As The Toast searches for its one true Gal Scientist, we will be running a ton of wonderful one-off pieces by female scientists of all shapes and sizes and fields and education levels, which we are sure you will enjoy. They’ll live here, so you can always find them.
Wait, what? Ants???
Yes! I am currently employed as a research assistant in a lab with three captive colonies of leaf-cutter ants (Atta cephalotes.) These ants come from South and Central American countries and have complex social structures, which I’ll discuss later. Similar to bees, they have a large queen, soldiers, and worker ants that accomplish different duties depending on their size. They are a reddish-brown color with sharp mandibles (jaws) and spikes on their backs. Wild colonies can grow to include millions of ants, but captive colonies like ours don’t get that big for lack of space. Here’s a close up photo of one of the ants cutting a leaf:
To cut, the ants use one tooth as an anchor and the other tooth is pulled through the leaf in a circular pattern.
What’s so special about these ants?
Leafcutter ants form the largest and most socially complex communities second to humans! Like some other species in the order hymenoptera, which includes wasps, bees, and ants, leaf-cutter ants are eusocial. Eusocial animals share the following characteristics: “cooperation in caring for the young; reproductive division of labor, with more or less sterile individuals working on behalf of individuals engaged in reproduction; and overlap of at least two generations of life stages capable of contributing to colony labor” (Holldobler and Wilson 1990.)
In other words, many adults from many generations live and work together, caring for one queen’s young, and they accomplish different tasks depending on certain factors. You may be wondering why all of these ants agree to babysit offspring that do not belong to them, and why they agree to a lot of hard labor when their queen lays around all day. Part of this has to do with inclusive fitness and haplodiploidy. Haplodiploidy is a sex-determination system when females are diploid or come from fertilized eggs and males are haploid or come from unfertilized eggs. So males have 100% of their mother’s genes and females have 50%. Because all the workers are sisters where their mom is the (diploid) queen and dad is their (haploid) brother, they share 75% of each other’s genes. If the ants had their own offspring their babies would only share 50% of their genes, thus making it more genetically beneficial for sisters to take care of each other over any other relative.
However, being haplodiploid is not a requirement for eusociality: animals like termites and mole rats do not follow haplodiploid reproduction but they are eusocial. So scientists are not entirely sure how and why eusociality evolved in animals, which is one of the reasons why it’s so interesting to me. Animals in social groups do get a variety of benefits from living and working together- mainly protection and a food supply, but there is still so much to learn about these complex behaviors and systems.
For an idea of how big ant nests in the wild can get, here’s a still from this video that shows the aftermath of pouring ten tons of concrete into a leaf cutter ant nest (different species than ours) and excavating the results. The spherical chambers are a bunch of fungus gardens!
Do ants have a ‘hive mind’ or a collective consciousness?
That’s a question scientists are still trying to figure out. Many consider ants and other eusocial animals a “superorganism” or an organism consisting of many organisms that cannot survive on their own. So each ant is like a neuron working together with other neurons to form one functioning brain. Without their fungus and their queen and other workers, a lone ant wouldn’t survive for long. But that question is so hard to even begin to answer because there’s so much we still don’t know. How do ants know what their specific job is? Do ants communicate to each other about what the colony should be doing? A vague answer would be “pheromones, probably” but even that is difficult to start studying.
I asked my coworker, who has worked here longer than me and has done more research, and he said yes, he thinks they do have a collective consciousness. He compared them working together to individual heart cells in a petri dish, that at first all beat at different rates, but when brought closer together, start to sync up and beat as one. Or how when people who menstruate spend enough time together, their cycles may sync up. Some argue that if ants are a superorganism, then the biosphere is also a superorganism. Or even humans, with the millions of bacteria in our gut that we cannot survive without, could be considered a superorganism.
So they eat leaves?
Well, no. They cut the leaves into discs, which they bring back to their nest and chomp them up into tinier pieces so they can grow a fungus on the leaves, and they eat that fungus. The fungus would not exist without this symbiotic relationship, as the ants and this particular species of fungus have been coevolving for millions of years. So basically, these ants are farmers growing and eating a crop of food! Some other species of ants go even farther and ‘farm’ aphids, keeping the aphids fed and safe while eating a sweet secretion that the aphids produce. But this is a whole different story so I won’t go on about that.
What is your job?
My job mostly involves microwaving leaves. But what I’m really doing is collecting data on the dry weight of the leaves we give the ants, measuring everything that comes out and everything that goes in for a hypothesis about their efficiency in caloric use. I feed the ants every day with blackberry leaves (taking out any leaves they don’t eat) and I make sure the ants are ~living their best lives~ in their tanks and tubes. My goal is to build up the colonies so we can start behavioral research along with the other research we are doing. I also help in general maintenance of the colony, setting up chambers for their waste (ants are very organized and clean) and solving issues that may arise in the lab.
What research are you doing?
A lot. Our current grant research is mainly looking into/analyzing biomaterials produced by ants and other organisms. We have a few projects going on having to do with the sharpness and wear of the ants mandibles which involves dissecting ant heads under a microscope with scalpels and tweezers and taking photos to measure the sharpness of their teeth. One project involves dissecting the teeth/claws of lots of different organisms and measuring the sharpness of those tools as well.
Other lab projects that I’m not actively working on involve figuring out the fracture resistance of ant mandibles and other invertebrate tools like spider fangs. These tools are very strong, so we’re attempting to find the amount of force required to fracture the fang/mandible/tooth. Another project simulates wear on an invertebrate’s tooth using a hand-built machine (made from a turntable connected to sandpaper) that sands down the tooth; this involves dissecting out a barely visible worm tooth and mounting it on the tip of a pin to be worn down and then photographed. Some past research we conducted involved figuring out if ants can judge the shortest distance to their nest, and our data shows that they can and do. We also found out how much cutting gets done outside of the nest versus inside of the nest (around 90% of the cutting occurs in the nest). The cool thing about my lab is that it’s mostly undergraduates working here, and if we have an idea that we would like to turn into an experiment, our boss is very open to us making a plan and following through on it.
Do they bite you?
I have been bitten, but it’s usually because I’m not being careful. I pick up the ants between two fingers just behind their head so they can’t bite me but sometimes I get impatient and just grab them anywhere, which results in sometimes getting bit. They are more hostile when I reach in their main chamber where their queens and babies live, the areas where we feed them are connected to this by plastic tubes to mimic their underground tunnels in the wild. I’m also pretty fast picking them up and putting them back in their tanks so they don’t have a big chance to bite. But some of the larger workers or “majors” could draw blood if they wanted to. But most of the minor injuries I sustain are from blackberry thorns.
Do they ever escape?
Oh yes, and for it is for this very reason that my coworker/boss have created an ANT VACUUM. (Really).
What do the queens do?
The queens are the founders of the entire colony. It all starts with the nuptial flight, when the ‘virgin queen’ produced by an older colony’s queen flies away from her nest where she mates with male(s) (who die soon after–misandry?) and finds somewhere to start her nest in the soil or some plant. Only a small fraction of new queens’ colonies actually survive because it takes a lot of energy to create a nest from scratch, and many queens are eaten or die before they can even mate. For leafcutter ants, the new queen keeps a tiny piece of the fungus they eat in a pouch and uses that to create the first nest material. She lays a few eggs and survives off her fat stores and shed wings until she has enough workers to maintain the fungus. After this initial period of growth, the queens are tended to by workers and have the sole purpose of reproduction. We have three queens, each with her own colony (who I have named Yonce, Nicki and RihRih) who had a small nest already established when we received them from a zoo, so the colonies’ main goals right now are growth.
(this is a queen)
Are there a lot of people doing ant research?
In the U.S., not a lot. My boss says around ten labs are currently researching ants, and this small number is partly because of a backlash from the media criticizing ant research because it was deemed unimportant. In 2010, senators John McCain and Tom Coburn published a 74 page document titled “Summertime Blues: 100 stimulus projects that give taxpayers the blues” where they listed projects funded by the stimulus bill of 2009 that they deemed unimportant of useless. Number 6 was $1.9 million awarded to the California Academy of Sciences for ant research in Madagascar, which they wrote seemed “both laudable and arcane.”
What they failed to mention was that this money was being spent over 5 years, and that the project leader Brian Fisher is not only researching the ants themselves, but human impact on ants, which could help address issues about climate change and biodiversity for other ecosystems. Just because an organism seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things, does not mean it is, especially in the case of ants.
Should I be afraid of leafcutter ants attacking me and my plants?
If you don’t live in South or Central America or parts of the southern U.S., no. And if you do, you probably already know about any ants that may cause harm in your area. Their main objective is to collect leaves and protect their queen, so they really shouldn’t attack you unless you harass them. They are a bigger threat to trees and plants, and can cause deforestation if the colony is large enough.
How well does Animorphs portray the ant experience?
After googling “animorph ants” it seems that the Animorphs series portrays some individuals morphing into black garden ants, which are different from leafcutter ants but have similar social structures. One wiki article for The Capture says that “Temrash again tries to escape, this time as an ant, but is forced back by an enemy ant colony.” Which actually does happen. If I put an ant from one of our colonies into a different colony, it would get attacked and killed because they communicate through pheremones and would not recognize the intruder ant.
This posed a problem when we were trying to paint individual ants to track their behavior (yes, I painted ants with a toothpick), but the unfamiliar scent of the paint caused ants to attack their own sisters. This was solved by gassing the ants with CO2 to knock them out, which made other ants less hostile for some reason. Although this didn’t always work and one day I had to reach in and pick up a wad of fighting ants to pull them off the poor painted ant. I ended up gassing the entire wad of ants and picking them apart.
I have a bunch of ants in my house, how can I kill them?
I don’t know because my job involves KEEPING ANTS ALIVE. (Probably poison though.)
Can you take the ants home with you to watch them?
No, because they are considered a bioterrorist threat. Seriously. I had to sign a form that made sure I wouldn’t take them out of the lab because they could hypothetically destroy all the plants in the area. BUT this wouldn’t happen because the climate where I live is not suitable for them and they would most likely die.
What have you learned the most working in the lab?
The most useful things I have learned have to do with the different complicated processes and failures that occur in the science world. My boss says most scientific papers and studies are 80% science and 20% bullshit, so I’ve learned to take everything I learn in science classes with a grain of salt. Science is inherently biased because it is a human created (and mostly white male created) thing, so science is not the answer to everything ever. Scientists make mistakes and theories are proven wrong and life goes on. I’ve learned that the process of submitting a paper is long and arduous and requires a lot of time and money. And sometimes even after all of your hard work that paper gets rejected. The process of getting a grant is even longer and more arduous. I’ve learned that there are so many things that science cannot explain and that for some things it may never be able to, and that’s ok. I’ve also learned that ants are pretty damn amazing.
Tags: animals, ants, gal science, julie twitchell, labs, science
ANT LAB
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ANT LAB
ANT LAAAB
Sung by my quirky accordion-pop band, Ant Mandibles.
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
Agreed. But I wonder if they’re new or have been in charge all along. It would be strategic to let our species believe we’re making decisions when we’re just responding to insect manipulation.
We had a leafcutter bee in our yard one spring, it was fascinating to watch her go to work. I think she abandoned her nest, nothing ever happened – unless, one day, we’re suddenly swarmed with leafcutter bees…
I also know an ant researcher IRL and I have to say she’s the mellowest academic I’ve met yet. Ant people are chill!
I just recently learned about leaf cutter bees they are so cool!!!! Ant people are chill I can attest to that. PS where is she studying ants???
Santa Cruz by way of Ohio.
yeaaaaa eusocial animals! So weird. so very weird, but so great.
I really enjoyed your comments at the end on Science, too. It’s so funny how so much of biology especially is just figuring out how not to fuck up your experiments.
a lot of things in science involve duct tape from my experience…
Julie! I loved this and I love ants. Does your work with a eusocial species ever influence your thinking about women’s and gender studies?
this is interesting, and I actually do have some thoughts on the fact that maybe there should not be a gender binary in nature when there is so much diversity. Like the queens are kind of their own gender, and then workers and drones. It makes me think more about the social aspect of sexes, like if we didn’t have a sex/gender binary in humans what would we then prescribe to animals?
and by gender i mean sex because gender is a ~construct~ (i think?)
Ooo, I love the queen as own gender idea.
Yeah, for sure! I am an entomology grad student with aspirations to write insect and environmental history focused fantasy.
I’ve spent some time thinking about how to execute stories about insects in a way that’s both faithful but also creative and compelling. Gender is a big and weird part of how so much biology in anthropomorphic animal stories has to be totally warped to fit human norms (not least of which is human biology, for that matter -_-). I think convincingly writing characters with gender identities without clear human analogues would be pretty challenging (more so than just writing believable characters in the first place, ugh) but definitely worth trying. Maybe I’m just overthinking it, though.
If the males die soon after mating wouldn’t that be mis-ant-ry instead of misandry?
yes you’re so right
The times when the Animorphs would turn into ants or termites or other hive insects were always the freakiest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebxEVP8cw
ETA: That’s how you get ants.
how often do you say, “thanks ants. thants.“?
also this article and the work you do is really cool!
So cool! I loved the book Anthill by E.O. Wilson. So interesting about how socially complex they are — they even fight wars.
YAY JULIE! This is so cool. I would have never thought of ants as so interesting, but this was great. Thanks for writing it!
A question: How long did it take the leaf cutter ants to build that enormous nest? Because holy cow, that is HUGE.
I’m not sure exactly how long it takes but they are so fast!! The queen is constantly having babies and making more workers so it probably doesn’t take very long! Our colonies are growing so fast we are needing to add more chambers for them to make fungus!
This was really interesting! How do lady ants decide to fly off and become new queens? Are these special types of ants somehow?
So from what I understand, after many years toward the end of a colonies life, the queen gives birth to special mini queens that have wings and they just fly off as soon as they can. I think the mechanism of how they do this is largely unknown. It looks like it varies between species.
What is this, a blog for ants???
(runs away)
This was awesome Julie!
Also I am in the ant lab right now on sitting next to thousands of ant friends!
Also that first ant picture is a picture that my boss, Robert Schofield, took of one of our ants! Ant glamour shot!
Hi ants!! The Toast says hello!
I have gotten rid of ants in apartments multiple times. In my experience, they don’t really bother people as they are just on a beeline (antline) toward something sugary/sweet–at least the kind I’ve dealt with. I don’t like killing things unless totally necessary and I found the best way to avoid mass-ant-genocide is to clean up or seal-off anything sweet or sugary (honey on counter, empty campari bottle in recycling, even shampoo or conditioner or soaps) and then tracing their path, spray a few with poison (raid) along it and watch them flee back to find the point of entry, spray that with a little poison and then you should be good. The rest will disappear magically without a source of sugar to march toward. I think dawn has slight insecticide properties that won’t be attractive to ants. That’s my novice humane-ish exterminator advice.
We once randomly had ants marching into our apartment from underneath a door, across a vinyl floor, up the side of the refrigerator, and into the freezer to suicide. It was pretty weird. (Wiping up ants with a sponge and putting the sponge in the freezer is a fast way to cause ants to stop being, too).
Great article, Julie!
Also, yes, very interesting. I enjoyed reading that.
when my cats were just teensy babycats we had a problem with teeny ants coming in and swarming the cat food dish
I tried putting down cinnamon and paprika on all the door and window thresholds. I tried cucumber peels (actually highly effective against most ant species where I grew up in upstate NY, not at all effective against californian ants! go figure). I tried, with great trepidation, ant traps (95% ineffective, these ants did not care about the ant bait, they wanted delicious kitten food/to terrify tiny dopey babycats for their ant-y satisfaction maybe). The only thing I could really do was put the food dish in a tray of soapy water, and that was only a deterrent because they were very small ants and it was a long way for them to swim and they were successful with less frequency. Plus Twoflower has always been a professional goofball and she would try to drink the soapy water, so in all, best solution still not a GOOD solution.
Eventually we just moved, maybe the ants took over that entire apartment. Good for them.
My strongest, most visceral ant memories:
I was maybe five when the students gave my father a six-foot candy cane for Christmas. He stashed it in a closet and we knocked chunks off it, inches at a time, to eat. One day I (about five years old) opened the closet, reached into the dark, and grabbed the candy cane, still in its twisted-shut wrapper… only to discover that the top six inches or so of the wrapper was packed full of big fat ants. It all goes dark after that, but I am sure I screamed.
Twenty years later, I was living in a sunny apartment four flights up. I woke up one summer morning, walked through my kitchen on the way to take a shower, and discovered a line of ants coming in my kitchen window, through the screen, across the counter, across the stove, over a shelf, up the fridge, and across it to the syrup bottle.
They were also inside the syrup bottle, which WAS FIRMLY CLOSED. They were apparently compressing themselves (HOW? You ingenious little fuckers, you have exoskeletons!) to slip through the pop-top of the plastic bottle, and they clung to the side of the bottle drinkin’ up syrup. I assume that unbroken line of ants extended all the way from the ground floor.
We get outsmarted by ants a lot in the lab. To keep them in their tanks we have little moats filled with water/oil around the edges and often they take leaf pieces and make a bridge across the moat and escape that way. If there is a way out or in they will find it.
BRIDGES that is AMAZING
Do they make little leaf boats? Because I’m imagining little leaf boats here, and also maybe some tiny straw boating hats.
If you really need to destroy the ants and can’t prevent them from coming in, you need a slow acting poison that the ants take back to the nest to kill the hive. My parents’ have had to do so once or twice.
Now I feel kinda bad about starting the “stop those pests, kill them” thread when there’s so much more to discuss. Like pheromones as a communication form. Whoa.
“Laudable and arcane” my ass. This is why I half-enjoy, half-dislike the Ig Nobel awards–they draw attention to such neat, unusual scientific research projects, but then characterize them as generally useless or trivial. Which is not to say that there aren’t folks doing trivial research projects in the world, but even projects that focus on something that seems “obscure” to the general populous are often connected to larger questions about the world and what we’re doing to it.
Also ANT LAB! I’m really glad I got to read this, J-Twitch, and I hope your midterm went well!!
yeah it’s kind of sad because there’s not a ton of money in researching ant behavior because most research funding is deemed useful if it somehow benefits humans. So that’s why our grant that we got is focused on looking at the biomaterials in different species and the sharpness of ant mandibles/other tools because it does have some medical relevance. All the behavior stuff is currently not funded, it’s just volunteers who are doing it.
I wouldn’t say the Igs dismiss the projects they give awards to as “useless or trivial”. In fact, IIRC (from having a housemate who was deeply involved with them), the tagline is “Science that makes you laugh, then makes you think”. I’d say the second part of that pretty well implies that they take it seriously, even if it is hilarious that a researcher is using a toy helicopter to sample whale snot.
I used to spend summers at my grandparents’ country house (my grandfather’s childhood home) and there was a big oak tree in the garden with an enormous ants’ nest at its roots. There were so many damn ants that you could hear them – the barely perceptible rustle of those billions of tiny little ant legs – and you could also smell the formic acid.
In case any of you are thinking “country house” sounds all fancy – the place didn’t have indoor plumbing and one night when I was about 13 I decided I would just pee in the garden instead of wandering out to the outhouse. Yes, I managed to squat right over the damn ants’ nest. I literally had ants in my pants. Not an experience I would recommend.
This was so cool! I can’t believe you can just grab the ants by the scruff of the neck like that – I don’t think I have the dexterity to do that without squishing them.
I do have a question about your current experiment – so the ants take the leaves to grow the fungus they eat, right? And you’re weighing the leaves via microwaving? 1) At what stage do you take the leaves away from the ants to microwave it? and 2) What effect does that have on their fungus production? Do they just say “oh there’s that leaf piece I lost yesterday, okay, now I’ll move it to the fungus chamber!”? Or are they disinterested in that piece of leaf now that it’s been microwaved?
So I take out any leaves they did not eat from the day before and weigh them before and after microwaving. I don’t put the microwaved leaves back in their tanks. I throw them away. They like fresh leaves so they won’t eat all dried out leaves which is usually what’s left after a day.
Ahhhh gotcha! Thanks!
I’m so impressed with your science brain and also the amount we just don’t know about these tiny creatures. Reading about this kind of stuff usually leads me to an existential monologue with myself, usually going something like, “If they don’t know this stuff about ANTS, what don’t they know about bigger animals? What about humans? Why are humans? Oh god.”
I am constantly over thinking things like this that I need to tell myself to chill out often. So I know what you mean.
I know Sim Ant was a thing, but I think it would make a pretty fun RTS-type game to build and run an ant colony.
I’m fascinated and also feel like a line of ants is walking up my leg after reading this. They’re all amazing but I don’t think I’d even heard of leafcutters before, and the fact that they’re growing fungus makes me think they’re like a hippie cohousing project with a little cooler full of homemade tempeh. I want to make them tiny tie-dyed shirts.
Well! This is going to sound possibly demented, but I live in Tampa FL and I have recently taken a keen interest in our local Florida harvester ants. Their colonies are nowhere near the size of leaf-cutter ants’, but still fairly impressive as this plaster cast shows: http://thinkorthwim.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/0…
I am deranged enough to want to construct an amateur ant habitat, on a rather smaller scale. Last fall I scooped out a smallish pile of anthill material, including a few eggs and larvae, and transplanted it into a plastic terrarium. The ants seemed to adapt well and started building new chambers, but I could not for the life of me figure out what to feed them. Harvesters eat seeds, but none of the ones I collected for them seemed to appeal. I also tried grass seed, wildflower seeds, sesame seeds, and a honey solution with no luck. Eventually they lost interest in caring for the larvae and wandered around aimlessly, so I replaced them into the old mound. I’d very much like to put together a successful ant habitat, and would appreciate any advice or direction about where best to seek information. I honestly would never have expected this topic to arise here, so: Yay!
–or, perhaps my first instinct was correct after all, and the above request is too weird to even merit discussion. I should have known. Just mention that you’re planning to keep a colony of highly venomous giant ants in your apartment, and suddenly people consider you “strange” or “colossally stupid.” DON’T YOU JUDGE ME, GIANT STINGING ANTS MAKE PERFECTLY FINE PETS
no ants are cool and lots of people keep captive colonies! I’m really not well versed in the care of other ant species though, but I’m sure there are some online resources available. People post a lot of youtube videos about caring for ants, so maybe look there?
Oh keen, thank you very much! I’d done some poking around online but I hadn’t considered Youtube as a resource. Most of the stuff I found seemed to be aimed at very short term observation, along the lines of a slightly more elaborate Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm. That’s where I found the tip about honey water, which works wonderfully, if the goal is to glue the ants to the inside of the dish and drown them. Ultimately I’d like to be able to view the whole life cycle as the eggs and larvae develop. A queen would be ideal, but just locating one would be a major pain. Last year I stumbled across a young queen just starting to excavate a nest, and tried to transplant her into a terrarium. I failed miserably, probably because she had already laid her eggs and I failed to locate them.
Why are there a zillion books about setting up a successful marine aquarium, so you can stare at your dynamited chunk of coral with its flaccid anemone and three dazed clownfish which will die from parasites almost immediately? Meanwhile there are approximately zero reference works on the natural history, care and feeding of the majestic and fascinating harvester ant.
There was one doughty warrior in the batch I kept for a while, who had been in a battle at some point, and still had the dried-out head of a decapitated enemy locked around her petiole by its mandibles. She was like a pulp fantasy barbarian with a skull for a belt. I like to think she’s still out there, somewhere, slaying wasps and having adventures.
Entomology on The Toast! I heart. Always loved ants, always wanted to study them. Proper jealous.
Just started my Masters in Nematology. Basically I’m investigating nematodes – microscopically tiny translucent worms who slip into insect larvae through their skin. From there, they vomit a small packet of bacteria into the host – the bacteria multiply, consuming the insect from the inside out and killing it of septicaemia, whereupon the nematodes reproduce, using the bacteria as food, before their progeny escape and start the cycle over.
The reason I bring it up is that they seem to have a similar mutualism with their bacteria as the leafcutters do with their fungus – the bacteria in the nematode gut isn’t found anywhere else in the world, doesn’t survive outside of the symbiosis and neither can exist without the other! It is fascinating and gross like basically everything in Entomology and that is why I love it.
Plus we’re finding a way to weaponise the nematodes so that they can be applied to grapevines to control pests. So we’re basically saving wine.
So cool, Julie! Always love hearing about your neat job.
We have three queens, each with her own colony (who I have named Yonce, Nicki and RihRih)
Also, I just finished reading The Bees, so this article was perfectly timed for me. Thank you!
Ooh, how did you like The Bees?
I'm not sure how humane this is, but I trace their path and the area around whatever they're raiding with lavender oil. It makes my skin tingle to be near it but I don't think it actively hurts the ants, just smells really off-putting. (That's my hope at least. I don't want to be burning the poor things.) HOWEVER this has in some cases just strengthened their resolve sooo who knows. It's always my first line of defense though.