These Butt-Tickling Ants Are Endangered Butterfly Bodyguards | IN OUR NATURE
The Serengeti is one of the richest ecosystems on Earth, but surviving out here is not easy.
You've got lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas, crocs, and that's just the stuff with sharp
teeth.
You've also got giant elephants, rhinos, buffalo to worry about too.
Hippos, you definitely don't want to run into the hippos.
They kill more people every year than sharks, which is a fact that continues to blow my
mind.
And that's just the big stuff.
There are countless little bugs who just love the opportunity to take a big old belly full
of your blood, or maybe lay a few parasite eggs under your skin.
What's going on?
Just a swarm of Tsetse flies inside the vehicle.
Nothing to worry about.
Surviving out here is hardcore, but it's easier if you don't go it alone.
Today, we're going to look at some stories where species cooperate to help each other
survive.
If you know what you're looking for, you can find these relationships everywhere.
And we're also going to look at what happens when these alliances get a little out of balance.
Teamwork makes the dream work and it's a good way not to die.
You guys know what makes this show work?
Post-production team?
Yeah, I was going to say, producer Amanda?
I'll acknowledge, my jokes are a big part of it guys.
I know, but it's teamwork.
And what makes teamwork work?
I can't just ask you guys to do stuff for me.
I have to do something for you in return.
You scratch my back.
I'll scratch yours.
You know, I'm not really comfortable with scratching
your back, Trace.
Joe, it's an expression.
Cooperation within species, that's one thing, right?
But what about cooperation between species?
Insects, pollinating flowers, and that kind of thing?
Totally.
That's a classic example, right?
The flower gives the insect some pollen or nectar to eat and the insect helps the flower
make baby flowers.
The technical term for this kind of relationship is called a mutualism.
It's sort of any relationship where both species get a benefit.
And if you go looking for these mutualisms and just about any ecosystem on Earth, you
can get some pretty weird examples.
Acacia trees are an iconic site across the African Savannah.
These fractal, river-like branches and broad, wide canopies with all their leaves clustered
up top, as if they're reaching for the sun, you get to know how they get that shape.
The gardener does it.
One of those snippers that you can get at the hardware store, the really big one.
There's just one person doing that all day long.
I want that job.
It's actually because of this: Nature's hedge trimmers.
Acacia trees look like that because that's how high a giraffe can reach.
Those are the only leafs left.
Once you get up close to an Acacia, you're really going to wonder why anything would
go through the trouble of trying to eat it Out here, we're surrounded by Acacias.
And the one thing I've noticed about them is they are covered in thorns, but the giraffes
are still eating on them like it's not a problem.
They just don't care.
Giraffes are so well adapted with that long tongue and they sort of get that tongue through
the thorns and can still get out the leafs.
In the Serengeti, everything is mean.
Some Acacias are a little meaner than others.
It's not a meal I would take, but we have another type of Acacia over here.
It's still covered in thorns.
This one's really interesting.
This is called a whistling thorn, and it's adapted a really interesting relationship
with ants.
So these are little ant houses.
Basically.
You can see them all around.
Ant houses built right into the tree.
This little Acacia grows these nodules, especially when they're young like this and inside of
those nodules live ants, an entire colony of ants in this tree.
You got ants in your plants?
Dad joke, check.
You only have to change one word in a dad joke to make it a bad joke.
One letter even.
Young plants need all the protection they can get out here with all the browsers.
And this is like a super evolution of protection.
This is just swarming with ants, and this would send a very clear signal.
If you're a giraffe trying to munch on this, I have a feeling you'd pick a different plant.
The minute you disturb the plant, all these ants are going to come rushing out.
I mean, the thorns are a big message, but the ants are a double no for me.
So let me make sure I've got this.
You said mutualism requires bolt species to get a benefit.
The plant gets protection from hungry stuff and the ants get a tree house.
Exactly.
And there's even more going on here.
That's incredible.
So the plant gives them a place to live, And in return, it gets protection.
But there's even more because the plant, if you look down there, provides little nodules
that the cream sugar...
It just came in and took a little drop of nectar off the base.
It's incredible.
Not only does this Acacia give the ants a place to live, it actually feeds them too,
in return for protection.
What's really crazy to me is neither of these organisms is conscious that they're in this
mutualistic relationship, the plants, they don't even have brains.
I know, they just evolved this way, adapting and trying to survive and you get this.
It's crazy.
I love natural selection.
You should get that on a T-shirt.
So anything that tries to take a bite, these ants are going to say, "No thanks, not at
our house".
This is a great example of [crosstalk 00:05:47] both getting a benefit.
When there's so many other things, why would you waste your time?
The last thing you'd want is ants on your tongue.
We'll leave him alone.
We're not hungry.
Go about your ant business.
But why is it called a whistling thorn?
Excellent question.
So it turns out, in addition to being an awesome photographer and filmmaker and safari guide,
Jahawi is also a really talented musician too.
The interesting thing is that when you get really good wind coming through here, through
these little nodules, it acts like a whistle.
So all of a sudden the whole tree starts to whistle.
All those little holes that the ants are coming in and out of are like a little flute.
It's creates a flute.
That's why it's called a whistling thorn.
A thorn!
Guys.
Okay.
It wasn't very windy.
I'm sorry.
I don't control the weather, but it is totally true.
I would never lie to my teammates.
So the Serengeti is also home to one of the most iconic and awesome mutualisms in the
animal kingdom.
Those are these birds.
They're called honeyguides.
And I guess their name kind of tells you what they do.
The bird locates a beehive, but it can't get to the honey on account of all the angry bees.
So it calls to the honey badger in however honey badgers and honeyguides communicate,
I don't know.
I don't speak bird.
Come on over.
I got some food.
I'll be right there.
And the honey badger follows the honeyguide over to the hive.
Somehow, both species know that there are these delicious treats at the end of this
trip.
So the honey badger breaks open the hive, eats its fill of delicious honey.
Then the bird comes in, gets its own meal of wax and larva and honey, all because the
honey badger did the hard work.
Sure, the honey badger don't give a you know what, but it can lend a helping hand.
A helping paw.
Classic mutualism.
Each species is getting a benefit.
Okay, I've got one more.
And this one gets at a big unanswered question underlying all of these mutualistic relationships.
You guys ever wonder how a giraffe scratches its neck?
That is your big unanswered question?
Okay.
Actually, no, that is not the question.
But I'm asking this one before I get to the important one.
How do they scratch their neck?
They don't, they actually have these little birds do it for them.
These cute little flappy flaps, flappy flaps?
I don't think we call birds flappy flaps.
Flappy flaps.
I like it.
These cute little feathery friends are called oxpeckers and their name also tells you what
they do, but they don't just live on oxen.
You'll pretty much find them on the backs of any four-legged, plant-eating animal on
the Savannah.
So they sit on the backs of grazing animals, and they eat ticks and worms and even grow
stuff like scabs and ear wax and those little buggers you get in the corner of your eye.
I mean, that happens to animals too.
Yeah.
Fun fact, they actually will roost in the nether regions of giraffes too.
That is a very fun fact.
The oxpecker gets their food and their yummies and the host gets cleaned off and stays healthy.
And sometimes the oxpeckers will even warn their hosts that predators are nearby.
Hey, there's a lion!
But in like, bird speak.
This is an obvious win-win mutualism, right?, Well, it's actually not always that simple.
And this is the big unanswered question.
What keeps these mutualisms going?
Yeah.
I mean, now that you mention it, it seems like it would be pretty easy for one half
of the relationship to become a freeloader.
Right?
Getting a benefit without having to do any other work.
I was thinking the same thing, like if a butterfly decides to get the nectar, but it doesn't
do any pollinating or if the ants, live rent free inside the Acacia, but they stop protecting
the plant from hungry animals somehow.
Right.
Mutualisms require a balance, but it might, sometimes, be easier to cheat.
Actually when scientists study these oxpeckers, they noticed that when there wasn't enough
bugs and worms and nasty stuff to eat.
They would pack new wounds in the backs of their hosts and drink their blood.
What, like vampire birds?
We're talking about Nosferatu?
But there is a way to keep this in balance.
The host never quite lets the oxpecker get comfortable enough to do its job.
They're always swatting and shaking and flicking their ear so the bird never gets totally comfortable
unless it's doing its good grooming behavior.
So the host keeps the relationship as a mutualism and doesn't let the bird become a parasite.
Right.
And we can totally see these organisms working together, but not all of the mutualisms that
are out there are easy to find.
Some of them are a little more complex, easy ones are like trees, right?
They grow fruits so animals will eat them and distribute seeds.
Yeah.
Something that you can't see, but there's like plants give off oxygen and animals give
off carbon dioxide.
Exactly.
All of these relationships are pretty easy to find, easy to understand, but some mutualisms
aren't so easy to see and they can be way more intricate and complex.
Just off the 101 highway around San Francisco lives this butterfly.
It's beautiful, it's shimmery, flits around flower to flower living his little butterfly
life.
I didn't know something so pretty could be so tiny.
It is a cute little butterfly.
Yeah.
It's called the mission blue.
And if you see one in the wild, you're super lucky.
But what I want to show you today, doesn't really involve looking for the adult butterfly.
It's about the caterpillar.
To find these caterpillars, we had to go to one of only three places in the world where
these butterflies live.
Not actually that hill, it's this other hill over here, San Bruno mountain.
We're talking about a seriously rare habitat.
You couldn't just go there any time.
Mission blue caterpillars, they're only feeding for a few weeks of their year long lifecycle.
So we had to come to this specific mountain, on this specific day, and we would check in
daily to see if volunteers and park rangers had spotted any mission blue caterpillar's
on the three species of plant that they live on for their entire life.
This is like the definition of a micro habitat.
Yes!
And everything had to come together perfectly.
So one day we got this call from our guide, Kira.
She found caterpillars on the lupins, that's the type of plant.
And the next day we're on San Bruno mountain on a caterpillar.
I don't like to be this close to the ground.
I don't think I've ever spent this much time looking at one plant.
Welcome to my world.
I have no idea what I'm looking for, but I feel like I should at least try to look.
We spent the next half day down in the dirt, looking for a very well camouflaged caterpillar
that was like the size of my pinky nail.
And luckily for us, we found some.
These creatures spend almost their entire existence on a single plant.
But when you see an adult mission blue flying around, that part of its life, is maybe two
weeks max.
It's been alive for a year.
It's been alive for a year on the same plant.
So its entire life is wrapped up on what's going on in this one.
Talk about a small world.
So these caterpillars are on these lupins, but they weren't alone.
They have this mutualistic secret weapon.
These guys, these are native California formicine ants.
And if you watch closely, you can see them tapping their little antenna on the caterpillar's
back.
It's like a little massage and it stimulates the caterpillar to squeeze out some sweet
honeydew.
It's a nutritious amino acid cocktail that the ants, they eat it to survive.
I feel like honeydew is a very generous word for what that looks like?
They're squeezing sugar juice out of their butts.
Talk about pour some sugar on me.
Def Leppard was... caterpillars.
Okay, but that is not all that is going on here.
The caterpillar's really only have one job.
Which is to eat and get fat and poop like babies do.
As a dad, I'm very familiar with the concept.
These big fat juicy caterpillars are delicious for predators, not just as a snack, but also
for caterpillar shaped incubators for parasitic wasps.
The wasps will actually lay eggs inside the caterpillar and when they hatch, the wasp
larvae eat their way out.
Amazing.
The caterpillars actually keep the ants around and give them the honeydew because the ants
will fight off the parasitic wasps, thus protecting the caterpillar's and their honeydew goodness.
Okay, let me get this straight.
You've got this caterpillar that lives on this one hillside on this very specific plant
that is friends with ants that are fighting off parasitic wasps that just want to lay
eggs and in its big chunky body?
Yep.
That's it.
Yep.
And the caterpillar then grows up big and strong to become a tiny butterfly and start
the whole cycle again, thanks to the ants.
But it gets even weirder because if you think about it, the caterpillar is a parasite on
the lupin because it's eating the lupin's leaves.
Once the caterpillar pupates and becomes a butterfly, it then switches its relationship
to mutualistic, drinking the nectar and pollinating the plants.
It's super complex and cool, and if any, one thread of this little web disappears, everything
falls apart.
Wow, that is amazing!
Trace, how did you even get this footage?
We have a friend up in the bay area who, this is all he does.
It's incredible stuff.
And to be able to see this interaction and to get it on camera, it's pretty darn rare.
While we were putting this piece together, I kept asking experts and local volunteers
and guides about footage and clips, and it's not really something that people film.
This story that we're telling, these images of that ant tending its caterpillar teammate.
This might be some of the best footage of this interaction in existence, and it's an
important record of this relationship because these butterflies are actually at risk.
I don't want to touch it or disturb it too much because they are endangered.
We have to watch where we step.
I have to watch where all of our body parts are because we don't want to crush them.
One of the things that actually helped make them endangered, not just human activity in
terms of development, but also trampling.
It's one of the ways that you can kill them.
You gotta be really careful.
That legitimately gave me chills.
Did I forget to say that part?
Yeah.
It's endangered too.
And not only does the mission blue have this super complex web of relationships that all
hinge on each other in this one place on the whole planet, but MB2 has been on the endangered
species list since 1976, and it's hanging on by a thread.
In 1998, this unknown fungus attacked the lupins, the one plant that it lives on, and
almost wiped out the whole mission blue species.
It's been super tough.
The mission blue was actually named for San Francisco's Mission District.
Now one of the most popular neighborhoods in the city and we humans have sort of stranded
it on the outskirts of human developments and these little islands of nature.
And now to keep them in existence, we have to step in and take some responsibility for
them and their mutualistic web of partners.
Today, park rangers with the San Mateo Parks Department, the Golden Gate National Recreation
Area, the National Park Service and volunteers all over the place are trying to save the
mission blue.
Every year they plant lupins and in that tiny window of time where the adults are flying
around, but haven't laid eggs yet the Rangers capture them and release them in other parts
of the bay area to spread them around.
It is complicated because you're out, you aren't chasing around butterflies with a butterfly
net.
And then it's a matter of very carefully containing them, putting them on ice, in coolers, and
then driving them, moving them from one island of wild space in the bay area to another because
they can't cross these floss, the city, they need our help.
One of the things we've been focusing on in terms of conservation is getting more of these
different species of lupins planted and growing so that if, and when a meltdown like that
happens, that there's an alternative food source available and that the butterflies
don't palm it, the butterflies track right along with what the plants are doing.
There's some variation throughout the site and that's what you want.
There's more variability, more diversity that builds for a stronger, more resilient butterfly
population.
So by protecting the butterflies, they're protecting the lupins, the ants, it's everything.
Yeah.
Choosing which species to save from extinction isn't just about the species, it's also about
these relationships.
Without the butterflies, the lupins suffer, the ants suffer, and you could argue that
wasps might suffer too, their larvae.
They need to eat.
They're all connected.
When I watch this, I'm thinking, what is this footage going to be in the future?
Is it a time capsule of a future extinct species?
Or is this capturing the efforts that saved the mission blue?
When people start to develop a more intimate connection with the landscape around them,
with these wild spaces, it really reduces any sense of loneliness because if you can
look around and say, oh, I know that that's a lupin, and I know that the butterflies live
here, and I know that that's a California poppy, or I know that that's a golden violet
and there's another rare butterfly that utilizes that.
All of a sudden, you're not just out here walking along the trail, you're out here with
thousands of other things doing their thing and it's a much more exciting place to be.
It's an alive place.
Mutualism and symbiosis is really the lifeblood of billions of individual life forms all over
our planet.
And I could even argue that you, Emily, and you, Joe, are walking examples of mutualism.
Your gut bacteria needs a nice place to live and some food and in exchange, you get help
digesting your lunch.
These relationships, they give me so much more respect for the power of natural selection
and evolution.
I mean, there's no direction or intent, right?
These ants and these caterpillars, they're not conscious that they're helping each other.
Yet nature is still able to weave these beautiful and intricate webs.
Absolutely!
And one of the reasons that we made this series is that we wanted to look at nature more holistically,
right?
It's not just individual animals or specific places, but relationships.
Even conservationists have forgotten this in the past.
Sometimes looking at things, species by species.
And we can't forget these links.
It's not just lions.
It's not just bison.
It's not just humans.
We are all connected.
But you look at a small thing and you're like, well, that must be simple.
But in reality, they're both equally complicated.
It requires the entire mountain for them to exist.
So they're big.
They're the size of the mountain.
And next time we'll be bringing you another story of these intricate webs in nature.
One that connects a pile of elephant dung in Africa to a football stadium in California.
There's bugs.
Hey guys, quick question.
Have you checked out Out Of Our Elements yet?
That's a new series on PBS Terra that explores the molecular stories underpinning our everyday,
natural world.
From the first molecule in the universe to the water that we drink, Out Of Our Elements
shows that if you look closely enough, what may seem familiar can actually be extraordinary.
You can check it out in the link down in the description and be sure to tell them that
I sent you.