I've been really enjoying the AntsCanada youtube channel lately. He stages ant wars in a controlled environment and films them really well. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCONd1SNf3_QqjzjCVsURNuA
Ant Geopolitics
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Re: Ant Geopolitics
#42Adrian 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?
You said "book" (singular), and I just wanted to let you know it's actually a trilogy, so there are more if you want to read them!
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#43Re: Ant Geopolitics
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I go to yoga studios and the instructors hit on me.
Still have a mostly shit time with apps. Not zero dates, but going out and doing things in the real world is a much better strategy.
Being attractive is probably enough for women, not men though.
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#45I think it's fascinating that, according to Wikipedia, Argentine ant colonies attack one another in their native range because of the increased genetic diversity (which they detect by smell). The mega colonies would only be a consequence of the inbreeding that follows rapid expansion.
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#46Disclaimer- 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…
How exciting. I'm a huge fan of ants and I didn't know about AntWeb. Insects tend to be harder to find identification resources for than spiders, which is what I spend more time on. However, this site seems to exceed any individual digital resource I know of for spiders.
RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm not associated with any research organizations but maybe I should be.
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#47Asking 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?
Weird because the app i used for posting this story usually points me to a dupe when there is one, i'm not sure if it's part of the HN API and why this mechanism has not worked as intended.
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#48if ants were mammals they would be humans
equivalently
if humans were insects we would be ants
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#49if ants were mammals they would be humans equivalently if humans were insects we would be ants
Well we're social but we're not really eusocial like they are
Re: Ant Geopolitics
#50I can't believe this article doesn't mention the slave maker ants. They're fascinating. These ants live in colonies so small they fit inside an acorn. They raid other acorn ant colonies, kill adult ants indiscriminately, and abscond with their pupae. They then raise the pupae in their colony. The enslaved ants feed and care for their captors and their young, and even help their captors on future slave raids. However, the enslaved ants opportunistically kill the queen pupae of the slave maker ants. It's an ongoing evolutionary arms race.
There are other socially parasitic ants in this vein: some will infiltrate a colony, kill only the queen without the colony realizing it, and lay their own eggs which are raised by the slowly replace the entire colony. There are also 'cuckoo' ants which simply sneak into the colony, lay their eggs and leave.