Is This A Good Idea? Giant Ant Farms -- With Giant Ants in Them?

February 07, 2011

By Patrick J. Kiger

If you've been reading my blog posts over the years, you may notice that I have a tendency to go off on some odd trains of thought. Right now, for example, I'm tempted to indulge in a tangent about how the concept of thought was perhaps first articulated by Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book Leviathan, when he wrote that "when a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought is not altogether so casual as it seems to be." But Hobbes' "train of imagination," as he dubbed it, now operates at Japanese bullet-train speed, thanks to the availability of the Internet.

This morning, for example, I was reading the New York Times obituary of Milton Levine, 97, whose salient achievement was the invention of the ant farm in 1956. That prompted me to click to the Amazon.com listing for Uncle Milton's Giant Ant Farm, a 10-by-15-inch clear plastic enclosure that allows children to observe ants tunneling through the soil beneath a ersatz farm. The product is advertised as "break-resistant and escape proof." The necessity for those safeguards prompted me to imagine Uncle Milton creating a truly giant ant farm -- that is, one populated by giant ants, of the sort that escaped from a nuclear test site in New Mexico and terrorized humanity in the 1954 movie Them! For a film about tractor-trailer-sized insects, Them! actually got positive reviews, including one from the New York Times, which noted that "the stars, of course, are the horrible hymenoptera. They are enough to make a man welcome the picnic-spoiling variety and give the atomic age back to the Warner Brothers." (For those of you who were absent that day in high-school biology, Hymenoptera is the order that includes wasps, bees, sawflies and other insects in addition to ants.)

This, in turn, led me to thinking: What if we actually could create giant ants? Wouldn't that be totally cool? Imagine giant ant farms the size of Epcot Center, which might be fantastically profitable tourist attractions. Giant ants also would have many practical uses. Ants are incredibly strong: they routinely carry objects larger than their bodies in their jaws. So by implanting electronic devices in the giant ants' bodies to control their movements, as scientists already have done with normal-sized insects, we could create a fleet of powerful biological machines that could till fields, perform construction or demolition work, and haul freight long distances, without burning fossil fuels.

Additionally, most ants are hunter-scavengers that will eat just about anything, so we could use giant ants as a biological regulator to control species that reproduce excessively due to global warming or humans' killing off of their natural predators. Ants also are eaten by humans in many places; in Mexico, for example, the eggs of one ant species are served as a delicacy called escamole. As a food critic for Kitchencaravan.com writes:

They came served in a little ceramic cup, side by side with guacamole, pico de gallo (tomato based salsa), and fresh tortillas. I thought that I would be nervous about eating them, but when I saw what they looked like, I was not intimidated at all. They were soft white ovals, that looked more like rice crispies than eggs. I tried a little bite, and they melted in my mouth. I put them into a taco with the guacamole and the salsa, and they were even better!

The big catch, of course: How would we create ants the size of 18-wheelers (which, according to this FAQ in TheTruckersReport.com, are up to 80 feet (24 meters) in length)? That would necessitate scaling up the common carpenter ant approximately 2,000 times.

Is that even remotely possible? According to this 2007 Science Daily article, scientists believe that what limits insect size is the ability of their respiratory systems to deliver oxygen. Some 300 million years ago, when the Earth's atmosphere was 31 to 35 percent oxygen (compared with 21 percent today), insects were much, much larger than they are today -- dragonflies, for example, possessed wingspans of nearly 2.5 feet. Researchers have subjected insects to hyperoxia -- that is, a high-oxygen environment  -- and seen them grow bigger. But unfortunately, they didn't bulk up to anywhere near sci-fi horror movie scale. The solution, assuming there is one, probably would lie in some form of genetic engineering. Alas, while we've been making giant-ant movies since the mid-1950s, it was only last year that scientists managed to sequence the carpenter-ant genome, so we're a bit behind the curve. Even so, ants' relatively short life span and their ability to live in a laboratory make them ideal subjects for epigenetics (i.e., the study of how genes are expressed in cells), so I'm not giving up hope that we'll eventually discover a growth-limiting gene that can be suppressed or altered to allow ants to grow suitably enormous. Alternatively, we conceivably might be able to graft a gene from another species into the ant genome, in the same way that scientists have created a genetically engineered strain of Atlantic salmon that grows twice as fast as the natural version.

Our breeders of horrifying hymenoptera probably would have to tinker with other aspects of ant anatomy as well. Remember that ants are incredibly light -- exterminators calculate that the average carpenter ant weighs just 0.1 gram (.003 ounces). So if we assume that its weight would increase proportionately to its length, a big-rig-sized version would weigh just 7 ounces (198 grams), roughly as much as the Big Mac you had for lunch yesterday. We'd have to make them considerably heavier, just so they wouldn't be knocked over by the wind.

So what do you think? Are giant ants a good idea? Express your opinion below.

 

Image Credits: Michael Matisse/Photodisc/Thinkstock | George B. Diebold/CORBIS

Comments

[Gary Oak]

It's not possible. The exoskeleton of a giant ant would not support it's own weight, let alone allow it to carry 50 times it weight. There are physical constraints on geometric scaling when dealing with living organisms. I took a biomechanics class last term, and one of the things we covered was just this subject, although we used King Kong as an example. But the same principles apply.

[Ash Ketchup]

For once I agree with Gary. Even if an ant could survive being large enough to carry something like a brick, it would snap open when it tried to pick it up. That's why there are no giant insects. Past a certain size, things have bones or live in an aquatic environment.

[Patrick J. Kiger]

Thanks, it's gratifying to have my proposal taken so seriously! You both raise valid points, assuming that giant ants simply would be scaled-up versions of normal ones. (Evolutionary biologist John B.S. Haldane made a similar point about the limitations of size back in 1926, in this essay http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_haldane.cfm). This tongue-in-cheek essay by a University of Chicago biology professor on the biomechanics and physics of movie monsters (http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/)elaborates upon the limitations of bone density and postural adaptations to cope with scalability in mammals. (In English: King Kong's feet would really, really hurt all the time.)

That said, we're not talking about normal products of evolution here. If we're going to get really SERIOUS about spawning a race of giant ants, we obviously would have to make some additional alterations besides just tinkering with genes. What about a cyborg ant whose biological anatomy was reinforced by an exoskeleton fashioned from super-strong carbon nanotubes? A giant ant's energy requirements also would be daunting, so it might also need an artificial power supply to help it to move.

[J.e. Turcotte]

How will this tackle the insect respiration problem (the part that keeps them as small as they are) and would we want to? Genetically engineered insects with modern respiratory systems would quickly devour everything on earth =P

[C#]

I remember an episode of Bill Nye where they showed if an ant model was enlarged as it grew, at about the size of a hat it collapsed.

[Joe]

No you can't do this but it would be nice to see one if you could

[Douglas Firwood]

You said in the post that ants eat pretty much anything. And since they would be the size of semi-trucks would they eat humans???

[lee]

all I will say is ever see the 1950's movie THEM.

[Uncle Milton Giant Ant Farm]

Thank you for information.