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Good news regarding my Messor colony! I left the new queen with the lesser workers while I went on holiday for a week, and it looks like she's been accepted. There's one worker that now chills with her in her tube, and the rest seem content to hang around not killing her. I've added some of the medium workers back into her enclosure along with some dead fruit flies and hopefully we can get egg production going again. There's a major worker still in the old enclosure that I think I'll leave there in a quiet retirement. She attacked the queen last time they met, and she's got a set of jaws on her like crab claws. Frankly she intimidates me a little, and could easily kill the queen if she wanted.
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# ? Sep 27, 2020 20:20 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:04 |
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-19/unique-wa-plants-adapt-to-allow-for-ant-pollination/12350088 Ants are so crazy in Australia that plants adapt to them!
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# ? Sep 28, 2020 03:23 |
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Out of curiousity what's the best way to kill and sterilize feeder insects? I'm assuming y'all don't just chuck in live animals like you would for say, a big arachnid.
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# ? Sep 28, 2020 21:08 |
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Out of curiousity what's the best way to kill and sterilize feeder insects? I'm assuming y'all don't just chuck in live animals like you would for say, a big arachnid. I think there's a risk to catching live insects re: grasshoppers because perhaps they can carry insecticides and bacteria. I think I've read the best thing to do is to freeze+boil caught feeders but honestly I just buy mine from the pet shop.
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# ? Sep 28, 2020 22:46 |
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Depending on the size of the animal I'd recommend killing and then boiling them over, that's what I usually do. Fruit flies I just cover in boiling water, crickets and bigger I usually cut through and then put them in boiling water for a minute. Afterwards I take them out, dry them using a paper towel and they're ready to go. That should kill off pretty much all parasites and I do that disregarding if I bought or caught them, just to be safe. Since I also got a scorpion and a spider, those need to get living crickets or bigger stuff, there I just try to make sure they're not visibly sick or infested. Roaches or locusts, as well as rodents and bigger guys, you also can wash a little before feeding, at least to check for obvious stuff.
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# ? Sep 28, 2020 23:22 |
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In preparation for winter I had to remove the tubes connecting the first and the second outworld and by doing so I removed a small stone I offer water in. Underneath, again, I found another, newly constructed satellite nest my ants had built, full of larvae. I'm not sure why they do this for the larvae - pupae would make sense since it's a lot less humid there than in the nest and pupae don't like it too humid - but they've proven time and time again and they will take this satellite nest no matter what I try to do to convince them otherwise. The only explanation I have is that they have problems keeping the larvae from eating eggs and pupae - a common problem for all ant species, the larvae are blind and will try to eat literally everything in range of their mouths - and so they want to play safe. Either way, by opening it up, I triggered full alarm, needed to distract them by using an attacking cricket to draw their attention away and then remove the tube next to the satellite nest. In there, I got a unique photo of this super cute ant: A white ant! This species is always very dark brown to deep black, so this is a special sight. It is, however, not an albino ant or something, it's actually a freshly hatched baby ant. She must have hatched from her cocoon a few hours ago, probably in the morning 4 to 7 hours ago. Her exoskeleton is not yet hardened and very very soft and vulnerable, it takes around 8 to 12 hours for it to harden fully, turning black. Usually these babies never, ever leave the nest as they are so vulnerable to everything, and due to the very short duration they look like this, it is extraordinarily rare to see one. Poor little girl was completely lost, her antennae cannot smell very well yet as that, too, needs some time to harden and adjust. Also she is very sensitive to light, so she just stumbled across, helplessly looking for her sisters to lead the way. That did happen after a few seconds, another ant came by, grabbed her antenna with her mandible, and carefully led the way towards the nest. In a few hours she'll be all black and fully functional, then she can tell the others her exciting story of how she got lost during complete chaos and thought the world has vanished around her.
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# ? Oct 8, 2020 12:35 |
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Welcome to the world baby ant!
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# ? Oct 8, 2020 19:20 |
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aphid_licker posted:Suddenly there's what kinda looks like a gigantic amount of eggs in the terrarium This thread continues to entertain and educate! There's a spot by the river here (SW Virginia) that I like to sit at and sketch. There's one fallen tree that's comfy to sit on, and the other day when crouched down to fetch a pencil I'd dropped, I saw those same fuzzy white things attached to the underside of "my" tree! Was wondering what the heck it was, didn't seem like eggs but the clumpy nature (balls about the size a pea) didn't suggest fungus. And yay, baby ant! Do ants hatch all at once, over the course of a few hours like most fish that I've kept do? And do they give indications that the hatching is imminent? Like when my Jack Dempseys spawned, I'd wake up about 3 days after the eggs were laid, check the nest, and they'd be jiggling. Then I'd come home after work to "welp, now I have 2+100 Jack Dempseys".
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 19:43 |
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Goons Are Great posted:In preparation for winter I had to remove the tubes connecting the first and the second outworld and by doing so I removed a small stone I offer water in. Underneath, again, I found another, newly constructed satellite nest my ants had built, full of larvae. I'm not sure why they do this for the larvae - pupae would make sense since it's a lot less humid there than in the nest and pupae don't like it too humid - but they've proven time and time again and they will take this satellite nest no matter what I try to do to convince them otherwise. The only explanation I have is that they have problems keeping the larvae from eating eggs and pupae - a common problem for all ant species, the larvae are blind and will try to eat literally everything in range of their mouths - and so they want to play safe. Weird to think she’s all grown up now. This thread has made me stop and stare and be fascinated by ants like when I was a little kid and I love it. There’s a colony living in a crack in the asphalt right outside my place and I’ve decided they’re my best pals. I keep meaning to take a picture of them and post it to see if y’all can tell me what species they are. They were dismantling a pigeon carcass this morning. Feast, little friends.
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 20:35 |
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Slime mold aren't actually a fungus, they are collection of strange groups that are entirely separate. In fact, plants, fungus and animal are more closely related to each other than we are to any slime mold group. Some of them act like one giant weird cell smeared over the ground, and some of them act like millions of separate amoeba up until they decide to clump together and sporulate. They are all very strange, and my rule of thumb if I can't identify something then it's probably a slime mold fruiting body.
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 21:00 |
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Apparently there are "ant crickets" that join up with yellow crazy ants! The yellow crazy ants seem to think they're like long lost cousins or something and feed them and give them stuff to do. "How do you do fellow ants?"
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 21:04 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:Apparently there are "ant crickets" that join up with yellow crazy ants! The yellow crazy ants seem to think they're like long lost cousins or something and feed them and give them stuff to do. Semirelated: A lot of stick insect species have the very first stage after hatching look like an ant. Lot of stick insect eggs get picked up by ants (some even have a little nutritious handle that gets nibbled off by the ants), so lots of stick insects hatch out in ant nests. They aren't particularly sofisticated mimics, so they mostly just run at very non-stick insect speeds and get out of Dodge as fast as they can before a real ant notices the difference. After the first moult they them slow down and look like a stick.
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 21:13 |
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Haha, basically the "I made this!" meme.
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 21:17 |
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JacquelineDempsey posted:This thread continues to entertain and educate! There's a spot by the river here (SW Virginia) that I like to sit at and sketch. There's one fallen tree that's comfy to sit on, and the other day when crouched down to fetch a pencil I'd dropped, I saw those same fuzzy white things attached to the underside of "my" tree! Was wondering what the heck it was, didn't seem like eggs but the clumpy nature (balls about the size a pea) didn't suggest fungus. I know next to nothing about fungi but my impression is that they can look like anything whatsoever. Seriously, there are some wildass looking fungi out there. Terrarium update, I had two actual mushrooms sprout in there and had to evict more pillbugs. No mold tho, which is nice, and it still smells properly wet-forest-y. Any time pillbugs are mentioned on gardening forums there'll be some bleeding heart do-gooder who says to leave them alone, they only eat rotting material but man lemme tell you, these guys will absolutely shred anything that looks like a plant.
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 23:31 |
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aphid_licker posted:I know next to nothing about fungi but my impression is that they can look like anything whatsoever. Seriously, there are some wildass looking fungi out there. Why not let the ants eat them or is this terrarium not really for ants?
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# ? Oct 10, 2020 23:39 |
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JacquelineDempsey posted:
They don't really sync their hatch rate, but the other ants decide when it's time to hatch, usually based on movement inside the cocoon. The ready to hatch ant inside the cocoon does not have strong enough mandibles to cut through the silk, so when ready they move back and forth and try to chew on the cocoon, which indicates their will to hatch. Then another brood worker ant comes by and cuts open the cocoon from outside to let them out, sometimes they also do so a little earlier than usual if they need mandibles on deck. Afterwards she wanders around the nest, gets to know her sisters and perhaps even her royal majesty and waits for her exoskeleton to harden. This is the rather primal way of hatching. Evolutionary advanced species even got rid of the cocoon altogether, as it's a remnant from the past when protecting the babies with silk was necessary, as civil war broke lose and endangered unborn kids to be killed by overthrowing ant renegades (as still happens in some primal ant species and those lacking a specified queen caste). Many temperate species today kept the cocoon for climate regulation reasons by now, but it's of lesser use now compared to then. Super modern ants, basically the evolutionary beta, actually developed these: Naked pupae. The ant is going through metamorphosis like this, not making a cocoon anymore. These ants just wake up when done, their exoskeleton hardens a lot faster and they can get started easier than they could when breaking through the cocoon, plus it saves resources and allows them to get rid of the silk organs in favor of new stuff.
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 12:53 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:Why not let the ants eat them or is this terrarium not really for ants? Ya I'm still posting in here out of inertia but I veered from the ant project into a forest moss terrarium thingy instead
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 13:12 |
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Goons Are Great posted:They don't really sync their hatch rate, but the other ants decide when it's time to hatch, usually based on movement inside the cocoon. The ready to hatch ant inside the cocoon does not have strong enough mandibles to cut through the silk, so when ready they move back and forth and try to chew on the cocoon, which indicates their will to hatch. Then another brood worker ant comes by and cuts open the cocoon from outside to let them out, sometimes they also do so a little earlier than usual if they need mandibles on deck. Afterwards she wanders around the nest, gets to know her sisters and perhaps even her royal majesty and waits for her exoskeleton to harden. I think my Myrmica do it this way?
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 15:39 |
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Interesting thread but let me be (I think) the first one to say "gently caress ants". I hate them and they creep me right out with their chilling efficiency, naked aggression and willingness to self sacrifice. I live in Florida and jesus christ I swear to god the fire ants that live here have it on for me. I've been severely stung or swarmed at least 5 times by these motherfuckers. When I first moved here the first time I learned about these special little guys, I went to a party and kicked off my canvas boat shoes by the front door. As I was driving home, I began to experience what I can only describe as a burning injection into my foot and between my toes. I couldn't figure it out but my foot literally felt like it was on fire. Turns out, a bunch of fire ants crawled into my shoe. My foot swelled up like an eggplant and was covered in these tiny, puss oozing blisters for over a week. I couldn't wear sneakers or anything besides sandals or flip flops. The second time, I was sitting and fishing along the river, leaned down resting my left hand on the ground to do something and stuck it right in a nest without realizing it. A half hour later, I was having trouble breathing and my arm started to look like a sweet potato, cutting off the circulation to my hand and sending me to the ER. You'd think at this point I'd learn to watch where I sit and walk but nope. This time I sat almost directly on top of a nest while wearing shorts and they hosed up my thigh and lower calf. I was really terrified they were crawling on me, were making their way up my towards my crotch and did what I'm sure must have been a really entertaining dance for everyone in the park. Again, I swelled up like the elephant man. I've learned to be more careful but those bitches seem to have it out for me and can sense my extreme allergy. I've caught some subsequent stings while doing yard work and poo poo but have gotten substantially better with my "don't sit on the ground in Florida" and "Always wear shoes" policy. ... Ants (and hornets and wasps) just give my the heebie jeebies. They look so MEAN close up and watching them swarm on anything with that angry herd mentality skeeves me right the gently caress out. Sorry to interrupt everyone's Ant Love discussion but I figured I'd way in from an alternative angle of "gently caress them". It only takes maybe 4 or 5 concentrated stings for wherever I was attacked to swell up like a balloon and make that part of my body look like I'm wearing a fat suit. I know it's my fault for disturbing their nest but holy poo poo I find them terrifying and those fuckers won't listen to explanation or reason.
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 17:16 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:I think my Myrmica do it this way? Ya most Myrmica are known to do this. The usually big nests, huge numbers and often polygynous nature of most species enabled them to reduce extra protection in favor of efficiency. BiggerBoat posted:
Heh that's fine, I totally get if someone doesn't like ants or their typically aggressive behavior. They believe they own this planet as much as we do and you're around as allergic to them as they are to your foot inside their nest. It's like how people usually hate flies and mosquitoes for being dicks, but it's in their nature to behave the way they do just as it's in our nature to be annoyed by them. We are largely incompatible to each other.
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 18:05 |
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I wish I had a colony of Solenopsis Geminata or Invictus up here. My Myrmica rubra are basically the closest I got. So far while my campos all entered hibernation early, my rubra still seem active. My pharaoh's seem to have a massive pile of eggs assuming my eyes aren't tricking me. They're also excavating into the cotton and digging into it for material.
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 18:10 |
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Pharaohs are ruthless My Lasius seem to finally get the call of nature to move their larvae out of the reconstructed satellite nest now that I'm cooling them down slowly from 20 to right now 15°C over the past few days. I've seen them moving larvae around into the nest. I hope I can get the pupae out of the cooker before November hits and they go to full sleep mode, last year they lost quite some brood over freezing babies, which nourished them early in spring but still was a bummer. Poor babies.
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 18:35 |
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Goons Are Great posted:Heh that's fine, I totally get if someone doesn't like ants or their typically aggressive behavior. They believe they own this planet as much as we do and you're around as allergic to them as they are to your foot inside their nest. Except they simply refuse to accept my humble and sincere apologies whenever I gently caress up. I'm not looking for trouble with these jerks. My handwritten letter to the nest I stepped on went unanswered and was never even acknowledged. Yeah, real classy, ants. Also, that hiding in my shoe, laying in wait, total dickhead ambush and stinging me on my drive home from a party was some bullshit so they loving started it as far as I'm concerned. I almost wrecked my car flopping my foot around the gas and the break pedals and it wasn't like I put sugar cubes or bread crumbs in my disgusting canvas boat shoe to lead them on either. They planned that poo poo. As we stand in this moment in time, ants can all get hosed and are free to contact my attorney.
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# ? Oct 11, 2020 22:35 |
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Latest news from the throne of the Pharaohs! Yup that's brood.
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# ? Oct 13, 2020 21:13 |
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Australian ant news. We're being invaded by ants! Well, more than usual. https://www.theguardian.com/austral...vationists-warn quote:
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# ? Oct 14, 2020 04:13 |
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https://twitter.com/DanielKronauer/status/1317099062823444483
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# ? Oct 16, 2020 22:03 |
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https://twitter.com/batshaped/statu...ber%3D1621pti22
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# ? Oct 17, 2020 20:47 |
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I know the future is going to be ant protein to replace burger meat but this seems a little sudden!
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# ? Oct 17, 2020 21:28 |
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Formic acid does taste a lot like lemon, yeah.
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# ? Oct 17, 2020 21:31 |
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Goons Are Great posted:Formic acid does taste a lot like lemon, yeah. This reminds me how we cultivated spicy foods for eating despite the fact that the spiceness was an evolutionary adaptation meant to protect these plants from predators!
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# ? Oct 17, 2020 22:00 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:This reminds me how we cultivated spicy foods for eating despite the fact that the spiceness was an evolutionary adaptation meant to protect these plants from predators! And now huge numbers of these plants are growing all over the world. It worked!
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# ? Oct 18, 2020 00:55 |
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i have these tiny little ants crawl into my dogs food bowl and i just lightly tap it onto the ground to get them out. am i hurting them? im legitimatally just trying to get them out because i just trained my dog to stop eatting ants and im afraid she will relapse if i let her eat an ant. before you ask on a walk she stoped to dig alittle and i was watching her but once she dug it up i quickly realised it was a bone with a million little ants on it and i grabbed it out of her mouth but in those few seconds she ate ants. she eventually started just licking them up off the ground and because ants can carry ant poison ide prefer if she didnt eat ants.
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# ? Oct 19, 2020 20:13 |
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Yeah it's better to not have your pets eat feral ants, just in case someone nearby is poisoning them. An easy trick to always pick up ants without harming them is by using a fluffy ball of cotton wool. They'll get stuck on it and it's soft enough to not damage the in general very stable exoskeleton. I'd doubt you hurt them before though, if you can pick them up and they run away after letting down, they're probably fine.
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# ? Oct 19, 2020 21:38 |
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On the other hand feral/wild ants are like, probably very probably well established and like, you're own health and comfort and your pet's health and comfort is the priority. Lets not dwell on how I let my bathroom get overrun by pharaoh's for weeks though... (In fairness, I did end up capturing them and now the numbers of workers in my bathroom has dropped considerably). Also the ant keeping discord suggests that my pharaoh queen will likely at some point lay queen eggs who will probably commit incest with their siblings and soon I'll have an infinite supply of queens; is this probable? Because I got people in the discord lining up around the block wanting to buy/trade me for spare pharaonis queens; for some reason these hillbilly ants are absurdly popular in Canada. The explanation I got is that they are kinda like a "legal" species of exotics in a country where its really difficult in importing such species unless someone is lucky and managed to grab "greenhouse" ants (i.e exotic ant colonies imported via importing tropical plants). fake edit: Why did you change your name! Very suss!
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# ? Oct 20, 2020 01:54 |
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Pharaoh queens are hard to get, so yeah this seems reasonable. The incest part can happen, yup. Due to the nature of ant intercourse, where one queen mates with dozens of males, incest is a relative term here and it's getting increasingly likely and genetically fine to engage in sex between ant siblings, as the recombination of genetic material makes it increasingly likely that new stuff will happen and bad stuff cannot stay in there well. It still, however, drastically limits the genetic material and thus offers risk for the babies, but ants are in general quite good at house keeping their genetic backyard and will relentlessly kill individuals that engage in biologically bad behavior, which is why mega colonies can happen and thrive so extremely well. So yes, this is quite probable and people will happily get in line to get a healthy pharaoh queen of yours!
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# ? Oct 20, 2020 08:03 |
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Def tell me if my using this as the generic crawly creature thread is unwelcome but this is pretty wow: https://twitter.com/just_whatever/status/1319232676684025856
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# ? Oct 22, 2020 16:05 |
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aphid_licker posted:Def tell me if my using this as the generic crawly creature thread is unwelcome but this is pretty wow: That honestly kind of freaks me out. Lovecraftian vibes.
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# ? Oct 22, 2020 16:37 |
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Holy loving poo poo that is absolutely amazing
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# ? Oct 22, 2020 16:43 |
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2022 ends with me being devoured by a swarm of reanimated Russian ice worms
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# ? Oct 26, 2020 04:55 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:04 |
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That's a startling and disturbing number of queens all of a sudden.
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# ? Oct 29, 2020 17:09 |