Mar 15, 2017
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
ROBERT KRULWICH: Are we—are we ready?
JAD ABUMRAD: I think we are. Maybe ...
ROBERT: You have to get in closer.
JAD: Yeah, yeah.
IAN FRAZIER: Oh, okay.
JAD: Oh, we should do the thing. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab.
SOREN WHEELER: Could you just tell us who you are?
IAN FRAZIER: Well, I don't believe I'm going to reveal that.
ROBERT: Well, it'll be revealed in time. This is a Radiolab about wars and games.
JAD: War games!
ROBERT: War games, exactly.
JAD: Great movie.
ROBERT: Yeah remember there was a moment in that movie where a certain game broke the computer?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: Yes, let's take a look at just—you know, let's begin with that game. You don't have to know, you listeners, what game we're talking about. That will become clear, unless you happen to be in, oh I don't know, Irkutsk. But thereby lies a tale.
JAD: Yeah. And first we're gonna start with this international man of mystery.
ROBERT: Yes.
JAD: Who are you really?
IAN FRAZIER: No, I'm Ian Frazier.
ROBERT: Ian is a writer for the New Yorker magazine. And we had Ian come to visit us because we were working together on a show about games.
JAD: And in that show, we ended up talking about ...
ROBERT: Baseball, football, basketball, checkers, chess. But Ian says there was a game that we totally ignored.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tic-tac-toe! tic-tac-toe! tic-tac-toe! tic-tac-toe! tic-tac-toe!]
IAN FRAZIER: Yeah, tic-tac-toe.
ROBERT: All right, so what's the deal with you and tic-tac-toe? I mean, you learned it at age five, I'm assuming, like everybody?
IAN FRAZIER: Exactly like everybody else. Of course.
ROBERT: Okay.
IAN FRAZIER: But as you get older, it's one of the first levels of sophistication that you reach, that you know how to get a draw in every tic-tac-toe game. And you learn that at about age, maybe six. And after that it's just formality. It's ...
JAD: It's sort of a developmental milestone, gaming-wise.
IAN FRAZIER: It is, it is. But when you realize ...
ROBERT: You're allowed to be sophisticatedly bored by the game.
IAN FRAZIER: Right, and then you go, "Oh yes, I'm very good at that."
ROBERT: So you— you reached the mature age of six and achieved a certain amount of tic-tac-toe sophistication.
IAN FRAZIER: I would say I was the grandmaster.
JAD: But the problem is, when you get to that grandmaster point, everybody else is a grandmaster, too. So everything is a draw and the game basically dies.
IAN FRAZIER: Right.
ROBERT: And so, like the rest of us, Ian stopped playing tic-tac-toe. But then, when he was Well, into his middle life, he ran into something that made him think, "Well, maybe tic-tac-toe can still do something for me."
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tic-tac-toe! Tic-tac-toe!]
IAN FRAZIER: Right, right.
JAD: What happened?
IAN FRAZIER: Well, I went to Russia and I traveled all over and I was in Chukotka, which is the part of the Russian Far East, opposite Alaska. It's not a great distance, but it's an enormous distance in terms of culture. And at that time, my Russian language was very weak and I was staying with this— a young couple who had a six year old son named "Igor." And because of the level of my language, I got along very Well, with preschool children and elementary school teachers. And he actually could speak some English. He had like about eight or ten words and the first thing Igor said to me was, "How do you do?"
JAD & ROBERT: [laugh]
IAN FRAZIER: And he just incredibly cute and a nice kid. And so we were just hanging out and I was able to talk to him.
ROBERT: And then, on a whim, really, he said ...
IAN FRAZIER: I said, "Well, let's— let's play tic-tac-toe." And I ...
JAD: How'd you get that idea?
ROBERT: Yeah.
IAN FRAZIER: Because it was just something to do with the kid. I don't even remember how we got that idea. But we were just sitting around and I explain the game to him and he had never heard of it.
JAD: Really?
IAN FRAZIER: He had no idea what it was.
JAD: Wow.
IAN FRAZIER: And I just showed him by drawing, how you do this, X's and O's. And he picked it up, I mean, he understood what it was. And then we started playing and he, very quickly, got the principle, but I, to be honest, was clobbering him.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: With you was there a certain kind of joy?
IAN FRAZIER: Just like, uh uh. That's not where the O goes. And then, there's three X's, pal. You're outta here. And he would be quite crushed, like, "Oh, no! I lost again!"
JAD & ROBERT: [laugh]
IAN FRAZIER: But it's really fun to play tic-tac-toe with someone who doesn't know how because you're just walkin' all over them and just putting X's and O's and just ...
ROBERT: Is this fair? I mean, is this something a mature ...
IAN FRAZIER: It was— okay, okay. Technically, it was not fair. So I stayed with them before we made this trip into the tundra. And we went out into the tundra. We were there for a week or ten days or something. And then I came back and stayed with them again. I do not believe he had been playing tic-tac-toe in my absence, but somehow he had gotten better.
ROBERT: Hmmm.
JAD: [laughs]
IAN FRAZIER: And so, we had very, very ordinary and frustrating games, from my point of view, as we came back. I didn't win as readily at all. I later checked, and listeners may contradict me, but as far as I know, this game is unknown in Russia. And I've asked Russian friends ...
JAD: Unknown completely?
IAN FRAZIER: Unknown completely.
JAD: Six years old and up?
IAN FRAZIER: And up?
ROBERT: How? How wide is the shadow of non-tic-tac-toe-dom? I mean ...
JAD: It just seems ...
ROBERT: I mean you established that it's not in Eastern Russia. Maybe, maybe you could go to Japan and they wouldn't know how to play it. I mean, I don't know.
IAN FRAZIER: Well, it would be interesting just to find out where tic-tac-toe is elsewhere.
JAD: And where it isn't.
ROBERT: Yeah.
IAN FRAZIER: Not that I'm gonna do it myself.
ROBERT: No, no, no.
JAD: This could be one of these— this could be one of these crowd-sourcing opportunities.
IAN FRAZIER: What is that?
JAD: Well, we could ask people to help map it for us. ‘Cause what if there are like whole corners of the globe that are virginal territory?
ROBERT: So you could go to playgrounds and you could like walk in ...
JAD: And say, "Hey kids!"
ROBERT: Wish them ...
JAD: "Come here!"
ROBERT: So! We decided to test this proposition.
JAD: After we talked to Ian, we put a call on our facebook page asking for people to help us make a map. And we got responses!
[CALLER: Hello. I am coming to you from Gwangju, South Korea.]
JAD: Actually, lots.
[CALLER: The north of Iran, near the Caspian Sea.]
[CALLER: Croatia.]
[CALLER: Poznan, Poland.]
[CALLER: Istanbul, Turkey.]
[CALLER: Christchurch, New Zealand.]
[CALLER: The Philippines!]
[CALLER: I'm here in Seattle, Washington.]
[CALLER: Costa Rica.]
[CALLER: The Netherlands.]
[CALLER: Argentina.]
[CALLER: Namibia.]
[CALLER: Japan.]
[CALLER: Dublin, Ireland.]
[CALLER: The outskirts of Aarhus in Denmark.]
[CALLER: It's a typically hot day in Dubai and ...]
JAD: Instructions were pretty simple. Grab a cellphone, whatever you've got that can record, go out ...
[CALLER: Now, let's get on with our business.]
JAD: And take a survey.
[CALLER: So I think we found our first victim.]
[CALLER: Here with have some nice people walking by.]
[CALLER: [foreign language]]
[CALLER: [foreign language]]
[CALLER: Hello sir, have you heard of ...]
[CALLER: [foreign language]]
[CALLER: [foreign language]]
[CALLER: ...a game called tic-tac-toe?]
[CALLER: [foreign language]]
[CALLER: Who here has ever heard of the game tic-tac-toe?]
[CALLER: tic-tac-toe.]
[CALLER: tic-tac-toe.]
JAD: So here are the results, which may surprise you. We'll go country by country. Everybody interviewed a lot of people. So what you will here is representative. We'll start with Japan.
[CALLER: Do you know tic-tac-toe?]
[INTERVIEWEE: tic-tac-toe?]
[CALLER: Know this game?]
[ INTERVIEWEE: No.]
[CALLER: No?]
JAD: Japan, no.
[INTERVIEWEE: No, no.]
JAD: Argentina, no.
[CALLER: She says, "No!"]
[INTERVIEWEE: No.]
[CALLER: But you're ...]
JAD: Ireland, no.
[CALLER: Do you know what it is, sir?]
[INTERVIEWEE: No.]
[CALLER: No one knows how to play tic-tac-toe.]
JAD: Namibia?
[INTERVIEWEE: Yes sir?]
JAD: No.
[INTERVIEWEE: No.]
JAD: Switzerland, no.
[CALLER: tic-tac-toe?]
JAD: Turkey?
[INTERVIEWEE: No.]
JAD: Croatia?
[INTERVIEWEE: No.]
JAD: New Zealand?
[INTERVIEWEE: tic-tac-toe? Is it a dance?]
[CALLER: No, it's a game. So you've never played tic-tac-toe?]
[INTERVIEWEE: No! I haven't!]
JAD: Iran?
[CALLER: And the answer is ...no.]
JAD: So, amazingly it seemed like huge chunks of the globe do not know tic-tac-toe.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Booya!]
JAD: So a tic-tac-toe hustler could clean up!
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Cha-ching!]
JAD: Or forget hustling, maybe you just wanna believe there are still some blank spots left on the globe. Well, here you are!
ROBERT: Yes!
JAD: But just to be safe, we asked everybody to go out, not just with their cellphones, but with a pen and a paper, so that when someone says "no," they could draw them the grid. Just to be certain.
[CALLER: Let me show you.]
[CALLER: We have X's and we have O's. And if you ...]
[INTERVIEWEE: X?]
[CALLER: Like this, this, or this.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Ah.]
[CALLER: So if I'm X and then ...]
[INTERVIEWEE: Mmm hmm.]
[CALLER: And then it's your turn.]
[CALLER: You try to stop me ...]
[CALLER: And you have to get three in a row.]
JAD: And this is when the answers changed.
[CALLER: So I'm an O. So X.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Ah!]
[CALLER: An X.]
[INTERVIEWEE: [speaks in foreign language]]
[CALLER: Yeah, yeah.]
[INTERVIEWEE: [speaks in foreign language]]
[INTERVIEWEE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Oh yeah, I know that. Okay.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Ohhhh.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Haha!]
JAD: Once people saw the grid with the X's and O's, they were like, "Oh yeah, we know that game. Of course! We just don't call it tic-tac-toe!"
[CALLER: The game has a different name in Turkish?]
[INTERVIEWEE: Yes.]
JAD: In Turkish, it's called ...
[INTERVIEWEE: X, O, X]
JAD: X, O, X. In Serbia ...
[INTERVIEWEE: Eeks Ox.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Eeks Ox.]
[INTERVIEWEE: Eeks Ox.]
[CALLER: Como se llama ...pero, what's the name in Peru?]
[INTERVIEWEE: Mi chi.]
JAD: In Peru it's mi chi. In South Korea ...]
[CALLER: What do you call it?]
[INTERVIEWEE: On mo, on mo, on mo.]
[CALLER: On wo?]
[INTERVIEWEE: On mo!]
JAD: And in England ...
[CALLER: Which— what is it called?]
[INTERVIEWEE: Dots and crosses.]
[CALLER: Knots and crosses.]
JAD: Knots and crosses.
[CALLER: ...crosses?]
[INTERVIEWEE: Yeah, yeah.]
JAD: Which is also what they call it in Ireland. And ...
[INTERVIEWEE: We call it knots and crosses.]
JAD: New Zealand. Now in Switzerland ...
[INTERVIEWEE: Morpion, it's known in the French language.]
JAD: That is what they call it. In Polish ...
[INTERVIEWEE: w kółko i krzyżyk.]
JAD: It's called w kółko i krzyżyk.
[CALLER: Does everybody in Poland know how to play this? Yeah?]
JAD: And to round things out, in Argentina they call it ...
[INTERVIEWEE: Ta-ta-ti]
JAD: In the Netherlands they call it ...
[INTERVIEWEE: boter-kaas-en-eieren.]
JAD: Iran.
[INTERVIEWEE: No hume]
JAD: Croatia.
[INTERVIEWEE: Križić kružić.]
JAD: And in Costa Rica ...
[INTERVIEWEE: Gato.]
JAD: Gato.
[CALLER: Let's take a little break and look at our notes. See where we stand so far.]
ROBERT: Jad, I'm beginning to get this feeling.
[CALLER: Seven people I interviewed, seven knew it.]
ROBERT: That our dreams of glory ...
[CALLER: They all know what tic-tac-toe is.]
ROBERT: That we were gonna— you know, we were gonna be the Genghis Khans of tic-tac-toe ...
JAD: It just may not be supported by the data. But we got Russia, right?
[PHONE DIALING]
ROBERT: Well, uh ...
[SOREN WHEELER: Hi, Ian Frazier? Hi, this is Soren, I work with Robert ...]
ROBERT: I don't know if we have Russia, actually, because as we were conducting our international tic-tac-toe survey, I got a note from Ian. It was a— it looked like an "uh oh" note, and he told me that shortly after we talked to him that first time ...
[IAN FRAZIER: It was maybe even the same day.]
ROBERT: He was at a party and there were some Russian.
[IAN FRAZIER: And I just thought, "Okay, let me just make sure about this." And I asked and they said, "Yes, of course there's tic-tac-toe." And I said, "Wow! Everybody told me that this—" And they said, "Yeah, sure everybody knows it." A friend even told me the name of it, it's kruzky nolsky, which is like crosses and zeros. And he said, "Yeah, it's well-known." And the entire thing fell to the ground at that point. So, sorry! I don't— I based this on insufficient data and it's completely wrong, it's like completely wrong, because I did encounter, you know, some people who didn't know, and this one kid, who I really, I can promise you, I just beat the pants off of in tic-tac-toe. He had no idea. But that was my —the limit of my conquest.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tic-tac-toe. We got three in a row. You, me and the tic-tac-toe. We got three in a row and what could more better. tic-tac-toe.]
ROBERT: Ian Frazier is the author of Travels in Siberia and whole bunch of wonderful books. For more information, go to our website, Radiolab.org.
JAD: Oh, and before we go, thank you, thank you, thank you to our international tic-tac-toe surveyors.
[CALLER: Ahmed Tadir.]
[CALLER: Suresh Detalla.]
[CALLER: Chris Rones.]
[CALLER: Sedar J'Adimi.]
[CALLER: Chris Venice.]
[CALLER: Salomon Ruskis.]
[CALLER: Christa Hans.]
[CALLER: Tarek Yasin.]
[CALLER: My name is Mara.]
[CALLER: Chelsea Unruh.]
[CALLER: Pavek Hawel.]
[CALLER: This is Mara.]
[CALLER: This is Moria.]
[CALLER: And this is Spondar.]
[CALLER: This is Spanky.]
[CALLER: Nick Glastenbury.]
[CALLER: My name is Jimena.]
[CALLER: Dzimon.]
[CALLER: My name is Attila Lukzha.]
[CALLER: Mr. Djimo.]
[CALLER: And my name is Pedramerfy.]
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: Next up ...
ROBERT: Talk about it Jad. Talk about these next characters that are coming up.
JAD: Oh. Well, you've got Wolverine, you've got Raven, who can shape shift. Storm, who can control the weather.
ROBERT: You can change your shape at will, you can bounce off buildings, you can fly, you can skate, you can turn everybody into frozen water.
JAD: And then someone calls you a freakin' doll.
ROBERT: They call you a doll.
JAD: Come on.
ROBERT: Will that stand?
JAD: No!
ROBERT: Stick around.
JAD: Maybe.
ROBERT: Because ...
JAD: We're not sure.
ROBERT: There's a battle coming on. Doll or superhero, you decide!
[LISTENER: Hi, this is Nele from Hamburg, Germany. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Okay, welcome back, this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: And up next.
ROBERT: This is a story about what goes where and what doesn't go there and what should go there, if you were only smarter about it.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Ike Sriskandarajah, are you around?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah, that's what I want to talk about.
JAD: Set it up for us, Ike.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, let's start back in 1993.
ROBERT: Okay.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: With two customs attorneys.
SHERRY SINGER: I'm Sherry Singer.
INDI SINGH: My name is Indi Singh.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Singer and Singh.
JAD: Singer and Singh!
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And one day, the two of them are looking at this customs book called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.
JAD: What was it called again? The Harmon what?
INDI SINGH & SHERRY TOGEHTER: Harmonized Tariff Schedule.
JAD: Harmonized Tariff Schedule. You almost harmonized at the Harmonized Tariff thing.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: It's this huge book chock full of customs classifications.
INDI SINGH: Meat products, milk products, vegetables.
JAD: It's got everything.
SHERRY SINGER: Literally thousands of provisions.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: So they're flipping through this big book. And what they notice that day is that in this book were the following words:
SHERRY SINGER: "Representing only human beings."
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: They saw this fateful phrase right next to the word "doll".
INDI SINGH: Under the Harmonized, a doll was something that represented only a human being.
JAD: A doll represented a human being.
INDI SINGH: Only a human.
JAD: Only a human being.
INDI SINGH: Yeah. It could not be any other creature but a human being.
JAD: So Barbie is a doll.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Right, but here's the thing. In this big book, right next to dolls is this whole other category called "Toys."
SHERRY SINGER: Toys.
JAD: Toys.
INDI SINGH: Which covers things like monsters, robots, angels ...
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Basically anything that isn't only representing a human.
JAD: So the dolls are human and the toys are not human.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah. And where it gets weird is that these two categories were being taxed differently.
ROBERT: How? How differently?
SHERRY SINGER: Twelve percent for dolls and 6.8 percent for toys.
JAD: Really? So getting a Barbie doll into the country would be more expensive than like importing a Transformer or something?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah.
JAD: Why?
SHERRY SINGER: I assume it was because there was a domestic industry.
ROBERT: A domestic doll industry.
SHERRY SINGER: That wanted and needed protection.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Do you think there was a powerful doll lobby?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Anyhow, you've got these two categories, you've got these two ladies. And they have a client called Marvel Comics.
ROBERT: Marvel Comics. This is the home of men with capes.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: And superpowers.
JAD: Yes!
ROBERT: And beautiful boots.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Tights.
ROBERT: Marvel, yes.
JAD: What about Marvel?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, Marvel Comics has this universe of action figures ...
JAD: Yeah.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Coming into our ports as dolls.
JAD: Wait. All their action figures are being classified as dolls?
SHERRY SINGER: Everything was a doll!
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah.
INDI SINGH: A 12 percent rate of duty.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And Sherry and Indi realized that there's a huge opportunity here if they can convince the government to remove the Marvel Action Heroes from the human-y barbie doll category and push them into the robot, demon-y toy category, they could save a huge amount of money.
INDI SINGH: We saw dollars.
ROBERT: Tens of thousands, of maybe hundreds of dollars.
JAD: Well, though, how much?
ROBERT: Thousands of dollars!
INDI SINGH: [laughs]
JAD: Jeez.
ROBERT: 50, a million dollars?
SHERRY SINGER: and then some.
ROBERT: More than a million dollars?
JAD: Because they wouldn't be taxed as high.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: This about more than business. This is about more than Saturday morning cartoons. This is about what it means to be a human.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: What. What do you mean?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, think about it. They have to convince government officials that under US law, these characters are not considered human.
ROBERT: Oh. That's totally eerie.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: So Sherry and Indi headed to customs.
SHERRY SINGER: Customs Headquarters.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: In DC, with a giant bag full of superheroes.
SHERRY SINGER: We actually went down there. We had a meeting, we brought samples of all of the items and um ...
JAD: Of action figures, you mean?
SHERRY SINGER: We had 60 or 80 figures.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And one by one ...
SHERRY SINGER: We tried to convince them that these figures ...
INDI SINGH: ... do not represent a human being.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And believe it or not, this meeting ended up in a series of court cases that went on for 10 years.
JAD: Ten years?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Because where it got really complicated and interesting is when they got to Marvel's crown jewel: The X-Men.
INDI SINGH: We didn't even really read the stories. Sherry and I were not familiar with comic books.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, they should have, because it's a great story. I mean, the story of X-Men is kinda about the next phase of human evolution. Regular parents having regular kids but some of these kids, around their awkward teen years, start to develop these strange mutant powers.
JAD: So the story is humans who mutate.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah, Well, that's what makes this so legally tricky. I mean, are these characters still human or have they evolved somehow out of humanness, into something entirely different?
ROBERT: Now the government says that all of the imported action figures, they are representations of human beings if they have things like a head ...
INDI SINGH: Right.
ROBERT: ... a mouth, eyes, nose, hair, arms, torso, breasts, muscles. If you look at any of these guys, Cyclops, he has all the basic elements that are the government's definition of a human being. And what do you say?
SHERRY SINGER: Well ...
INDI SINGH: Um.
JAD: Eventually, to make their point, Sherry and Indi pulled out a blue furry guy that X-Men fans might know as Beast.
SHERRY SINGER: We can look at Beast.
ROBERT: This is Beast.
SHERRY SINGER: This is one that we won early on.
JAD: Well, he's called Beast.
SHERRY SINGER: Even customs agreed ...
INDI SINGH: But he has a head, he has a head, he has two arms, he has two legs ...
ROBERT: Yes.
JAD: He does have those.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: He wears glasses.
INDI SINGH: ...In response to Robert's comment.
JAD: But you know, Beast, in the X-Men story line, he's a pretty like sophisticated guy. He's a thoughtful intellectual, am I right, Ike?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah, he'd be the first X-Men to quote Shakespeare to you.
ROBERT: He wears glasses!
JAD: He quoted Shakespeare!
ROBERT: He quotes Shakespeare!
JAD: He quotes Shakespeare!
[ARCHIVE CLIP: he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And men in England now-a-bed shall will count their manhoods cheap!]
ROBERT: So don't you think that would puts him somewhere down the human sort of bell curve?
INDI SINGH: Well, in this case, our argument would be, human beings do not have blue skin.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: the judge agreed.
INDI SINGH: And it doesn't resemble a human being!
SHERRY SINGER: And they don't have horns ...
JAD: That's a pretty safe argument.
ROBERT: There are people— there are human beings of blueish skin, you should know.
JOE LIEBMAN: Beast is harder to fit into the mold of what we customarily know as human.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: That's Joe Liebman, he worked on the case for the government side.
JOE LIEBMAN: He has aspects that perhaps are closer to the monster.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: But it gets trickier. Take the most popular X-Man.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Who's that?]
ROBERT: Wolverine!
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Wolverine!
JOE LIEBMAN: He's got muscular arms and legs.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: He puts on a coat and a flannel shirt and he's a logger.
JOE LIEBMAN: Sure.
INDI SINGH: But the eyes they just didn't look human. And that's what our basic argument ...
SHERRY SINGER: And the claws also.
INDI SINGH: And the claws.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Metal claws.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN: Razor-like, adamantium claws.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And in the story, a mad scientist implanted them in his arms under his skin.
SHERRY SINGER: Right.
JAD: But that just means he's a guy who had a little augmentation.
SHERRY SINGER: No.
JOE LIEBMAN: Well, he's developed something we don't know to actually exist that does not mean ...
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: ... that it might not exist in future humans.
JOE LIEBMAN: In a world that we have not yet seen.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Joe's basic point is, "Don't rule it out." He pointed to this runner, Oscar Pistorius.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, NEWS: They call him the Blade Runner. The world's fastest man on no legs.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: The double amputee runner from South Africa who wears prosthetic legs that some people claim actually increase his speed.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, NEWS: Saying his prosthetic legs had more spring than human legs.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And some people say he should be disqualified from competing against able-bodied humans.
[NEWS CLIP: The body that governs track and field banned him from competition.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: But forget about augmentation. What if we're just talking mutation. I mean, as a human, we have about 20,000 genes.
ROBERT: And if one of them just gives you claws, that doesn't mean that the other 19,999 genes aren't keeping you pretty much in the human classification.
INDI SINGH: I studied— My undergraduate degree is in microbiology and biochemistry.
ROBERT: Oh.
JAD: Huh.
INDI SINGH: So I know we have mutations going on in our body constantly.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: Constantly.
JAD: So we're all mutants.
INDI SINGH: But in common language and in Science Fiction, when you use the word "mutant" ...
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: She says you mean something or someone that's ...
INDI SINGH: Disfigured ...
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Alien. That's no longer like us. So colloquially, if Marvel calls the X-Men "mutants", then ...
INDI SINGH: They are not human.
ROBERT: On the Wolverine case, did you win or lose?
INDI SINGH: We won.
SHERRY SINGER: We won.
JAD: It's all— How do you feel about this, Ike?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: I— I don't know. I'm kind of seeing red.
JAD: [laughs]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: No but seriously! Here's the thing, in the X-Men universe, all the X-Men are trying to do is fit into our world.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: I don't want to hurt you, Eric. I never did.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: To feel like a human being.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: It's the truth.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Marvel Comics has created this world where mutants want to be treated like humans and the government is persecuting them as monsters. But in the real world, it's exactly the opposite. You got Marvel saying, "They're monsters." And you've got the government saying, "No, let them be human!"
BRIAN SINGER: In the X-Men universe, humans are very often out to get the mutants. They're dismissive of the mutants, fearful of the mutants, liquidating them, experimenting on them.
ROBERT: First of all, tell us who you are.
BRIAN SINGER: I am Brian Singer. I'm a filmmaker.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Brian directed a bunch of the X-Men movies.
BRIAN SINGER: X-Men 1, X-Men 2, X-Men United.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And he says all the movies, at their heart, are parables about living in a world where you don't fit. Where you're not the right category. In fact, the first X-Men he directed, US government fears mutants so much that this US Senator puts forth legislation called the "Mutant Registration Act."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Mutants are very real. And they are among us. We must know who they are and above all, we must know what they can do.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: That Us-Them conflict is key to the entire saga.
BRIAN SINGER: Well, yeah, it's no coincidence that it was born during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
ROBERT: Oh so this is like—so this is modeled then on the Civil—on a moment in world history where people were trying to figure out how to either get along or not get along.
BRIAN SINGER: Yeah, absolutely.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: This tension plays out within the mutants themselves, where you have two groups. The X-Men ...
BRIAN SINGER: Who chose to take the stance to defend a world that hates and fears them.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Don't give up on them, Eric.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And then you've got this other group of mutants led by Magneto.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN MOVIE: What would you have me do, Charles?]
BRIAN SINGER: And he doesn't have faith that humanity's every going to embrace mutants.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN MOVIE: We are the future, Charles, not them. They'll no longer matter.]
BRIAN SINGER: He saw that what happens when you're different is that you get rounded up ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN MOVIE: Experimented on, eliminated.]
BRIAN SINGER: And you're gassed.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: It's interesting to hear you describe that, because when I walked out of the most recent movie, I felt such a strong, maybe a stronger connection to Magneto after you saw what he went through.]
BRIAN SINGER: Yeah, you see the imminent victimization of him and you root for him because he's ultimately facing a monster.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And when he was making these movies, he had that monster of intolerance and prejudice on his mind and it was actually pretty personal to him.
BRIAN SINGER: There's a photo album my family has and it starts in the 20s. And I was looking through it and I recognized the lineage and then there were a few pages of just these portraits of different people, I didn't know who they were. And I said to my dad, "Who are these people?" And my dad goes, "They're all gone. They're the ones that are gone from Poland. They're just all gone. They're erased. There's no records, there's no property, there's no nothing."
ROBERT: So he doesn't even know their names.
BRIAN SINGER: No, we just know that they were people that were part of the neighborhood and the family in the 30s that never left Poland like my grandparents did and disappeared.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: I know this sounds pretty heavy for a comic book, but over the years, the X-Men have been a stand-in for, Well, firs the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, and most recent, the story works as an allegory for Gay Rights.
BRIAN SINGER: In fact, in X-Men 2, we actually had a coming out scene.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: In the scene, this kid Bobby Drake, he's hiding some of the X-Men in his parents' house.
BRIAN SINGER: And then his parents come home and find him with these strangers.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Aren't you supposed to be at school?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Bobby, who is this guy?]
BRIAN SINGER: And he is forced, basically, to show his parents that he's a mutant.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: There's something I need to tell you.]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Everyone takes a seat in the living room and Bobby, using his special mutant powers ...
BRIAN SINGER: He freezes a little cup of coffee.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: [coffee cup freezing]]
BRIAN SINGER: And the parents react in panic.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Bobby ...]
BRIAN SINGER: And the mother says ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Have you tried not being a mutant?]
ROBERT: Really?
BRIAN SINGER: Like it's a choice.
JAD: Mmm, it is ...
ROBERT: We have to get to— we have to find like what the ultimate legal disposition of this case was.
JAD: Yeah, so did they— did they in the end say these characters were human? Or did they perpetuate this retail bigotry, I can say that they were non-humans?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: You guys really want to know?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: We have to know, we have to finish the story.
JAD: Yeah come on, yeah exactly, tell us.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Non-humans.
JAD: Aw! Seriously?
ROBERT: Really?
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Eventually, the judge ruled that all Marvel heroes, not just the X-Men, are not human.
JAD: Mmm, so Sherry and Indi won.
SHERRY SINGER: We're not civil rights attorneys ...
INDI SINGH & JAD: [laughs]
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: So when you're having your nice meal after the case ends, you don't feel at all that you've just robbed humanity from a whole population?
JAD: [laughs]
SHERRY SINGER: [laughs] No we had absolutely no guilt at all, like none.
JAD: Wow, Well, thank you Ike.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: You're welcome, Jad.
ROBERT: That would be Ike Sriskandarajah, our reporter on this story. We also had a fine producer.
JAD: Matthew Kielty.
JAD & ROBERT: Thank you, Matt.
ROBERT: And coming up, we are coming up to perhaps the most warlike group that I've ever met. This is a very successful team of warriors who've taken over arguably the largest patch of earth that any conqueror has ever conquered. And that's coming up right after this.
[LISTENER: This is Timothy Franzig calling from Stillwater, Minnesota. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Rober Krulwich. This hour we're talking about war and games and borders, in this case
JAD: Borders, yeah. In this next segment ...
JAD: It's nice out here!
ROBERT: We're on a road trip in Escondido, California.
JAD: Which is close to San Diego.
ROBERT: Regular suburban neighborhood.
JAD: Sprinklers. Lawns.
ROBERT: Nice houses.
JAD: Pretty ordinary. Except ...
JAD: This might be him. Do you think that's him?
ROBERT: For David Holway.
DAVID HOLWAY: Hey, how's it going?
ROBERT: Good, how are you?
ROBERT: David is an ecologist and an evolutionary biologist from UC-San Diego.
DAVID HOLWAY: So, yeah, you can just park.
ROBERT: And when we saw him, he was standing in the street.
JAD: Oh, he's got the things! He's got the things!
JAD: Holding what looked like some kind of ...
JAD: Nice!
JAD: ... hookah pipe. When we got out of the car, he walked us over to the side of the road near a driveway and pointed down.
DAVID HOLWAY: You can see Argentine ants in the—along the curb here.
JAD: There's a little guy. Yeah, that's an Argentine ant right there? The Argentine ant.
DAVID HOLWAY: That is the Argentine ant. So I'm just gonna collect some Argentine ants from the side of this—side of this sidewalk.
ROBERT: You are scraping the surface of the dirt with your fingers.
DAVID HOLWAY: There's a little nest here.
JAD: As soon as he scrapes, about a hundred ants just appear and start running in every direction.
DAVID HOLWAY: Yeah, so what we're seeing are just small numbers of workers that were probably in the leaf litter at the surface.
JAD: Doesn't seem so small, though. It looks like they're everywhere.
DAVID HOLWAY: No, this is tiny.
ROBERT: This is tiny? There's a lot of them!
JAD: First hundreds, then thousands of them here.
ROBERT: You're wrecking up their day! Look at you!
ROBERT: Now the reason the three of us grown adults are now squatting on this little patch of dirt in somebody's front lawn is because around 10 years ago, David and colleagues discovered that this very spot at this particular driveway ...
DAVID HOLWAY: Yeah, we're at 2211 Eucalyptus.
ROBERT: ... in front of this house.
JAD: Was the edge of a vast empire.
DAVID HOLWAY: Right about at this driveway.
JAD: And that empire ends right at that one driveway, 221 Eucalyptus.
ROBERT: To demonstrate this, David takes this hookah thing that he's carrying.
DAVID HOLWAY: So there's a tube that you suck on that connects to a vial.
JAD: He sticks the tube into the scrum ...
ROBERT: Sucks up a few ants ...
JAD: ... drops him into the vial.
JAD: Okay. You just put one—one.
DAVID HOLWAY: It's that one right there.
JAD: Okay.
ROBERT: And then he walked just to the other side of the driveway, like 17 steps, sucked up some ants on that side.
JAD: So here's a new—here is a new guy.
JAD: Plopped him into the same cup, and waited.
ROBERT: So far, nobody seems to.
JAD: So you've got these ants from different sides of the driveway in the same cup. And at first, they don't seem to notice each other.
JAD: Okay, so we're watching. We're watching one guy, one—oh! Oh?
JAD: And then ...
ROBERT: Right away! Wow!
JAD: The two ants just lunge at each other.
ROBERT: Oh, my gosh!
JAD: They lock antenna, and soon they're in a ball.
ROBERT: This isn't good.
JAD: That is heavy duty fighting. They're like—they're seriously rolling around.
DAVID HOLWAY: One's got—looks like it's got a hold of the leg, and the other one's got a hold of the leg.
JAD: Look at them!
ROBERT: It's got its antenna ripped off.
DAVID HOLWAY: It's also missing a couple legs.
JAD: They got yanked off?
ROBERT: Look at the entire one side. Look at that. See, one side of his legs are missing. He's going around in circles because he has nowhere else to go.
DAVID HOLWAY: It's no holds barred.
JAD: Now here's the thing: what we saw in that cup between those two ants was a tiny version of what is happening all over the planet.
ROBERT: This one family of ants ...
JAD: The one on the left of the driveway, not the right.
ROBERT: Has fought its way, not only across huge hunks of America, they now control enormous swaths of the globe. And how they pulled this off? Well, that's maybe more frightening than the fact that they've done it.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: Now, we're gonna get to all that, but first we have to go back to the mid 1800s, to a little place in the northeastern corner of Argentina.
NEIL TSUTSUI: That's right.
ROBERT: Have you ever been to this place?
NEIL TSUTSUI: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've been there several times.
ROBERT: Oh, you have? Oh!
NEIL TSUTSUI: Actually, on the first ...
ROBERT: That's Neil Tsutsui. He's an evolutionary biologist, and says if you're an ant, this place is kind of special.
JAD: Meaning hellish.
ROBERT: Because it's a place where two rivers come together.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Yeah, it's this region in the floodplain between the Rio Parana and the Rio Uruguay.
JAD: A lot of different kinds of ants live there in this little spot. And he says when it rains—which it does there all the time ...
NEIL TSUTSUI: The floodwaters rise, and everybody's home gets flooded and you have to flee.
MARK MOFFETT: The ants are forced up into the trees or any high ground.
ROBERT: That's ecologist Mark Moffett.
MARK MOFFETT: And then as the water falls, all these different subgroups meet again, and they have to start battling from scratch.
ROBERT: That's my land!
JAD: My land!
ROBERT: My land!
JAD: My land! Mine!
MARK MOFFETT: They battle relentlessly ...
JAD: Because this place is always flooding.
MARK MOFFETT: And over time, eons of this, they simply, simply do not know how to stop killing each other.
ROBERT: So you've got this breeding ground for incredibly nasty ants there in northern Argentina. All these different groups.
JAD: All fighting and fighting, and more or less keeping each other in line.
ROBERT: But one day in the 1800s, a steamship rolls up to, say, Buenos Aires, which is a big part of the mouth of these two rivers.
MARK MOFFETT: A boat pulls up, a ramp comes down, and ...
ROBERT: Somehow a couple of ants from one of those Argentine ant families ...
MARK MOFFETT: Are up the gangplank, probably, you know, within the first hour.
ROBERT: Because they're always fleeing floods, so they're programmed to move. That's what they do.
MARK MOFFETT: They're moving into the coffee bags. You can imagine they're moving into all kinds of things.
ROBERT: And then the boat pulls out, and this family of ants leaves their war-torn hellhole of a homeland behind. Until eventually ...
MARK MOFFETT: Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. 1891 is the first time they were seen there.
ROBERT: ... they show up in New Orleans.
MARK MOFFETT: New Orleans. And then 1907, they leapfrog all the way to California. They were simultaneously found in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I believe.
JAD: How did they get to California?
MARK MOFFETT: Well, the Panama Canal wasn't open yet, so it seems likely they took the train.
ROBERT: Wow!
ROBERT: Now, here's the thing about these ants that make them different from all the other ants: because they grew up in this crazy, bloodsoaked floodplain of death ...
JAD: Their survival strategy was pretty simple: kill everything. If it's not one of us, kill it. No matter what.
ROBERT: Other ants will have occasional sex with other ant groups, capture them and make them into slaves, adopt their children. These ants?
MARK MOFFETT: These ants don't fool around.
JAD: They don't have sex outside the group, they never take slaves. And if they catch your babies?
ROBERT: They eat them.
JAD: And it turns out there's a side benefit to being a cruel, segregationist, violent bastard, because being that way allows these ants to stay pure.
ROBERT: Genes stay the same. They're genetically pure.
JAD: Yeah, genetically pure. And when they stay genetically pure, they can stay unified as a group. And when they do that, they can spread in ways the other ants just can't. Because see, ants use smell. Like, that's how they know who's in and who's out. First thing they do when they meet another ant is they sniff them using their antennae.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Something sort of like a tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff.
MARK MOFFETT: They register odor. It's a parallel to the nationality in humans. As long as they sense that identity throughout the individuals they meet, they are happy.
JAD: Now with most ants, as they spread over vast distances, they start to commingle with other ants. Queens come and go, and inevitably that smell nationality dilutes. It begins to change.
ROBERT: But with these Argentine ants, the smell doesn't change from queen to queen or from nest to nest. Even if they go way off, conquer totally new territory, build distant nests ...
NEIL TSUTSUI: All these different nests function as sort of a fluid network. They can fuse and fission through time. For example, you might be nesting on the edge of a sidewalk, and the sprinklers come on. Everybody evacuates, and all the queens and workers and babies get moved to higher ground and may fuse with a nest that's already existing at the higher ground.
ROBERT: So all these Argentine ants living across the south in the US, they get along.
JAD: And if you don't have to worry about each other and you've killed off everything else ...
NEIL TSUTSUI: They can focus their energy on producing more Argentine ants.
MARK MOFFETT: And all you have to do is outnumber the enemy enough and you can wipe out anything.
ROBERT: Even an animal 5,000 times their size.
MARK MOFFETT: Horned lizards are dropping in abundance out in California because the ants simply run all over them and they can never sleep. These lizards normally eat ants, but they simply can't grab these ants. They're too fast and too small, and so they're literally being killed by their own food.
ROBERT: Hmm.
ROBERT: To sum up, they're very nasty, very loyal, and they're extraordinarily numerous. Put those three things together and what you get is Genghis Khan in an ant.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: [singing] See the USA in your Chevrolet.]
ROBERT: During the 1950s, this tight-knit, brutal family of ants starts to spread deeper into California.
JAD: Thanks in large part to all the new freeways, because now they could spread faster and farther. Like, say you ...
NEIL TSUTSUI: Put out a potted plant on your front porch.
JAD: The ants move in.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Overnight.
JAD: Next day ...
NEIL TSUTSUI: Pick up that plant and move it, you know, a hundred miles away the next day.
JAD: And there they are in this new place that's so far away from where they were yesterday, and they can conquer that.
ROBERT: And not only that, it is, after all, the 1950s and 1960s, and you got suburbs springing up all over America.
JAD: Lots of lawns, lots of sprinklers that go on, off, on, off, on, off, which, if you're an ant, is ...
NEIL TSUTSUI: In many ways very similar to home—fresh terrain that's been exposed by the receding floodwaters. Humans have modified the habitat in California in ways that Argentine ants really like.
ROBERT: So the Argentine ants are happy.
JAD: And most people don't even notice this is happening.
ROBERT: Until we get to the 1990s. In fact in 1998, Neil, our entomologist friend, and his colleague, Andy Suarez, they're now studying Argentine ants around San Diego. And they begin to wonder, how far can a family like this of ants spread and still remain pure and still remain loyal to each other? So in the summer of that year, Neil and Andy hop into a car and they go on a little road trip, starting in San Diego and heading north. They took a cup full of Argentine ants from San Diego, and periodically they would stop, get out of the car, kneel down with their ant hookah pipes and suck up local ants—whoever happened to be there—and then pop those ants into the cup with the San Diego ant. Now if the ants think they're part of the same colony, they won't fight.
NEIL TSUTSUI: That's right. So we put in ants from Los Angeles, tap, tap, tap, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff. And they recognize San Diego ants as being members of the same colony.
ROBERT: So they know the colony extends at least from San Diego to Los Angeles, but they keep going.
NEIL TSUTSUI: We go up to Santa Barbara. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. No aggression. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff. Nothing.
ROBERT: No fighting.
NEIL TSUTSUI: To San Luis Obispo. Same thing. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff. They think they're all members of the same colony.
ROBERT: Still no fight.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Up to San Francisco. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Same thing. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff. And this continued.
ROBERT: All the way to a little town a hundred miles north of San Francisco.
NEIL TSUTSUI: And that site displayed no aggression towards the ants that we collected at the very beginning of our road trip from over 600 miles away in San Diego.
JAD: Just think about that for a second, okay? Remember those ant hills you might have had in your front lawn? Little mounds. Imagine one of those 600 miles wide, give or take, with trillions and trillions of ants in it.
ROBERT: Scientists call this a supercolony.
NEIL TSUTSUI: The large California supercolony.
JAD: And as scientists kept tracking this colony, they realized ...
ROBERT: These ants had hitchhiked far beyond California.
MELISSA THOMAS: They're all over Europe. Europe's got—actually, Europe's got the largest colony known.
ROBERT: That's Australian ant scientist Melissa Thomas.
MELISSA THOMAS: Yes.
ROBERT: In 2002, she worked with David Holway to chart just how far this one super colony has expanded.
MELISSA THOMAS: Australia has some.
ROBERT: Where you are?
MELISSA THOMAS: We've got some here in Perth. Yes. And over in Melbourne and Sydney area.
ROBERT: Up and down Spain, all around Italy. Around Greece.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Japan. Many Atlantic and Pacific islands.
ROBERT: Hawaii.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Easter island, places like that.
MARK MOFFETT: They've taken over much of northern New Zealand. They've taken over parts of South Africa.
ROBERT: All these places are occupied by the same family of—are they the same colony?
NEIL TSUTSUI: They think they're all members of the same colony. In fact, we imported Argentine ants from Japan, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Europe. Brought them to UC-Berkeley.
JAD: And they put all of these ants from all these different places in the same cup.
NEIL TSUTSUI: Like we did on our road trip. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff.
ROBERT: And no fighting! You've got, say, an ant from Okinawa in Japan and an ant from Genoa in Italy. They're 6,000 miles distant, maybe 150 generations apart.
JAD: And yet they still know each other.
NEIL TSUTSUI: They still recognize each other as members of the same colony.
JAD: Because the smell that bonds them together hasn't changed.
NEIL TSUTSUI: At some point in the past, you know, one colony in Argentina got picked up and moved around and spread and continue to spread and continue to spread. The descendants of those ants we have now across all continents except Antarctica, they still think they're all members of the same family.
JAD: So here you've got this monoculture, right?
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: That's really violent, on the edge.
ROBERT: On the edges. Yeah.
JAD: But then if you're on the inside and part of the group, very, very peaceful.
ROBERT: And since there's only one other creature that can do this, that can create an allegiance across vast, vast spreads of Earth, I couldn't help but ask Neil ...
ROBERT: Do you ever analogize to human history when you look at these things?
NEIL TSUTSUI: It's tempting to, but I try not to. Because these sorts of situations are kind of a Rorschach. You can see whatever you want to in them.
ROBERT: Yeah.
NEIL TSUTSUI: And so, you know, for our Argentine ant research, we've had people say, "Look, the lesson from this is that we should all be like Argentine ants and get along and cooperate and we'll succeed." But then on the other hand, I've had white supremacist websites cite my research and say this is evidence that the key to success is not mixing the races.
ROBERT: Hmm.
ROBERT: The unsettling part is that, at least in efficacy, like, they're right. This has been a very successful formula for these ants.
JAD: Well, if it lasts.
ROBERT: Right. Which brings us to ...
JILL SHANAHAN: Jill.
ROBERT: What's your whole big name?
JILL SHANAHAN: Jill Shanahan.
ROBERT: Jill Shanahan.
ROBERT: In 1995, Jill was working with Andy Suarez in San Diego, helping him map the ant empire. And one day, as part of her job, she found herself in ...
JILL SHANAHAN: A park in a housing complex.
ROBERT: Just outside San Diego looking for Argentine ants.
JILL SHANAHAN: Mm hmm.
ROBERT: So do you find some?
JILL SHANAHAN: Yeah, I believe that there was a colony at the base of a tree.
ROBERT: Now before she left, she grabbed some Argentine ants from the lab. And these tree ants, they looked exactly the same as her lab ants.
JILL SHANAHAN: They're pretty easy to identify.
ROBERT: And she figured they would just meet the new ants and go sniff, sniff, sniff, get along.
JILL SHANAHAN: That, or ignore each other.
ROBERT: But when she plopped one of these tree ants into the cup with one of her lab ants ...
JILL SHANAHAN: These guys were fighting. One was more aggressive than the other and started biting the other one. And then they'd grapple each other and get into a tight little ball and just ...
ROBERT: And you're watching this.
JILL SHANAHAN: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: And no one has ever seen Argentine ants fight before. You're seeing something nobody's seen before. Did you have any sense that that was happening?
JILL SHANAHAN: No, I guess not. [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
ROBERT: Which may explain why Jill is now in the interior design field. But this is a big deal!
JAD: Because what it means is that another family of Argentine ants had made it over from the old country and brought that old fight to America. So scientists like Melissa began to wonder: how big is this new empire? And where do the two meet?
MELISSA THOMAS: Exactly. Our goal was to find where that territory met in nature.
ROBERT: So Melissa heads out with her standard ant gear: the hookah pipe thing to suck up the ants, the fight cup to plop them into.
MELISSA THOMAS: Right.
ROBERT: She'd do the fight cup test in all these different places in the area, trying to zero in on where that border might be.
MELISSA THOMAS: I'd slowly sort of get closer and closer and closer.
JAD: And eventually, she finds herself walking down a street in a normal subdivision in Escondido. She looks down and she sees it: this thick channel of death.
MELISSA THOMAS: Dead bodies. Hundreds, hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.
JAD: And from all directions, live ants were ...
MELISSA THOMAS: Pouring into this area and fighting to the death. Masses and masses of them fighting.
MARK MOFFETT: Piles and piles of them killing each other.
MELISSA THOMAS: It's pretty extraordinary to see, actually.
DAVID HOLWAY: There were times when we didn't even need to get out of the car to find the supercolony boundary because you'd see the dead workers spilling over the curb.
ROBERT: No!
JAD: Spilling?
DAVID HOLWAY: Spilling.
JAD: Which brings us back to where we started with that driveway and David Holloway.
ROBERT: Oh, my God!
JAD: Oh, my God. They're just like, almost bouncing off the bottom.
ROBERT: This, then, is the price of empire. These ants have conquered a huge portion of the globe, but every day they pay the price in bodies at the border.
ROBERT: Like, this guy has lost all—you see, he's only got limbs on one side now.
JAD: And that price might be going up, because scientists have now figured out that several more families of Argentine ants have hitchhiked their way over.
JAD: Yeah. This is that—this is what I expected.
ROBERT: Are they gonna die?
DAVID HOLWAY: Yeah, the ones that are really injured probably won't live too much longer.
JAD: Oh my God, those two!
JAD: So in the end, this strategy of violence and intolerance seems to be pretty good until it meets itself.
ROBERT: Or even worse, something badder than itself.
JAD: Oh my God, those two. When you shook the ...
ROBERT: Oh, look, they got free! Oh, but the other one. Oh, he's just throwing into another fight. Oh, look, look, they're going into a circle. Oh, they're in the ball of death. Well, not quite. They've just separated.
JAD: They sort of locked ...
ROBERT: Locked big. Thanks to Douglas Smith for production help on this piece.
JAD: Douglas.
ROBERT: And now we're gonna switch. We're gonna switch empires, switch species and we're gonna look at a war that you can see in you're up in space looking down and we're gonna tell you why it's a good war, a great war. And a war we need.
ROBERT: We sat down with Ari Daniel Shapiro.
JAD: Okay.
ROBERT: And he told us this story.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Here it comes.
WILLY WILSON: All right. Yeah, so here we are at the Center for the Culture of Marine Phytoplankton.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: This is Willy.
WILLY WILSON: And I always say ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Willy Wilson.
JAD: Willy Wilson is his name?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.
JAD: That's tough.
WILLY WILSON: Yeah, my dad's Willy Wilson, long line of William Wilsons.
JAD: And you're son?
WILLY WILSON: My son is Angus. But he's Angus William Wilson, so. [laughs].
JAD: Love that guy.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Willy works at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine.
JAD: Okay.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he studies these tiny, plant-like creatures that live in the sea called phytoplankton.
WILLY WILSON: Right so put your ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He keeps them in a fridge in these little test tubes, half full of kind of greenish water.
WILLY WILSON: Let's have a look at this.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He pulled one out and showed it to me. And it doesn't really look like there's that much going on in there.
WILLY WILSON: But right at the bottom you can see what looks like ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: A sort of white ...
WILLY WILSON: Sorta goo ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It's the carnage of war.
JAD: Oh.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: In test tube that Willy is holding are millions of tiny, single-celled plants called coccolithophores.
JAD: Coccolithophores ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah and there are lots of them in the sea.
WILLY WILSON: there's probably about 100,000 of these coccolithophores in a teaspoon of sea water.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Tell me about the coccolitho— like what do they look like.
WILLY WILSON: They're basically like tiny, little, translucent balls— you know like a slight tinge of green. But the key thing is ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: The outside of that ball, it has these white plates.
WILLY WILSON: Tiny, circular shields of chalk.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because the coccolithophores are fighting for their lives.
JAD: Fighting with whom? Each other?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Viruses. These viruses that are shaped like— like diamonds. So here's what happens. Imagine you're a coccolithophore ...
ROBERT: Okay.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Floating in the ocean. And along comes this diamond-shaped virus and it jams its diamond tip into you.
WILLY WILSON: Between these plates, it actually gets inside the cell.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: The chinks in the armor.
WILLY WILSON: That's right, it's like the chinks in the armor.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And the coccolithophore just engulfs it.
WILLY WILSON: And the virus thinks, "Yes I'm in here!" And it sort of makes straight to the nucleus.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And it's at that moment that the viral takeover begins. The virus kind of hijacks the cellular machinery that's usually used by the coccolithophore to make more coccolithophore stuff. And it starts making more viruses.
JAD: So in side the coccolithophore there are these little diamonds multiplying.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, they're filling up that space and eventually all these viruses head out of the coccolithophore.
JAD: In big belches, or?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Like a steady stream of viruses.
JAD: Wow.
WILLY WILSON: And each one of these viruses has the ability to go on and infect another coccolithophore cell.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: In fact, those coccolithophores in that test tube that Willy showed me ...
WILLY WILSON: If I shake this stuff to the bottom right ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Those were in the process of dying.
WILLY WILSON: You smell that? Yeah, so that— what you're smelling there, that's the infection. That's dimethyl sulphite compound. So the infection is already occurring in this culture.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And when the coccolithophore dies, those kind of white shields fall off the cell.
WILLY WILSON: They sort of gradually, sort of rain off over the course of the infection.
JAD: So as it's dying after it's spewed out these viruses it just sheds its plate and it kind of ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, COUGH]
JAD: And then it dies.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.
JAD: And that creates this white chalkiness.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.
ROBERT: And this means that the coccolithophores are not doing very well.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, they've got a couple of tricks up their little calcified sleeves. Sometimes when a virus enters, the coccolithophore will send out a chemical signal.
WILLY WILSON: They start shouting, "Hey, it's too late for me."
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But save yourselves.
JAD: Oh.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And initially, this signal's pretty weak in the water. But as more and more coccolithophores are infected, the chorus of this chemical beacon grows louder and louder.
WILLY WILSON: And so the other cells, they hear these messages.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They change by messing with their DNA a bit. And they go from having those white shields on the outside to having these jaggedy scales.
WILLY WILSON: Which we think might be impenetrable.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Scales instead of these plates and shields.
WILLY WILSON: That's right, yeah. That's right.
JAD: Why aren't they just scaly all the time?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because when they're scaly, they can't be the best coccolithophores they can be.
JAD: [laughs]
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They just don't grow as well.
JAD: So scaly is an adaptation against the viruses.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Exactly. And then finally, if all else fails ...
[explosion]
WILLY WILSON: Program cell death.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: The coccolithophores just commit suicide.
WILLY WILSON: It just shuts down and kills itself to prevent propagation of viruses.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But over time the viruses have figured out how to ...
WILLY WILSON: ...Prevent the cell from killing itself.
[alarm]
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So it delays the death of the coccolithophore for as long as possible to maximize the number of viruses that can get out.
JAD: Wow, this is serious.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, it's like an arms race.
WILLY WILSON: there's a constant battle to be fitter than you were several generations ago. And without ...
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Here's the crazy thing: this battle is happening all through the surface of the ocean. There are legions of coccolithophores dying all the time. And the coccolithophores are shedding their white shields.
WILLY WILSON: Like taking millions of tiny, little miters and putting them in the surface of the ocean.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So many that you can actually see this carnage from space.
JAD: You can see this from space?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.
WILLY WILSON: You get the massive blooms that cover almost the whole of the— the North Atlantic. You get this sort of milky bloom that covers anything from, you know, off the West Coast of Scotland and of Southern Iceland almost all the way to Newfoundland. And the Southern Hemisphere, you get this massive milkiness that circumnavigates the globe.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: These vast swirls of milky water curling around islands and continents.
JAD: And that's all carnage from this battle.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Billions and billions of soldiers that have fallen in the field.
JAD: Wow.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: That we can view from space.
JAD: It probably is trillions if you're talking on that scale.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah I think ...
JAD: What's after trillions?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Quadrillion?
JAD: You think we're in the Quadrillions? Just say it, see how it feels.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: There are quadrillions soldiers dying.
JAD: [laughs] How did that feel?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It felt good.
JAD: [laughs]
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: If I were to be an astronaut, how often would I see these sorts of blooms?
WILLY WILSON: All the time somewhere on the planet.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Every day, every hour?
WILLY WILSON: Every day, every hour, there's gonna be a bloom going on somewhere. You know, good examples are the Norwegian fjords. They start in the fjords and they taper into May time and then they sort of creep out of the fjords like this huge, living amoeba. Fishermen hate it because the fish can't see the lures, so they can't the fish anymore.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And as the shields rain off and fall down to the ocean floor, they build up and build up over time.
WILLY WILSON: Millions of years of sedimentation of these sort of chalk particles.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: That's actually what led to the creation of the Cliffs of Dover. The White Cliffs of Dover in England.
JAD: Shut up, really?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yes.
WILLY WILSON: This is geology in action.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And not just that. When the coccolithophores gets decimated by the virus, it kinda clears out the ocean for other phytoplankton to bloom. And then they get mowed down by their viruses. And then the coccolithophores might bloom again and then they get wiped out. And this cycle ...
WILLY WILSON: All these battles, I mean it's all responsible for about half the oxygen that we breathe.
ROBERT: Really? Half the oxygen we breathe?
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Half the oxygen.
ROBERT: Whoa.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because when the phytoplankton bloom, they take in carbon dioxide and they release a puff of oxygen. And then they're cut down by these viruses but they grow back up again and another breath is released. So the whole system is— is just kinda breathing.
WILLY WILSON: People think that the lungs of the planet are the rain forests, and that's kinda half the picture, but every other breath we take comes from the phytoplankton in the ocean that are going through these battles on a— you know, on a daily basis.
JAD: So this is a battle that rages every single day. Somewhere in our oceans.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. We need the battle to live.
ROBERT: Ari, thank you.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Sure.
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