Robyn Williams: And they farm, and do they eat the fungus? And in the nest they grow a fungus on these leaves, so it is actually an agricultural society, so to say, and these trails allow them to do that more efficiently, so they save a lot of energy by using these trails. So first of all these particular ants are leafcutter ants, and as the name implies they go out and they cut leaves and they bring them back to the nest.
Robyn Williams: And the trails presumably are so that you can go out there into the wilderness, find the food and bring it back efficiently. We do see that the larger ones are a little bit less likely to go and carry food, so there might be something in there, but we really do not know. Robyn Williams: You just get born and know? Thomas Bochynek: That's a very good question, I wish I knew. Robyn Williams: How do they know which is which? So the workforce on these highways is split into workers that clean the trail and workers that go and retrieve food from the end of these highways. Robyn Williams: Are they all doing different jobs, these ants, or are they all doing the same thing? Thomas Bochynek: Well, I looked at how they build their trails, so how they organise these 10,000 ant hours' worth of work and how the energetics of using this trail influenced the building and the maintenance of the trail. These are really the greatest infrastructure builders, so that's why we went and looked at them. So the colonies are 9 million individuals strong.
Thomas Bochynek: So the reason why these ants piqued my interest is that they built the most excessively large trail. Thomas Bochynek: Well, I have to say I picked my research area in a way that allowed me to travel a bit, so I'm going to Central America to do my experiments, to Panama there… Robyn Williams: Which part of the terrain here in Victoria have you been looking at? Robyn Williams: Now I can understand why you've come to the ant capital of the universe, namely Australia, rather than Germany where you come from where there are fewer ants. It takes about 10,000 ant hours' worth of work, and that needs to be organised somehow. And it implies that they're very well organised together. Robyn Williams: That's extraordinary, I had no idea they were that huge. And they lead to harvesting sites or connect nests and really fulfil all the jobs that the human infrastructure does as well. So these ant highways can be up to 200 metres long and colonies can build up to several kilometres of these trails for a given colony in a given year. And they are about the same dimensions as the human highways can be.
So they are very clear of any debris so that transport can happen very quickly on these trails. Thomas Bochynek: Well, these highways, they're very much like the highways that we humans build. He's our PhD for this week.Īnts, like humans, build highways. Their powerful jaws deal damage in an area of effect.Robyn Williams: Tom Bochynek comes from Cologne in Germany, via Townsville, and he's now at Monash studying ants. They are a nomadic species of ant not to be trifled with.
The red colony has driver ants with them. These large imposing ants taunt nearby ants into attacking them. The green colony has come with some leaf cutter ants. We have paid careful attention to detail with the way the ants move and spread out which gives them a real insect-like feel.įinally there is a shot from the jungle tile set a bit more up close to the action. This is on the surface and two colonies have locked horns with one another. In the games campaign you will be able to form a colony with multiple species of ant each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Here we can see leaf cutter, driver, black and trap jaw ants. Second is a gameplay shot with the user interface visible. Blank ants are a fairly weak ant in our game but they can be produced in large numbers cheaply. The worker is carrying an egg from the queen into the nursery where it will hatch into a black ant in this case. They are on the main game website at but also here.įirst is a nursery with the queen in the background. I shall go over them and explain what they are. I took some time today to add a few screen shots to the game website.