Goons Are Great posted:

alnilam posted:

that owns

Goons Are Great posted:

As an alternative to , take this nice ant doing acrobatics!

hamjobs posted:

Don't slap it until you attempt it

hamjobs posted:

Same, I'm on a shake shack and we'd fueled night Safari looking for cool ants and aphids

hamjobs posted:

We need a drink chat thread too because gins are extremely delicious and I've been dry for years but considering recreational alcoholism

We have relatively tame crows that bring me pebbles in exchange for peanuts and bits of fruit and grains; I'm looking forward to the berries coming on so we can have Crow Parties.

alnilam posted:

speaking of fungi you know what's hosed up that one fungus that makes the ant want to crawl to the top of a tree and then it bursts out of the ant to disperse itself

Goons Are Great posted:

Cool poo poo about leaf cutter ants!

Resting Lich Face posted:

Further reading on the metal as gently caress ant fungus.

Barking Gecko posted:

How about army ants? Their foraging behavior and their nomadic lifestyle are pretty interesting.

Goons Are Great posted:

Not only that, exoskeletons simply are too unstable and fragile in larger scale, as the gravity becomes a problem at some point and external structure like an exoskeleton cannot support it very long.

The main reason however why insects in general are small is again their lack of lungs. Trachea and spiracles are nice, but very ineffective compared to full active breathing. You can't get enough oxygen into a larger system to function properly, which is why larger insects also have muscles to contract their trachea a bit and suck in air more quickly. Still, a centralized breathing system is vital for even more growth.

Goons Are Great posted:

Note that all insects depend on temperature, they have no ability to warm themselves up like we humans do, unless they cuddle intensively (which bees for example famously do). The larger the body, the more surface area you can lose heat from, so there's another limiting factor here.

Goons Are Great posted:

They totally do that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5QxUR-mZVM

Goons Are Great posted:

Acrobat Ants or Cocktail Ants are according to wikipedia actually just synonymes for the genus Crematogaster. Funnily, the English wikipedia page is actually contradictory to itself, too, no idea what happened there.
Either way, Crematogaster are indeed known for their ability to be super agile with their asses and aim everywhere, but they mainly do it to appear more threatening and booo don't come close. Some species do in fact not have any venom anymore, all species have a spraying device, sometimes larger and better than others, but most of them are no longer able to actually spray it around. They produce venom and it just drops out, so they then rub their rear end in a top hat on the enemy to shock and stun them. Other species there are able to produce a lot of venom and spray a tiny bit, but still they mainly use their agile butts to rub them all over the place, just like this:

That white thingy on the rear end is venom froth dropping out of its rear end.

Goons Are Great posted:

Oh no all is well, it's just that ant colonies move slowly compared to thread lifetimes, as that kind of stuff takes months to develop.

Happy to do more effort posts though if you guys want to know something!!

alnilam posted:

I want to know literally anything about cool ants and bugs

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.

lol but seriously posted:

you did good

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 !!

Goons Are Great posted:

Oh God don't hold up this mess of me posting five pages of about insects as a standard.
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!!

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.

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

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!

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:

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.

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

xcheopis posted:

Thanks.

xcheopis posted:

Ant posts = good