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Ant Geopolitics

aeon.co

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Re: Ant Geopolitics

#51

Post by lukan »

ssnri wrote: post #44
snapcaster wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Being attractive is probably enough for women, not men though. "

That is valid only for a certain subset of humanity.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#53

Post by xipho »

digging wrote: post #46
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…

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 id…

I would first engage, if you haven't, the spider community at iNaturalist. It is likely that others are thinking along the same lines as you.

We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely interested in facilitating the structuring of communities that link people like you to those doing the science behind the scenes, this is really important for the long term stability of resources like those you're interested in.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#54

Post by bee_rider »

gryn wrote: post #21
tsunamifury wrote: post #12

This article seems to be continuing the “genes eye view” of the world. That we are mostly vessels for gene propagation and socialization. Ants are becoming superior gene propagation and socialization vessels and therefor may succeed in reframing the worlds ecosystem to their goals. Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans could probably roundly poison them into extinction if we wanted.

The problem with that is that humans depends on the ecosystem making them extinct would probably have very long chain of negative effects that would poison us in return if not make us extinct too.

Also, lots of our systems depend on people evaluating incentives locally and picking their behavior based on their interests—humans that all decided to pointlessly try and wipe our ants wouldn’t be engaging in normal human behavior!

Are we going to give the ants supernatural coordination as well?

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#55

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

hyperman1 wrote: post #37
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #32

After reading the article, I really want a bug/ant RTS game.

There used to be SimAnt. The game worked great when you simply let it run itself without actually playing it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt

I'd play the heck out of an updated version that taught you more about ants while you played it.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#56

Post by permo-w »

mullingitover wrote: post #50

I 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,…

>However, the enslaved ants opportunistically kill the queen pupae of the slave maker ants.

I'm guessing by this you mean the species of ants that tend to be enslaved, rather than the enslaved ants themselves?

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#57

Post by mistermann »

tsunamifury wrote: post #12

This article seems to be continuing the “genes eye view” of the world. That we are mostly vessels for gene propagation and socialization. Ants are becoming superior gene propagation and socialization vessels and therefor may succeed in reframing the worlds ecosystem to their goals. Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans could probably roundly poison them into extinction if we wanted.

Our relative intelligence seems insufficient to overcome our default behavior as vessels for the unthinking propagation of memes though, which has resulted in serious harm to the ecosystem of a variety of species, including us!

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#59

Post by wonderwonder »

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 really liked Children of Time and Ruin. I could not get through Children of memory and its very rare for me to abandon a book. It just seemed very different than the prior ones for me. Maybe I will give it another shot. With that said I loved his Final Architecture series and just finished the final book in it.
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