Another week, another story about how we aren't as unique as we like to think. Each discovery points to more intelligence, more skills, more capacity for emotion or pain. One day I think we'll regret how we treated animals so poorly while the evidence was there all along. All that was needed was the precautionary principle.
Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
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Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#12The ants where I now live are so big that it’s easier to see their more subtle behaviors. About the length of a finger nail. Yeah yeah I’m sure there are bigger ants than that, but I consider that pretty big for an ant! They are fascinating to watch. I often see one ant carrying another, and occasionally see a group of ants trying to get another one unstuck.
>I often see one ant carrying another
That might not be an act of kindness toward the carried ant. It could be banishment from the colony to prevent the spread of fungus:
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#13Ants are hella cute. Sometimes I would get ants coming into my home, and it was fun watching them try to find food somewhere. I tried to keep it clean. Were these the recon teams sent to find stuff? Sometimes I’d bring them to my desk and it was cool hanging out with some ants. I eventually caved and bought some sugar cubes. They seemed to LOVE them. I chipped them into smaller chunks, and watching ants yeet them on…
Given how much you liked hanging with ants, I recommend you try spiders in a garden. Look for a spider web where one is hanging, toss a small piece of debris that breaks a little of the web, and watch in awe how they repair it.
I would hunt for my friend spider. Find an ant, throw it into the net, watch how quickly spider friend descends right to the spot and spins it into a take-out container.
Really only works with live victims. If they died before I threw them on the web, the spiders usually wouldn’t recognize from the vibrations that there was food at that grid location. I did trick a spider once with a pine needle, tapping/shaking the body of the dead prey until I got lucky and the spider came. Usually this didn’t work though, tripping whatever heuristic the spiders used was tricky.
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence. What? I can't tell if I'm missing something, or is this some meme.
I am talking about this photo [1], even though it's not after all taken by an electron microscope. Pretty scary, but intelligent face, is it not? [1] https://factcheck.afp.com/macro-photograph-ant-taken-stacked...
Is "looks a bit like a human from this angle" what we classify as "having intelligence"?
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#15The ants where I now live are so big that it’s easier to see their more subtle behaviors. About the length of a finger nail. Yeah yeah I’m sure there are bigger ants than that, but I consider that pretty big for an ant! They are fascinating to watch. I often see one ant carrying another, and occasionally see a group of ants trying to get another one unstuck.
Where do you live now?
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#16I also recently learned that ants remove deceased workers from their nest, and dump their corpses somewhere else.
Source: my office carpet
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#17Another week, another story about how we aren't as unique as we like to think. Each discovery points to more intelligence, more skills, more capacity for emotion or pain. One day I think we'll regret how we treated animals so poorly while the evidence was there all along. All that was needed was the precautionary principle.
Buddhists had discovered this ages ago.
They could see more or less intuitively how consciousness evolved and that potential descendants of every living thing are capable of it and that each living thing is somewhere on the line.
Caveat: this is my personal interpretation which deviates a bit from the teachings
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#18Stunning! They are also the only other animal on the planet to manipulate it's environment to grow food, apart from humans, by protecting aphids. Sometimes they even wage war to neighboring nests, and kidnap larvae which subsequently grow as workers. Ottomans were very fond of this practice. Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence.
They don't just protect them as a food source. Some wood ants will literally farm them. If a they expand or a tree isn't producing enough sap, they will move aphids to new trees putting them on a new sap source so that they can "milk" them for honeydew (aphid excreted sugar which is a major food source for wood ants).
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#19Ants are hella cute. Sometimes I would get ants coming into my home, and it was fun watching them try to find food somewhere. I tried to keep it clean. Were these the recon teams sent to find stuff? Sometimes I’d bring them to my desk and it was cool hanging out with some ants. I eventually caved and bought some sugar cubes. They seemed to LOVE them. I chipped them into smaller chunks, and watching ants yeet them on…
This comment makes me wonder if there is an ant equivalent of toxoplasmosis which makes one think that cats are irresistibly cute
I think what you're saying is an urban legend. Do you have a credible source for the statement that toxoplasmosis makes one think cats are incredibly cute?
Re: Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
#20Stunning! They are also the only other animal on the planet to manipulate it's environment to grow food, apart from humans, by protecting aphids. Sometimes they even wage war to neighboring nests, and kidnap larvae which subsequently grow as workers. Ottomans were very fond of this practice. Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence.
They don't just protect them as a food source. Some wood ants will literally farm them. If a they expand or a tree isn't producing enough sap, they will move aphids to new trees putting them on a new sap source so that they can "milk" them for honeydew (aphid excreted sugar which is a major food source for wood ants).
I forgot to mention that woods ants also create their own medicine. Wood ants will combine resin from evergreen trees with formic acid (from themselves) to create a substance that is anti-microbial and the rub it all over themselves. [Source: I've been doing a lot of reading for background for a board game I'm designing.]