Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
🐜 Ants!
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS. ATX Outsiders is our community who meet IRL outside each month. Join us!
Upcoming events I’m hosting:
Sunday, June 21: Reverse Brain Rot: Summer Series. Grab a book, notebook, and SPF—we’re sprawling at Barton Springs periodically this summer to chip away at the TBR and TBW list. Join this partnership with Zac Solomon, founder of ATX Writing Club.
Sunday, July 19: Reverse Brain Rot: A slightly sweatier version of our June 21 event.
EVENT RECAP
A dozen folks showed up at 8am on a Sunday to, uh, pluck leaves together.
If this is also your speed, you should join ATX Outsiders for first dibs to events + a direct line into our community conversations.
Special thanks to Ian McCluskey for bringing December Yaupon to life, and for educating us during our foraging hike!
Our locally caffeinated crew
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
Did you know roughly 20% of humans can smell ants?
This is a cilantro-like genetic lottery scenario.
The olfactory-inclined pick up on ants’ methyl ketones, with notes akin to blue cheese or rotting coconuts.
Roughly 100% of ants can smell you. Or, more accurately, sense you, using their antennae to detect carbon dioxide, body heat, and/or your particular breed of oils and sweat.
Lucky them.
Today we’re digging into the ants of Central Texas.
Facets and Features of Ants
We’re going to start by lingering on a new phrase in my vocabulary: eusocial Hymenoptera. This is the order of insects that includes the most highly organized social insects, including all ants, some bees (like my girls), and various wasps.
They have this classification because the entire colony is the organism. Like, a superorganism. The whole organism happens to be distributed across thousands of bodies. The individual ant is a rounding error. The unit functions with a strictly defined caste system:
the queen, who’s an egg factory
sterile female workers who tend to nest maintenance, brood care, colony defense, and foraging
males, whose sole purpose is to mate and die
Fun facts about this girl gang:
Ant colonies communicate through pheromones, alerting the whole to trails, threats, and death. If a live ant is sprayed with oleic acid, the death pheromone, her nestmates will drag her to the trash heap. She will walk back. They will drag her out again. Repeat x infinity.
Texas is an ant-diverse state, home to roughly 250 species of ants
Colonies can range from hundreds of ants to millions of ants
Ants make up roughly 20% of terrestrial animal biomass. For scale, every human on Earth weighs as much as every ant on Earth.
Understatement: ants are strong. Workers can carry 10-50x their body weight
Anthills/nests/formicaries are a full team effort, composed of clumps of earth + ant saliva + feats of ant mandible strength. They’re the tip of the iceberg—just the entrance to an extensive, climate-controlled underground network of tunnels, nurseries, and specialized chambers
I cannot recommend stepping on an ant mound, even if it’s a soft contrast to a world of packed soil
It’s moderately tempting to poke ant mounds, but also, rude
Fire ant mound, packed with reasons to stay indoors
See also: hell incarnate
One of the many types of ants in Texas are Fire Ants. They’re invasive. They will destroy all that is good in the world, given the opportunity. You might know them from their chemically unique venom, solenopsin, which burns like hell and inspires your body to create pustules that will plague the following days
Fire ants gave us a show in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey—their living rafts during floods tucked their queen safely in the middle, and the workers’ hydrophobic exoskeletons demonstrated how their species has outlasted five mass extinctions over 130 million years
A relatively new ant in the region is called Rasberry Crazy Ants, as a nod to the Texas exterminator who documented them in 2002 near Houston. They’re an invasive species who move in erratic, non-linear paths. They bite and spray formic acid. They have multiple queens, and no defined mounds. They escape modern eradication techniques. They also seem to love electrical equipment and are gaining a reputation for short-circuiting AC units and causing millions of dollars in infrastructure damage.
They are outcompeting fire ants, setting us all up for a dubiously moral Smash or Pass scenario.If you’ve got ants creeping across your kitchen counters or your shower this season, they’ll respond to the name Sugar. Sugar ants are a catchall for varieties like Odorous house ants. They’re looking for food, water, and a break from drought conditions, pheromoning to all of their extended selves about how great your digs are. It’s a compliment.
Ants’ Role in the Ecological System
Ecologically, ants decompose/are nature’s cleanup crew, aerate soil, and disperse plant seeds.
They’re also farmers.
Some ants farm crops.
For example, leaf-cutter ants cultivate fungus. They carve pieces of leaves and carry them underground to create massive, spongy gardens. Like, 20 feet deep, 50 feet wide, multi-generational gardens. They chew leaves into a paste to grow a specific fungus, then there’s a clone situation that sends young queens packing with starter crop in her mouth to perpetuate their existence.
The ants go marching one by one, hoorah.
As witnessed at Commons Ford, January 2025
Some ants farm aphids.
Aphids are tiny, soft-bodied insects also known as plant lice, and they use their mouthparts to suck nutrients out of a plant’s food-carrying veins.
Several species of ants herd aphids to the juiciest parts of plants, and steer them toward greener pastures. The ants protect aphids from predators, like ladybugs, wasps, and hoverfly larvae.
And then, you know, the ants milk the aphids.
HOW TO MILK AN APHID: gently stroke the aphid’s abdomen with antennae to stimulate them to secrete their sugary, nutrient-rich liquid called honeydew.
That liquid is a byproduct of aphids’ plant sap diets—the sticky liquid is the excess. And this relationship benefits everyone because some aphid species have evolved without the ability to excrete waste on their own, making them completely dependent on ants to juice them.
In extreme cases, ants will clip the wings of their domesticated aphids to prevent them from flying away when they mature.
Some humans farm ants.
Last winter, it seemed like a good idea to acquire an ant farm.
Lessons learned:
You can buy ant farms on the internet with vials of Harvester ants, but not queens to perpetuate the system, so you can expect to watch your colony slowly die over one to three months, with the most resilient ants surviving up to six months. Surviving, not thriving.
I heard rumors I could go into the forest at dawn, post-rain, to squat and squint for slightly larger, more-urgent-seeming ants to capture my own Harvester queen, but a. I have minimal ant literacy b. my ant/vial fine motor skills are also underdeveloped c. there was moderate likelihood of inadvertently introducing a not-Harvester ant into the Harvester colony d. sometimes things are meant to be fleeting and finite
To introduce your new ant friends into their future tomb, the instructions say to refrigerate the ants to make them sluggish before carefully plunking them into their environment, and whatever you do, do not agitate them or let them free range your home because they are biting creatures and may also spray formic acid into their bite wound to double down on inflicting pain
Their refrigerated sluggishness wears off more rapidly than you might hope if you’re putzing around during the Insert-Ants-Into-Container step
You might have to override an impulse to smoosh your new friends when they try to make your entire dining room their habitat instead of the intended small vessel within your dining room
Much gratitude for February 2025’s refrigerator-like night time temperatures.
They’re pretty fascinating to watch. The tunneling! The dedicated spot to bury bodies! The way they take down a speck of apple!
Yes, I googled “can cats smell ants.” The internet says yes.
Look at those tunnels!
Around this time, there was an international ant scandal, involving Carpenter ants and queens and people using the word pet very liberally
Pro-tip: avoid getting involved in the global ant smuggling network, even if you have a stash of modified test tubes in your carryon
All things considered, Alien Ant Farm is a pretty solid band name.
All things considered, hobby tunneling is an excellent subplot in my favorite novel.
All things considered, I’m very grateful I can’t smell the collective presence of every ant on Earth.
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ June 11: Artist & Curator Sculpture Walk: with a focus on Impossible Beings
🗓️ June 11 : The Drop-In Music Series: Thursday night lounge on the lawn of The Long Center for live music + cityscape
🗓️ June 12: Sunset Swifts: swoop over to Bastrop for a bird show at dusk
🗓️ June 12: FoundHer’s Walk and Talk: Women walking with a purpose
🗓️ June 12: Music Under the Stars on the Capitol Mall
🗓️ June 13: Guided Walk: Native Plants: you might get to eat one
🗓️ June 13: Austin Yoga Festival: Thanks for putting this on my radar, Ariana!
🗓️ June 13: Discovery Day: Prehistoric Life: Your chance to ask a paleontologist about their favorite dinosaur(s)
🗓️ June 13: The Board Walks: with curiosity at the forefront
🗓️ June 13: Saturday Ruck at The Observatory: with city skyline and river corridor views
🗓️ June 13: Hyde Park Storytelling: join a couple hundred folks to hear and share tales around the theme: Fabulous!
🗓️ June 13: Guided Tour: chat history and water at Jacob’s Well
🗓️ June 13: Prehistoric Hunting: the Atlatl: could you feed yourself in a no-tech world?
🗓️ June 13: Blanton All Day: Plein air drawing, bubbles (like, real bubbles), and tango lessons—a perfect day?
🗓️ June 13: Knit in Public Day: take a road trip to chat about the power of knitting clubs + knock out some rows. I bet they won’t discriminate against crochet.
🗓️ June 13: Sunset Guided Kayak Tour: pairs well with a campsite at Inks
🗓️ June 13: Farmyard Wizards: Family-friendly opportunity to grow magic beans and watch Hootie the Magician
🗓️ June 13: Goat Yoga: Baby goats transform a moment of zen into some tangential experience
🗓️ June 13: Summer Mercado: I have a hunch their prizes will include plants
🗓️ June 13: Summer Star Party: an Enchanting evening of star clusters, galaxies, and switching your headlamp to red mode
🗓️ June 14: Pollinator Celebration: Local beer + local plants + the promise of fun for all ages
🗓️ June 14: The Austin Symphony Concerts in the Park: the Brass Ensemble will close out the series
🗓️ June 14: Writers Walk: The Creatives are on the move
🗓️ June 16: Butterfly Detectives: Aimed at 8-11 year-olds, with a focus on Monarchs
🗓️ June 17: Spore Stores: Myth, Art, & Mushrooms: unearth a story in this adult-aimed hands on craft/activity session
🗓️ June 18: Summer Solstice Party: TreeFolks Young Professionals have a maypole, flower crowns, and a mini market to celebrate these longest days of the year
🗓️ June 18 : Austin Ruck Club: Barton Springs after is sounding really appealing
🗓️ June 19: Meet a Founder Friday: Pickleball: start the day with some hustle
🗓️ June 21: Reverse Brain Rot: I’m co-hosting this book + notebook + Barton Springs lounge
🗓️ July 19: Reverse Brain Rot #2: It’ll be toasty.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
The baby hummingbirds are feathering.
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you have exactly zero ants in your pants.
-Nicole
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