Argentine Invasion
From a suburban sidewalk in southern California, Jad and Robert witness the carnage of a gruesome turf war. Though the tiny warriors doing battle clock in at just a fraction of an inch, they have evolved a surprising, successful, and rather unsettling strategy of ironclad loyalty, absolute intolerance, and brutal violence.
- Duration
- 19m
- Broadcast on
- 30 Jul 2012
- Audio Format
- other
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From a suburban sidewalk in southern California, Jad and Robert witness the carnage of a gruesome turf war. Though the tiny warriors doing battle clock in at just a fraction of an inch, they have evolved a surprising, successful, and rather unsettling strategy of ironclad loyalty, absolute intolerance, and brutal violence.
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Wait, wait, you're listening to RadioLab. RadioLab. Shorts from WNYC and NPR. Look, it's a gate in community with electric gates. Electric gates. Hey, I'm Jada Boomeron. I'm Robert Crowwich. This is RadioLab. The podcast, and today, it's nice out here. We're on a road trip in Escondido, California, which is close to San Diego. Regular suburban neighborhoods. Sprinklers, lawns. Nice houses. Pretty ordinary. Except-- This might be him. You think that's him? For David Hallway. Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you? David is an ecologist and an evolutionary biologist from UC San Diego. So yeah, you can just park-- And when we saw him, he was standing in the street. Oh, he's got the things. He's got the things. Holding what looked like some kind of hookup pipe. When we got out of the car, he walked us over to the side of the road near a driveway and pointed down. You can see Argentinans in the along the curb here. There's a little guy here. Yeah. That's Argentin right there. That is the Argentinans. So I'm just going to collect some Argentinans from the side of this sidewalk. You are scraping the surface of the dirt with your fingers. There's a little mast here. As soon as he scrapes about 100 ants, just appear and start running in every direction. Yeah, so what we're seeing are just small numbers of workers that were probably in the leaf litter at the surface. Doesn't seem so small though. It looks like they're everywhere. This is tiny. This is tiny. There's a lot of them. First hundreds, then thousands of them here. You are wrecking up their day.
Transcription truncated.
From a suburban sidewalk in southern California, Jad and Robert witness the carnage of a gruesome turf war. Though the tiny warriors doing battle clock in at just a fraction of an inch, they have evolved a surprising, successful, and rather unsettling strategy of ironclad loyalty, absolute intolerance, and brutal violence.