:31They are, in fact, descended not from wasps but from cockroaches and their huge nests
37:36act not only as their fortresses but their food stores.
37:42They build with nothing but mud and their own excrement, yet their nests are gigantic.
37:47If termites were our size, some of their homes would be four times as tall as New York skyscrapers
37:53and measure up to five miles across at their base.
37:58These are not quite so tall, but they're particularly remarkable for another reason.
38:05Every one of these termite hills points in the same direction, north and south.
38:11It's as though they were needles in a compass.
38:15And indeed, they're called magnetic termites.
38:19They, in fact, take their cue for building from the magnetism of the earth.
38:25And the benefit of doing so comes not from that but from the daily movement of the sun.
38:43In the morning, the rays of the rising sun strike the eastern face of the mound four square.
38:51Termites, after the cold of the night, need warming up
38:54and are gathered in galleries immediately below the surface.
38:58But as the day continues, it warms up.
39:01But the termites don't overheat because the rays of the sun only strike the surface dancingly.
39:07And by midday, the full force of the sun is felt only on the top edge.
39:21As the sun moves towards the west, so this face becomes roastingly hot.
39:27But the eastern face falls into shadow and remains relatively cool.
39:33And the termites stay at the temperature that suits them best.
39:38Other termites escape the heat of the day by retreating to deep cellars below their mounds.
39:44But these magnetic termites colonize areas that flood during the rainy season.
39:49And the ground beneath them is regularly waterlogged.
39:53So their compass-like mounds are a response not just to the movement of the sun
39:58but to badly drained sites.
40:02Here in South Africa, it can also get very hot, but there's no danger of flooding.
40:07So termites can take refuge from the heat below ground where it's cool and relatively stable.
40:16But two million insects living below ground create a different kind of problem.
40:21The air around them gets stale.
40:24So termites need to have a way of linking the underground air with the fresh air above.
40:30A ventilation system.
40:32And they do that with this.
40:35And to see how it works, you've got to look inside.
40:41Using the latest scanning techniques, we can create a picture of the mound's interior.
40:48An intricate network of passages lead to a central chimney.
40:54Hot, stale air from the insect population below rises up through the chimney.
41:03But the top of the mound is sealed.
41:07So how does this stale air escape?
41:11The mound may look as though it has strong defensive walls like a fortress.
41:15But in fact, these walls are porous.
41:18And their primary purpose is to harness the wind.
41:22Fresh air blowing against the side of the mound is forced through the tiny holes in these walls.
41:28From there, it travels through the smaller tunnels until it reaches the central chimney.
41:35Here, the cooler, fresh air mixes with the hot, stale air rising from the insect community below.
41:44Meanwhile, some air is blown around the side of the mound.
41:48This creates a suction that pulls the stale air out of the chimney and out through the outer walls.
41:55So an internal air current is created and the whole mound ventilated.
42:00The mound's inhabitants spend most of their time close to or below ground level.
42:07Beneath their living quarters, there are garden chambers where the termites cultivate a fungus
42:13that rots the wood and vegetation they collect and make it digestible.
42:19Farther down still, the queen lies in her own chamber.
42:25Her huge body is a gigantic egg-producing factory.
42:30She's so swollen that she can't look after herself.
42:34The workers must constantly clean her and feed her with food from their own crops.
42:40Her partner, with whom she founded the colony maybe 20 years ago,
42:45is still with her and mates with her throughout her life.
42:49She lays eggs at an extraordinary rate, as many as 30,000 a day.
42:57As she produces them, so workers remove them from the royal chamber and take them to nurseries.
43:03There, they'll be fed on compost from the fungus gardens until they turn into adults.
43:10The superorganism that lives in this great castle
43:14crops the surrounding vegetation just about as severely as an antelope.
43:21The density of individual termites around here is extraordinary, over 100,000 per square metre.
43:28And just as there are lions and leopards that hunt antelope,
43:33so in the underground, there's an abundance of termites.
43:38Antelope.
43:39So in the undergrowth, there are insect hunters which prey on the tiny herbivores.
43:46The ants, the termite's ancient enemy.
43:51Matabele ants, specialist termite hunters.
44:01A scout has laid down a clear chemical trail
44:05and this battalion of workers have picked it up and are following it.
44:10There may be only a few hundred of them,
44:12but they're going to severely test the defences of a termite colony.
44:24The mound has formidable guards, soldier termites.
44:35The ants have a special technique for dealing with these soldiers.
44:39They grab the termite's jaw and then sting it in the only vulnerable place on its head,
44:44in its mouth.
44:54The ant's front line breaks into the colony.
44:57Reinforcements for the termite soldiers arrive quickly.
45:02Already, there are casualties on both sides.
45:08But the invaders overwhelm the defenders.
45:17It's not to the ant's advantage to kill an entire termite colony
45:21any more than it would be sensible for farmers to exterminate their cattle.
45:25Better to let most survive so that they don't die.
45:29Better to let most survive so that they can be regularly raided.
45:33So, although there are millions of termites in the colony,
45:36the matabele ants rarely go deep into the nest to press home their victory.
45:59The raid lasts less than 15 minutes.
46:02Nonetheless, the spoils are impressive.
46:15Termite bodies are now being piled in dumps outside the nest.
46:29Many of the casualties are still alive, but paralyzed by the ant's stings.
46:34Now, the raiders have the considerable task of carrying their victims back to their nest.
46:43They will have to take all their booty with them.
46:46If any termite bodies are left behind, they will be collected by scavengers.
46:54The termite soldiers certainly fought hard.
46:58One of their dead still grips a matabele soldier in its jaws,
47:02which it killed before it was itself slaughtered.
47:13Well, it's been a successful raid.
47:16Many of the bigger ones have got mouthfuls of termites.
47:20How they managed to hold all of them in one mouthful, I don't know.
47:24But, obviously, they've got a little way to go now.
47:28And soon, the young ones back in the nest will be getting good food.
47:35The matabele ants will use their plunder to raise more workers.
47:39Ironically, the raid will have the same effect on the termites.
47:43The queen will detect the loss of her soldiers and workers,
47:46and will increase her output of eggs to repopulate the colony.
47:51So there will be just as much food for the matabeles the next time they raid.
48:01The tiny creatures of the undergrowth were the first animals of any kind to colonize the land.
48:08They established the foundations of the land's ecosystems.
48:13Ultimately, they were able to transcend any limitations of their small size
48:19by banding together in huge communities of millions and putting up buildings like this one.
48:25If we and the rest of the backbone animals were to disappear overnight,
48:30the rest of the world would get on pretty well.
48:34But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse.
48:40The soil would lose its fertility. Many of the plants would no longer be pollinated.
48:47Animals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals would have nothing to eat.
48:52And our fields and pastures would be covered with dung and carrion.
48:58These small creatures are within a few inches of our feet wherever we go on land,
49:04but often they're disregarded.
49:08We would do very well to remember them.
49:17This film was made with the support of
49:21the National Wildlife Fund
49:25and the World Wildlife Fund
49:29in collaboration with
49:33the World Wildlife Fund
49:37and the World Wildlife Fund
49:41in collaboration with
49:46World Wildlife Fund
49:50World Wildlife Fund
49:54www.worldwildlifefund.org