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Ant Geopolitics

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Re: Ant Geopolitics

#31

Post by grimgrin »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

I'll piggyback this sci-fi thread to link the beginning of Phase IV, because I rather like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTv4WYHsncQ

The plot: "After a spectacular and mysterious cosmic event, ants of different species undergo rapid evolution, develop a cross-species hive mind, and build seven strange towers with geometrically perfect designs in the Arizona desert."

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#33

Post by photochemsyn »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #25
ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing ( https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png ) :) (slight spoilers, FYI) https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-…

Great idea. Leaf-cutter ants have something like five worker castes (soldier, excavator, forager, garbage collector, gardener) so managing that distribution might be a fun part of a game (tending towards Ant Factorio). e.g.

https://youtu.be/VLBDVXLiWxQ?t=301

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#34

Post by snapcaster »

ssnri wrote: post #17
ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

I enjoyed that book. After I read it I made my bio on dating apps: “Active, creative, hairy; but enough about Portia spiders.” My question is: how successful do you think that’s been for me as a straight man?

It depends on how physically attractive you are obviously, that variable confounds everything people say about dating apps and what works or doesn't

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#35

Post by pegasus »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #30

Asking because it isn't spelled out in HN Guidelines. What are the actual automated rules for posting 'dupe' stories? This is a dupe from 10 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39400770 When I submit something that is a dupe, it gets labeled as dupe and not posted. But this post was dupe and did get posted. What are the automated rules?

There's a somewhat recent post by dang saying that (if I remember correctly) moderators sometimes manually look over rejected posts and give them a second chance if they feel it's worth a shot.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#36

Post by ses1984 »

octagons wrote: post #19

If you found this story interesting, you may be interested to know that antkeeping is a rewarding and fairly inexpensive hobby. The Global Ant Nursery (GAN) project run by AntsCanada, a popular YouTube channel, is a great way to obtain new queens responsibly. Alternatively, it’s fairly easy to find queens on your own. AntsCanada offers a starter guide, and there are many other resources that teach you when and where…

AntsCanada is a great gateway into antkeeping but I would beware about the GAN.

I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The person said that they already gave away the species I wanted, but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They pushed a species which isn't really known to native to my area, but he insisted he found them locally. They aggressively tried to upsell me on expensive extra supplies they said were critical to the care of this species. When I got my ants, they were shipped from several states away.

I reported this to AntsCanada. I'm not sure what happened, but I recently tried to get a different queen from GAN and I ended up talking to the same person under a different identity.

I'm sure there are some great people on GAN, just beware.

I ended up getting a queen from Atlantic Ants. It did ship across state lines, but the species is one that's ubiquitous in my region.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#39

Post by romaintailhurat »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

Love all the scifi recommendations in this thread!

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#40

Post by xipho »

octagons wrote: post #16
xipho wrote: post #13

Disclaimer- shameless plug involved. Humans are one species, a complicated on for sure, Ants are well over 15k species. Of course not all are found together, but many species are. As the article notes the diversity of their social structures is collectively nuts. The combinatorics of all these species interacting with a myriad of micro-habitats and resultant behaviors emerging is crazy. The sheer number of non-ant sp…

I am an avid ant hobbyist and use AntWeb regularly to aid in identification and distribution of ant species when hunting for new queens. I’m glad to hear about this change - the site had needed a bit of a refresh for a while!

At present it's just the data being dumped from TaxonWorks and re-integrated into the existing front-end (separation of concerns nicely done). In the future we hope efforts that wrap TaxonWorks APIs and tooling, "companions", will evolve to make things look better. For example it would be trivial to wrap AntWeb in TaxonPages (see Github for everything) to get a new front end there, though that software is focused at the Taxon level. Multiple groups are looking to build out similar efforts at the specimen level (perhaps SpecimenPages).

We've recently has some amazing success with previously "unknown" people contributing to our open-source framework(s). These contributions, and hopefully future ones, will let us deliver additional features in a more timely fashion, for example things like multi-entry and "traditional" taxonomic keys. TLDR - there are opportunities to chip in to the "refresh" efforts on multiple fronts.

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