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Stoner Sloth

alnilam posted:

I want to know literally anything about cool ants and bugs







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

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lol but

body is a dinosaur
yo ant crew, do ants like getting liquored up like fruit flies seem to?

Goons Are Gifts

lol but seriously posted:

yo ant crew, do ants like getting liquored up like fruit flies seem to?

Technically!
Fruit flies love those because of the fermented grains or fruits in there, because of chemical magic! The long story short, when alcohol is made we just take stuff that has various kinds of sugar in it. The bacteria and fungus used during fermentation use that sugar to produce energy and produce alcohol out of it, because this happens in an environment that has no oxygen around. However, a lot of magic happens and also not all of the sugar and other stuff that offers tons of energy stay in there, so, in general, liquor tends to have energy in it!
This energy is what the flies are after. For them it tastes amazingly sweet and nice, the alcohol is however unhealthy and also toxic for them. That's why you can easily find a ton of flies on a small patch of dried beer, but they usually won't directly fly into your glass.

Just as flies, ants are also into this kind of free energy, so yes, they will try it when they can. As they do not have those amazingly practical trunks to suck it up, they are less efficient at it and won't really bother with it, also the alcohol would still be very toxic for them, so they might intoxicate and probably hurt themselves in the process.


Stoner Sloth

Goons Are Great posted:

Technically!
Fruit flies love those because of the fermented grains or fruits in there, because of chemical magic! The long story short, when alcohol is made we just take stuff that has various kinds of sugar in it. The bacteria and fungus used during fermentation use that sugar to produce energy and produce alcohol out of it, because this happens in an environment that has no oxygen around. However, a lot of magic happens and also not all of the sugar and other stuff that offers tons of energy stay in there, so, in general, liquor tends to have energy in it!
This energy is what the flies are after. For them it tastes amazingly sweet and nice, the alcohol is however unhealthy and also toxic for them. That's why you can easily find a ton of flies on a small patch of dried beer, but they usually won't directly fly into your glass.

Just as flies, ants are also into this kind of free energy, so yes, they will try it when they can. As they do not have those amazingly practical trunks to suck it up, they are less efficient at it and won't really bother with it, also the alcohol would still be very toxic for them, so they might intoxicate and probably hurt themselves in the process.

Also my brother's dog used to do this too - he'd go eat fermented fruit from citrus trees in the backyard and then stagger around merrily for awhile. And knock over ppls booze so he'd get some. Big fat party animal of a dog.

Glad to hear the ant frens have plenty of room to grow into and can easily get extensions for thier house too!







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

lol but

body is a dinosaur

Goons Are Great posted:

Technically!
Fruit flies love those because of the fermented grains or fruits in there, because of chemical magic! The long story short, when alcohol is made we just take stuff that has various kinds of sugar in it. The bacteria and fungus used during fermentation use that sugar to produce energy and produce alcohol out of it, because this happens in an environment that has no oxygen around. However, a lot of magic happens and also not all of the sugar and other stuff that offers tons of energy stay in there, so, in general, liquor tends to have energy in it!
This energy is what the flies are after. For them it tastes amazingly sweet and nice, the alcohol is however unhealthy and also toxic for them. That's why you can easily find a ton of flies on a small patch of dried beer, but they usually won't directly fly into your glass.

Just as flies, ants are also into this kind of free energy, so yes, they will try it when they can. As they do not have those amazingly practical trunks to suck it up, they are less efficient at it and won't really bother with it, also the alcohol would still be very toxic for them, so they might intoxicate and probably hurt themselves in the process.

thankyoy

Goons Are Gifts

Okay so, I really feel like another huge effort post right now, so before I get started on reworking the outworld, let's talk about a super special thing that shaped evolution for basically every living thing: Parasitism!



You know the nasty idea of having a weird worm living inside a colon? You know that fungus that infects ants and bees and mind controls them until their heads explode? You know about fishes swimming into your dingdong while peeing into a South American river?
This is parasitism! An organism living alongside another organism while damaging it in one way or another. Parasitoids additionally kill their host once they are done with them. Sounds terrible and horrifying? It is! However, it's a very, very important part of life and accompanied it since the very first cells evolved, almost 4,5 billion years ago! Viruses and bacteria infecting you and making you ill are technically nothing but parasites for you. There are parasites for humans, dogs, trees, flowers, mushrooms, even bacteria or archaea! If it lives, there probably is one or several parasites or infections for it.
It is the counterpart of symbiosis, the act of two organisms living together in harmony and benefiting each other, or Commensalism, when two organisms live each other with benefit for one, but no harm or benefit the other one.

You might be wondering now, what the gently caress does this have to do with amazing ants building nations and marching towards victory? Well, because it does! Ants, as well as bees, wasps and hornets not only are affected by other species being parasites towards them, no, they developed parasitism in an extremely specialized form. They don't parasitize a host organism, they parasitize the social structure other ants developed. As such, they are parasites for other colonies and infest the super organism that the colony resembles. This process is called Social Parasitism.

Very similar to ant slavery (which is in fact also some kind of parasitism, only on a more abstract way, as the host is basically robbed and taken elsewhere), social parasitic ants happen a lot in European and Asian ant species, it happens less often in tropical areas, but is always possible.
For ants, we distinguish between temporary social parasitism and social parasitic inquilism.

Temporary social parasitism is by far the most common form. It is fairly easy: A pregnant queen of a parasitic ant species mates with tons of males like usual, but then instead of founding her own colony in a founding tube, she instead searches for a suitable host nest.
She lands nearby and inspects her target carefully. She wants to get in and this requires her to sneak by the workers. Given that ants have an insane ability to smell (if you think dogs are able to nose something, you haven't seen ants. It's their most important sense and by far exceeds their visual abilities), it's practically impossible to do so undetected. So instead there are various ways to deceit the target's soldiers: Rub your body with pheromones coming out of your butt and pray that it works, stalk and hunt down a single worker and bath in his blood so that you smell like him, kill a worker and carry him on your body while going in and hope it works. There's a great chance to be discovered, roughly 90% of attempts end up with the parasitic queen being discovered and either shoo-ed away, or immediately be attacked and hurt or killed. If all else fails, there also is a very possible way of the pregnant queen starting a killing spree and brutally tear apart every worker she can find, until the remaining ones submit and leave her be.
If either of this does work, she can enter the colony and the (remaining) workers (for the moment) accept her as theirs, or at least don't bother her. The intruding queen makes her way to the colony's queen and immediately kills her, if she's able to, or she asks the workers that believe that she is indeed part of their colony to come and help her kill their own queen.
Once this happened, the colony is inevitably doomed. The parasitic queen will replace the original one and start bearing kids. The remaining workers are either whipped into submission or convinced via pheromones she stole from the original queen (usually both and there always is some kind of suspicion in the nest, so civil wars can happen) and start serving their new queen. The parasitic queen of course will only be able to produce eggs for her own species, so that the host ants take care for another species and raise them as their own. The parasite workers will at some point outnumber the original ones (since they can't reproduce without their queen) and at this point kill the remaining host workers, reforming the entire colony into a now fully grown parasitic colony that can then produce new queens and continue the cycle of life.

Inquilism however is different to this. As it requires extremely specialized strategies and a long time of co-evolution, it is very rare, but also extremely fascinating. The most famous species doing this is Tetramorium inquilinum. What makes them special? Well, those ants do not have any workers at all. There are only males and queens. As such, this species is strictly speaking not eusocial, however as it still depends on other ants being eusocial and is only able to live in eusocial colonies like every other ant ever known, biologists do not count her as solitary ant.



This is one of their queens. Noticed something? Yeah, not only is she quite small for a queen, but look at the legs, or better, what's left of them. They were not removed for this picture, but this species almost has no legs at all. Ironically, they don't need it and evolution removes whatever is not needed over time. Give them more time in evolution and they will disappear entirely.
They can hardly move. They can creep forwards slowly and clumsily, they are incapable of climbing a hill and obviously digging is absolutely impossible. They do not have any venom or stinger, their butt is unable to remove the poop properly, it half-way sticks to it. They can't see well, even their antenna are reduced, so that they can smell less amazingly than basically every other worker. No kidding, they do not have any mandibles or teeth and are unable to eat anything else but liquid juice directly placed on their mouth, which makes them essentially unable to nourish themselves, not to say laying eggs or even cleaning their bodies.
Once they lose their wings after mating, the queen is essentially a helpless bag of meat lying around. Sounds brutally dumb for evolution to do? Not at all, evolution favors those who can adapt, not those who are weak and unable to do things. These ladies are far away from being helpless, they are cunning masters of deceit and were able to reduce every basic function almost all other animals have, because they don't need it.

A queen lands nearby another nest and is able to produce a pheromone that instantly and with an so far not explainable success rate convinces every worker nearby that she is not only part of the colony, but she is basically a goddess. Workers swarm out and pick her up, feed her with every food they have by directly sticking it in her mouth. They wash her, they lick her, they love her. They bring her to their normal queen, which now is almost ignored by them, and place her on top of her. The parasite is able to hook herself up to the original queen and will never move again for the rest of her life. The host queen has to carry her around until she dies:


(this is just an animation of another species, as you can see, those actually have legs. Tetramorium inquilium instead have two hook-like "legs" that they use to pierce their host queen's exoskeleton.)

This can reach absurd dimensions, including host queens covered by multiple parasite queens, leaving her unable to move. The workers take care of the parasite until she lays eggs, many males, a few queens. The workers of course will take loving care for the intruders. Meanwhile they almost ignore their real queen, which sometimes leads to the weird result in the parasite feeding her host so that she doesn't die and leave the parasite to die as well. The new queens and males go out and mate, until the queens are pregnant again and find a new nest.

If you think mind controlling mushrooms are scary, think about a species tricking an entire different species nourishing them and never even questioning what the gently caress they are doing. :science:

Goons Are Gifts fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Apr 17, 2019


Goons Are Gifts

Sorry, this one turned even longer than expected, but there are soooo many details to this and I already boiled it down a lot. Enjoy science information anyways!!


lol but

body is a dinosaur

Goons Are Great posted:

long words about hosed mind control ants

holy poo poo

Goons Are Great posted:

Sorry, this one turned even longer than expected, but there are soooo many details to this and I already boiled it down a lot. Enjoy science information anyways!!

you did good

Stoner Sloth


Very interesting GAG! Amazing how much evolution can pare a critter down to the essentials necessary for its' survival.







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

Goons Are Gifts

Given the wild growth this thread has seen, I edited the op and included links to my annoyingly long effort posts, because holy poo poo I couldn't find my own posts due to :words:!!


Stoner Sloth

Goons Are Great posted:

Given the wild growth this thread has seen, I edited the op and included links to my annoyingly long effort posts, because holy poo poo I couldn't find my own posts due to :words:!!

Haha - thanks mate, that's really cool - you've given me quite a high bar for quality effort posts to try to reach for toxin crew (loving around and trying to get things ordered in a word doc before I start) and the links are also a really good idea for that too cause I'll probably spend a bit of time on some of the fundamentals of toxicology to make later posts easier to understand for people without the background :)







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

Goons Are Gifts

Stoner Sloth posted:

Haha - thanks mate, that's really cool - you've given me quite a high bar for quality effort posts to try to reach for toxin crew (loving around and trying to get things ordered in a word doc before I start) and the links are also a really good idea for that too cause I'll probably spend a bit of time on some of the fundamentals of toxicology to make later posts easier to understand for people without the background :)

Oh God don't hold up this mess of me posting five pages of :words: about insects as a standard. :sun:
I usually just start writing from the top of my head and start explaining and detailing out and suddenly the posts are long and detailed, maybe look some detail up real quick, then I redact a ton of stuff that goes too deep or is simply irrelevant and there we go with a still huge effort post. I just enjoy to write a lot of words and add some pictures or shopping hats on ants for fun, just do what you feel like and it will still be amazing!!
Remember that most of us here will not know terrible much about toxin crew, so it's completely fair to start off easy and small and add details as people ask or as you need them for additional posts.

This is still byob after all, having fun while posting and while reading posts is all that matters!! :justpost:


xcheopis


I like your effort posts.

I'd probably like the effort posts on toxic animals but that includes spiders and I loathe spiders.

Stoner Sloth

Goons Are Great posted:

Oh God don't hold up this mess of me posting five pages of :words: about insects as a standard. :sun:
I usually just start writing from the top of my head and start explaining and detailing out and suddenly the posts are long and detailed, maybe look some detail up real quick, then I redact a ton of stuff that goes too deep or is simply irrelevant and there we go with a still huge effort post. I just enjoy to write a lot of words and add some pictures or shopping hats on ants for fun, just do what you feel like and it will still be amazing!!
Remember that most of us here will not know terrible much about toxin crew, so it's completely fair to start off easy and small and add details as people ask or as you need them for additional posts.

This is still byob after all, having fun while posting and while reading posts is all that matters!! :justpost:

Well I think they've been great my friend!

I'm going to try to keep mine simple initially - there's some basic sort of things that will help everyone get a bit of grounding and then I can go into more specific stuff and answer questions if I've been unclear or people think of something else. That and I can sort of move through categories of dangerous critters... think I know which I'm going to start with and it's not spiders or snakes but I'm sure I'll get to them eventually! Which also brings me to...


xcheopis posted:

I like your effort posts.

I'd probably like the effort posts on toxic animals but that includes spiders and I loathe spiders.

I'm happy to put spoiler tags or something on images of animals that some people aren't cool with so that they can easily enjoy the thread without having to worry about stuff that creeps them out leaping out at them. I'll probably want to do that if I post anything with pictures about some of the results of envenomation with certain types of venom too it can be... graphic.

But also as I say, I'll probably leave spiders for a little bit and focus on some other interesting beasties that tend not to get as much airplay as spiders and snakes. And I'll be doing a bit about jumping spiders and ulaboridae neither of which are terribly scary for those who find most [spoiler]spiders a bit much. Not sure if any of that helps I'm happy to take other suggestions - wanna make it a friendly and chill thread with hopefully a few interesting things to read for all yobbers :)

Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Apr 21, 2019







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

Manifisto


this is some very cool stuff, even if occasionaly :stonk:, thank you for writing it up!


ty nesamdoom!

Nosfereefer

IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM

alnilam posted:

I want to know literally anything about cool ants and bugs

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Nosfereefer

IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM
seriously, the ants have farming, baking, warfare, and even highly exploitative economic structures figured out even better than us

we should just let them run the entire show

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Nosfereefer

IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM
wait, has anyone checked if, say, queen elizabeth has any pheromone-spewing ants attached to her...?

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Stoner Sloth

Nosfereefer posted:

seriously, the ants have farming, baking, warfare, and even highly exploitative economic structures figured out even better than us

we should just let them run the entire show

"Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species". E.O Wilson

So probably comrade.







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

Goons Are Gifts

If the Queen would have this kind of power, I'm sure Brexit wouldn't be a mess. :rimshot:

On a scientific note, I personally find it extremely fascinating to see ants communicate in general. Imagine this happening for humans: They are efficient, they are clear, there is no misunderstanding, no lies, no personal grudges that hinder communication. They just talk using chemistry and it works!
Communication based on sounds made by moving air and wiggling tongue and lips alongside appears such a bad thing compared to what ants are capable of doing!!


Nosfereefer

IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM

Goons Are Great posted:

If the Queen would have this kind of power, I'm sure Brexit wouldn't be a mess. :rimshot:

On a scientific note, I personally find it extremely fascinating to see ants communicate in general. Imagine this happening for humans: They are efficient, they are clear, there is no misunderstanding, no lies, no personal grudges that hinder communication. They just talk using chemistry and it works!
Communication based on sounds made by moving air and wiggling tongue and lips alongside appears such a bad thing compared to what ants are capable of doing!!

i'll have you know that i communicate v. efficiently via farting

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Nosfereefer

IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM
also, from what i'm reading there are a lot of lies involving ant chemical communication (which is going to be my new synth band's name)

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Nosfereefer

IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM
butt based bluffs

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Goons Are Gifts

Oh yeah okay, that's right, lies from parasites. Terrible ones even, as they seem to even better at lying than we humans are, by far.
However, no lies between two workers of the same colony, they are working together at all times towards the good of their colony. Parasites come from outside and use that trickery to exploit the system though, as they have other goals in mind.

Additionally, there is another weakness regarding ant language, as there is the chance of this happening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0HoqjxfvJ4

Which is a rare and terrible communication problem. One ant lays a pheromone track, wind or other external factors coincidentally mix it all up and it leads to a circular shape- Then another ant thinks this is the way to go (as they mainly rely on smell to navigate) and also laying another pheromone track, with another ant coming and doing the same. This leads to a terrible stack of pheromones being concentrated in this shape, every ant moving adds more to it, strengthening the literal vicious circle even more, until it is so strong that the ants believe this is an emergency and they need to use this track to flee, going faster and faster, telling more ants to come here and flee this way. The ants will march around this track, believing it is the way to go, forever and ever, until they die of exhaustion or any brave scout ants manages to escape the chemical urge to stay there and lays a new track elsewhere, which still only saves a few of them.

In this case, their efficient language is actually too good and no one doubting it leads to their doom.


lol but

body is a dinosaur
:antdrugs: needs to be a thing

Goons Are Gifts

Today I spent a few hours in digging into the outworld, it was time to make things right.
As I said before, there was some biological experiment going on that kinda ended up badly for my ants. To sum it up very quickly: You know when you place a flower pot with moist humus on your window and in summer at some point stuff starts growing in there, if you keep it moist?
This is more or less what happened here, only on an invertebrate level.

I had this outworld setup with nothing but basic ground and some humus, added some sticks from outside and just waited to see what happened. It was in late autumn last year when I did that and then deep European winter hit, so not much happened for a while. However, slowly, some invertebrates and small plants started to develop in there that I carried in with the sticks and just lone animals that searched for safety in the warmth of my home and ended up in there. The main population however were Springtails, which I added manually because I wanted them to be in there, as they are decomposer and they would be able to break down the trash my (then later-to-come) ants would produce.
Short description of what these guys are:


Springtails are not insects (in taxonomy, insects are a class in the phylum Arthropods. Springtails are arthropods, but belong to the class of Springtails, or Collumbola. That means they are related to insects in general, without being insects.
They got six legs, are very small (0,1mm-2mm tops usually, mine are at ~0,3mm, but there are several species with various sizes, so) and mainly eat large chunks of bacteria, fungi, fruits and juices, but also dead insects and plant matter. They break them down using their spiky tongues and thus provide small enough pieces for even smaller decomposers, like bacteria, to start eating as well and pooping out minerals that then go back into plants. As such, they perform absolutely vital roles in every habitat and are also basically present everywhere. If you ever saw tiny white, brown, black or whatever dots moving any amount of earth - that's them. Go out into your garden, grab a hand of earth and I can guarantee you have at least 20 springtails in your hand. They're friends!

So, this is how this setup looked today, before I started working on it:


As you can see, stuff does not exactly look life friendly and growing. A fungus had started to grow on the ground itself, infesting the entire thing and sucking up all moisture I added over time. The entire thing was dried out to a huge brick of earth when I put it out today. The humus on top was doing fine, but by far not enough to support complex lifeforms like invertebrates. Water wasn't able to break the ground anymore and the springtails started to assume this is drought, so they hid themselves beneath the moss you can see in the middle, waiting for water to come. Water did come constantly, but it never really made the ground wet anymore, it just landed and started to evaporate and dry again.
A few weeks longer and most likely all of them would have been dead. Other animals I had in there, like a small bug and several super small earth worms already went extinct entirely and I can't even imagine the numbers of casualties the springtails had to suffer over time.

So I spent hours collecting the tiny buddies, which is a tough job given their size and their ability to jump all the time and their mean tendency to not trust a monkey digging through their home, tried to separate them from other animals I found that I didn't want in the setup, like masses of mites and generally took out everything that I could, to minimize the risk of re-infecting the setup with unwanted stuff.
I couldn't save them all, so a good portion of animals got thrown out without me being able to collect them, but I tried to minimize deaths by emptying the stuff out in the garden. Then cleaned the entire thing entirely, even found some loving algae growing in the watering place, and rebuilt the entire thing.
Now with tiny pebbles as the ground layer to store water overflow, a thin layer of forest earth (bought, not collected obviously, as that would have infected the thing with unspeakable horrors from the woods) and added some compressed humus to it. The moss went back in, a single plant that I didn't injure during my digging work went back in and I also added some natural decoration that I bought. Not for aesthetics alone, but so that the springtails and later the ants have places to hide.

This is how it looks now:


That was today in the afternoon, now, half a day later, I already see the small plant that seems to lie around in the picture to stand up again. You can see the springtails (tiny white dots on the brown humus) as well, they are now busy making themselves a new home and dig tiny, tiny houses.

I now feel comfortable letting the ants actually go in their own outworld and meet their neighbors (springtails usually live inside of ant nests and the ants are very happy to have them around, as they are basically working as janitors and eat up the trash the ants produce), as I now am confident that the setup - for now - is healthy and clean of unwanted infestation again.
Let's hope I can post some springtail houses soon!


Stoner Sloth

Goons Are Great posted:

Today I spent a few hours in digging into the outworld, it was time to make things right.
As I said before, there was some biological experiment going on that kinda ended up badly for my ants. To sum it up very quickly: You know when you place a flower pot with moist humus on your window and in summer at some point stuff starts growing in there, if you keep it moist?
This is more or less what happened here, only on an invertebrate level.

I had this outworld setup with nothing but basic ground and some humus, added some sticks from outside and just waited to see what happened. It was in late autumn last year when I did that and then deep European winter hit, so not much happened for a while. However, slowly, some invertebrates and small plants started to develop in there that I carried in with the sticks and just lone animals that searched for safety in the warmth of my home and ended up in there. The main population however were Springtails, which I added manually because I wanted them to be in there, as they are decomposer and they would be able to break down the trash my (then later-to-come) ants would produce.
Short description of what these guys are:


Springtails are not insects (in taxonomy, insects are a class in the phylum Arthropods. Springtails are arthropods, but belong to the class of Springtails, or Collumbola. That means they are related to insects in general, without being insects.
They got six legs, are very small (0,1mm-2mm tops usually, mine are at ~0,3mm, but there are several species with various sizes, so) and mainly eat large chunks of bacteria, fungi, fruits and juices, but also dead insects and plant matter. They break them down using their spiky tongues and thus provide small enough pieces for even smaller decomposers, like bacteria, to start eating as well and pooping out minerals that then go back into plants. As such, they perform absolutely vital roles in every habitat and are also basically present everywhere. If you ever saw tiny white, brown, black or whatever dots moving any amount of earth - that's them. Go out into your garden, grab a hand of earth and I can guarantee you have at least 20 springtails in your hand. They're friends!

So, this is how this setup looked today, before I started working on it:


As you can see, stuff does not exactly look life friendly and growing. A fungus had started to grow on the ground itself, infesting the entire thing and sucking up all moisture I added over time. The entire thing was dried out to a huge brick of earth when I put it out today. The humus on top was doing fine, but by far not enough to support complex lifeforms like invertebrates. Water wasn't able to break the ground anymore and the springtails started to assume this is drought, so they hid themselves beneath the moss you can see in the middle, waiting for water to come. Water did come constantly, but it never really made the ground wet anymore, it just landed and started to evaporate and dry again.
A few weeks longer and most likely all of them would have been dead. Other animals I had in there, like a small bug and several super small earth worms already went extinct entirely and I can't even imagine the numbers of casualties the springtails had to suffer over time.

So I spent hours collecting the tiny buddies, which is a tough job given their size and their ability to jump all the time and their mean tendency to not trust a monkey digging through their home, tried to separate them from other animals I found that I didn't want in the setup, like masses of mites and generally took out everything that I could, to minimize the risk of re-infecting the setup with unwanted stuff.
I couldn't save them all, so a good portion of animals got thrown out without me being able to collect them, but I tried to minimize deaths by emptying the stuff out in the garden. Then cleaned the entire thing entirely, even found some loving algae growing in the watering place, and rebuilt the entire thing.
Now with tiny pebbles as the ground layer to store water overflow, a thin layer of forest earth (bought, not collected obviously, as that would have infected the thing with unspeakable horrors from the woods) and added some compressed humus to it. The moss went back in, a single plant that I didn't injure during my digging work went back in and I also added some natural decoration that I bought. Not for aesthetics alone, but so that the springtails and later the ants have places to hide.

This is how it looks now:


That was today in the afternoon, now, half a day later, I already see the small plant that seems to lie around in the picture to stand up again. You can see the springtails (tiny white dots on the brown humus) as well, they are now busy making themselves a new home and dig tiny, tiny houses.

I now feel comfortable letting the ants actually go in their own outworld and meet their neighbors (springtails usually live inside of ant nests and the ants are very happy to have them around, as they are basically working as janitors and eat up the trash the ants produce), as I now am confident that the setup - for now - is healthy and clean of unwanted infestation again.
Let's hope I can post some springtail houses soon!

Cool update - stay safe little springtails!







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

Goons Are Gifts

Nothing new to report for my ants, but I probably will urge them to enter their outworld for the first time soon, now that it's cleaned up. Will be curious how they react!!

Meanwhile, here are some random ant facts I collected to spitfire in a short summary:
  • Ant warfare is, as already mentioned, a thing. Ants will fight each other to death for genetic supremacy of their family. However, did you know ants and termites (who are in now way related to ants) are also mortal enemies? In the tropics, where termites dominate easily up to 80% of the entire forest ground, ants are in a constant war with various termite species:

  • The genus Adetomyrma, living exclusively in Madagascar, are also called "Vampire ants", because they are able to feed on blood. Not human blood though (not yet, that is), but they feed on blood of their own kids. They regularly take care of their kids, but once they hatch and turn into larvae, the workers and the queen will inflict tiny wounds into the larvae and feed on their hemolymph. Afterwards they lick the wound clean and leave the larvae be, they never take so much that they hurt their babies. Sometimes they barely go out and hunt insects due to their babies feeding them!
  • The infamous Pharaoh Ant that is a pest in large parts of the world, is infamous for living in hospitals and office buildings. They are very small, extremely aggressive and territorial and grow ridiculously quick. They are polygynic and always have several queens, also they are known to create literally colony-satellite nests that later on demand their independence, all happening inside the walls of buildings. They are known to break into computers due to the heat emitted, where they can cause major damages by cutting through cables and they even sometimes cause fires that way.
  • Several species of the genus Solenopsis are sneaky thieves. They create their nests nearby hostile ant nests and late at night they swarm out, sneak into the hostile nest while silently killing guards, breaking into the food chambers and carrying their food outside the nest as fast as they can before the colony can realize it. Runner ants then come and pick the loot up. This is usually done by only a few sneaky ants per nest, resulting in widespread thief raids in dozens of nests in a large area.
  • (warning: spiders below, linked instead of embedded)Take a look at these nice ants working on a... web?
    https://i.imgur.com/zX6Xj53.png
    Actually those are not ants. They are Jumping Spiders (Myrmarachne) mimicking Yellow Crazy Ants in Australia. If you look very closely...
    https://i.imgur.com/U2weIDH.png
    This way they can sneak into the crazy ant's nest, quietly murdering sole workers to eat without being recognized.


Also, if you ever feel like you can't do something and you won't accomplish it, remember this brave ant:

Goons Are Gifts fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Apr 21, 2019


Stoner Sloth

Goons Are Great posted:

Nothing new to report for my ants, but I probably will urge them to enter their outworld for the first time soon, now that it's cleaned up. Will be curious how they react!!

Meanwhile, here are some random ant facts I collected to spitfire in a short summary:
  • Ant warfare is, as already mentioned, a thing. Ants will fight each other to death for genetic supremacy of their family. However, did you know ants and termites (who are in now way related to ants) are also mortal enemies? In the tropics, where termites dominate easily up to 80% of the entire forest ground, ants are in a constant war with various termite species:

  • The genus Adetomyrma, living exclusively in Madagascar, are also called "Vampire ants", because they are able to feed on blood. Not human blood though (not yet, that is), but they feed on blood of their own kids. They regularly take care of their kids, but once they hatch and turn into larvae, the workers and the queen will inflict tiny wounds into the larvae and feed on their hemolymph. Afterwards they lick the wound clean and leave the larvae be, they never take so much that they hurt their babies. Sometimes they barely go out and hunt insects due to their babies feeding them!
  • The infamous Pharaoh Ant that is a pest in large parts of the world, is infamous for living in hospitals and office buildings. They are very small, extremely aggressive and territorial and grow ridiculously quick. They are polygynic and always have several queens, also they are known to create literally colony-satellite nests that later on demand their independence, all happening inside the walls of buildings. They are known to break into computers due to the heat emitted, where they can cause major damages by cutting through cables and they even sometimes cause fires that way.
  • Several species of the genus Solenopsis are sneaky thieves. They create their nests nearby hostile ant nests and late at night they swarm out, sneak into the hostile nest while silently killing guards, breaking into the food chambers and carrying their food outside the nest as fast as they can before the colony can realize it. Runner ants then come and pick the loot up. This is usually done by only a few sneaky ants per nest, resulting in widespread thief raids in dozens of nests in a large area.
  • Take a look at these nice ants working on a... web?

    Actually those are not ants. They are Jumping Spiders (Myrmarachne) mimicking Yellow Crazy Ants in Australia. If you look very closely...

    This way they can sneak into the crazy ant's nest, quietly murdering sole workers to eat without being recognized.

Also, if you ever feel like you can't do something and you won't accomplish it, remember this brave ant:


interesting stuff my dude! I wonder if the vampire ants also use their sense of taste to tell the general condition of the larvae to make sure they aren't taking too much from any one of their babies and putting their health at risk. Also wonder if they've got some sort of anti-microbial secretion in their saliva to help prevent infection from the wounds they create.

Love the ant mimicking spiders - amazing creatures. I'd heard there is also a spider that has cracked the sort of 'morse code' of ant communication using scent and antennae touches - they basically use their legs to tap on the ants antennae and lure them away from other ants and into a little hideaway made of silk before straight up murdering them.

Also really impressed with the awesome pictures you are getting!

Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Apr 21, 2019







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

pixaal

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


There communication wouldn't need to be perfect we communicate fairly well with dogs enough to get them to follow onto a trap if that's what we wanted

please don't trap dogs in comically oversized webs and eat them

Goons Are Gifts

Stoner Sloth posted:

interesting stuff my dude! I wonder if the vampire ants also use their sense of taste to tell the general condition of the larvae to make sure they aren't taking too much from any one of their babies and putting their health at risk. Also wonder if they've got some sort of anti-microbial secretion in their saliva to help prevent infection from the wounds they create.

Love the ant mimicking spiders - amazing creatures. I'd heard there is also a spider that has cracked the sort of 'morse code' of ant communication using scent and antennae touches - they basically use their legs to tap on the ants antennae and lure them away from other ants and into a little hideaway made of silk before straight up murdering them.

Also really impressed with the awesome pictures you are getting!

Impossible to tell if there are ant doctors that can actually tell the condition of their larvae - it seems possible, but it also just could be that they only take a certain amount of blood and hope it works out. On the other hand, there are practically no reports of larvae dying from this and larvae that are infected by any kind of disease is not getting bitten, so, who knows! There is magic involved!

Most ants do have special stuff in their saliva. Most importantly of course, the saliva keeps the wounds clean and washes away bacteria, viruses and fungi trying to get a foot in the door of an organism. Additionally, saliva almost always has some sort of antibiotic properties, which goes for most insects but also mammals - our human saliva is indeed lightly antibiotic and "licking their wounds" like wolves and dogs do it works just as well for us, too! This is because the cells emitting the saliva are of course mainly (more than 99%) pooping out water, but in that water there are myriads of other things included, like enzymes, proteins, electrolytes and also straight up tons of antibodies that kill off things the body already knows how to kill almost immediately.
The slightly acidic property of saliva, combined with the digestion enzymes dissolved first burns away dirt and intruders in the wound, then the antibodies kill of those who survived this, proteins and even straight up pain killers boost up healing immediately and the water washes out the rest. This works for us humans and most mammals just as it does for ants! We do have a lot in common there.

Don't forget ants do everything with their saliva. As already described, they make bread with it, they enable mushrooms to grow in their farms, they clean their body and protect it against bacteria, they stop mold from growing, they clean and close their wounds and more. It's a vital instrument in their life (just as it's for most insects - watch a fly clean itself every two minutes!) and as such, it had heavy impact on their evolution and was able to gain important properties as a direct evolutionary advantage.


Goons Are Gifts


Stoner Sloth

Goons Are Great posted:

Impossible to tell if there are ant doctors that can actually tell the condition of their larvae - it seems possible, but it also just could be that they only take a certain amount of blood and hope it works out. On the other hand, there are practically no reports of larvae dying from this and larvae that are infected by any kind of disease is not getting bitten, so, who knows! There is magic involved!

Most ants do have special stuff in their saliva. Most importantly of course, the saliva keeps the wounds clean and washes away bacteria, viruses and fungi trying to get a foot in the door of an organism. Additionally, saliva almost always has some sort of antibiotic properties, which goes for most insects but also mammals - our human saliva is indeed lightly antibiotic and "licking their wounds" like wolves and dogs do it works just as well for us, too! This is because the cells emitting the saliva are of course mainly (more than 99%) pooping out water, but in that water there are myriads of other things included, like enzymes, proteins, electrolytes and also straight up tons of antibodies that kill off things the body already knows how to kill almost immediately.
The slightly acidic property of saliva, combined with the digestion enzymes dissolved first burns away dirt and intruders in the wound, then the antibodies kill of those who survived this, proteins and even straight up pain killers boost up healing immediately and the water washes out the rest. This works for us humans and most mammals just as it does for ants! We do have a lot in common there.

Don't forget ants do everything with their saliva. As already described, they make bread with it, they enable mushrooms to grow in their farms, they clean their body and protect it against bacteria, they stop mold from growing, they clean and close their wounds and more. It's a vital instrument in their life (just as it's for most insects - watch a fly clean itself every two minutes!) and as such, it had heavy impact on their evolution and was able to gain important properties as a direct evolutionary advantage.

That indeed makes sense! thankyou for the extra detail - bees do very similar sorts of things (minues the awesome baking and farming skills of course) but also most honey bees have anti-parisitic venoms in their saliva. You've probably heard of varroa mite but even European honeybees have a defense in terms of giving them a venomous bite - an interesting thing given with think of bees venom often only in terms of their sting!

I do have a reason for suspecting the ant doctor hypothesis though - there are types of wasp that use this to monitor how much paralyzing or zombifying (like making them utterly passive and able to be led around) venom they are using since too much could easily kill their prey that they are trying to use to incubate their young if they use too much or escape if they use too little. They do this by snipping off half of the antennae of their prey and repeatedly tasting their hemolymph and topping up the venom as needed - figure that this might therefore be the sort of useful adaptation an ant might readily be able to evolve if the selection pressures were right :)

pixaal posted:

There communication wouldn't need to be perfect we communicate fairly well with dogs enough to get them to follow onto a trap if that's what we wanted

please don't trap dogs in comically oversized webs and eat them

lol'd - also good points especially about not trapping poor doggos in giant webs, it's hard to be sure just how well they understand each other but it's certain effective enough to both lure in prey and preventing the spider becoming a meal for the ants! (though of course who knows how often they gently caress it up and become the prey themselves)

Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Apr 21, 2019







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Farecoal

There he go
I watched Walking with Beasts a lot as a kid and this section gave me nightmares for a long time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybENuYZLiQU

Question about the vampire ants: how does sucking the larvae blood benefit them at all? Isn't the energy in that blood from them feeding the larvae in the first place?

Goons Are Gifts

Eww, why would they show it that way if they already have the freedom to animate it. They could have just shown something else, that isn't a baby hatching. :smith:
Yeah, it's really scary! But there is absolutely no reason to believe that primal ants wouldn't have done this. Ants are opportunists, they take whatever they can and muscle meat is no exception to that (in fact, I could easily feed my ants meat and they'd take it, it's just not as efficient as using protein-rich insects, as it's the proteins they're after), so larger species have no problems doing this. Hell, army ants do it nowadays, too!

For vampire ants, it is in fact a zero sum game in the long run, as they have to feed the larvae nonetheless. The main purpose for this is that by having their babies cut open and sucked on essentially is nothing but an, admittedly macabre, way to store energy. They feed the larvae with insects when they are strong, healthy and the conditions allow them to regularly hunt, and they are able to hide away and stay indoor, feeding on their blood while drought or excessive rains hinder their ability to hunt. Also, not every worker suck on larvae for a living, the largest portion hunts regular insects and sucks up juice like honey, honey dew by aphids and fruit juices they can find. The larvae are mainly reserved for the queen and the inner colony workers - the smaller and usually younger ones that take care of the brood, the queen and the inner tasks the nest require, like digging, moving brood to the optimal place and cleaning up their trash.


xcheopis


Oh. Great. Spiders in the ant thread. 'K, bye.

Goons Are Gifts

xcheopis posted:

Oh. Great. Spiders in the ant thread. 'K, bye.

Oh god I'm sorry, I put them in spoilers and added a warning, please don't hate me :ohdear:


xcheopis


Thanks.

Stoner Sloth


I'll make sure I do the same when it comes time to discuss 'em in Toxin Crew thread - that'll be awhile though I think, got lots of weirder stuff to do first :)







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xcheopis


Stoner Sloth posted:

I'll make sure I do the same when it comes time to discuss 'em in Toxin Crew thread - that'll be awhile though I think, got lots of weirder stuff to do first :)

Ah, see, I'm not reading that thread because I really loathe spiders and don't want to read about them, but neither do I want to disrupt anyone else's reading. So, no need to worry about it. :)

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