Ants! what are your thoughts?

[Bert&Ernie]

i saw this cool doco on ants.

 

It got the thinking how amazing they are and how similar they are to us.

whats really crazy is that a whole colony comes from one ant, the queen, which is cool cause it really make the whole colony like one life form in itself.

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what does everyone else think about ants?

Edited September 7, 2013 by jwerta

[Evil Genius]

I like the movie "Attack of the Killer Ants"! Pretty much my thoughts on Ants.

[nothinghead]

Just watched a doco on Ed Wilson the other day. Fascinated by their way of communication and their drone-like organisation. Don't know much about 'em tho.

[waterboy 2.0]

We would probably be screwed without them

[~shameless~]

It's not all types of ants ,just some can become a problem for humans. I believe we make the conditions just right for them. White ants love dead wood and we build houses from dead wood, Argentines love unstable and expansive soils , we put down house slabs and foot paths for them to live under.

[~shameless~]

Any one here been near a bullant collony when they decide to take flight? Bull ants have got a genuine painful bite and even still will bite whilst being pulled apart ,having them crawl up your pants and bite the inside of your thigh fuckn love that

[bogfrog]

I'm more a fan of bees than ants, although the societal structure is somewhat the same.

I think any swarm-dwelling creatures are incredible, and we as humans have alot to learn from the blueprint these creatures lay out, when it comes to co-operation, correct use of "human resources", adapting to circumstance and of course, releasing the notion of the all important individual.

I did a bit of reading up on bees when i thought i was turning into the crazy bee lady, and there were many problem-solving processes that a bee colony uses which seem crucial to any smoothly functioning society.

Such as when the colony needs to find a new home, they cant just fly out into the unknown as a swarm, hoping they will find somewhere suitable before everyone runs out of energy, so they send out a few specially selected searcher bees in all directions. These bees hunt the countryside for suitable locations for the new nest, and upon their return, they communicate to the rest of the swarm exactly what they had found through an intricately encoded series of dance moves (the direction, the distance from the current hive, the dimensions of the chosen nesting spot), and every searcher bee (they had a special title but i forgot) has a turn to perform their dance, before the group makes a collective decision depending on the new information they have recieved.

I'm assuming many similar stratergies are used by ant colonies, sorry to talk about bees when you ask what i think about ants!

Yet, there is stil the heirachal system. The queen (despite being large and somewhat immobile) makes all the decisons. If the queen is stupid, the colony is stupid.

Did the ant doco say how the baby ants become different to each other?

With bees, they are fed different amounts of different substances while they are still in the larval state. Its quite fascinating to me, the amount of control they can enforce upon the development of their offspring. Like a human probably couldn't decide their child will be a soilder and feed it particular kinds of food and be able to reliably watch their child turn into a soilder.

[myco]

leaf cutter ants harvest leaves and stuff to grow fungus for food thats pretty fucken cool hahaha

[Sallubrious]

I've read that ants tend to build their nest in areas of geopathic stress and people in years gone by would not build a house over ants nests. Before building a house they would dump some ants in the prospective area and observe the ants. If the ants moved away it was a suitable place to build a house and if they stayed and built a nest it was not.

I know geopathic stress is a controversial topic, but in some Eastern European countries there is a lot of scientific research into it. I think it was in the Ukraine where they'd mapped areas of geopathic stress and found a direct correlation to escalated cancer rates in those areas.

Somewhat paradoxically some ants have detectable levels of Iridodial which is a substance indicated in the repair of DNA and has been used in cancer treatment.

Dr Hans Neiper has been using it for years to treat malignancies of many kinds. He was the doctor who cured Ronald Reagans cancer and has one of the most successful track records in cancer treatment anywhere.

Dr. Hans Neiper states: "In my clinical experience, I have observed that the iridodials outdistance most other therapeutic substances known in the treatment of cancer. They are extremely effective, even in terminal breast cancer cases, as long as the tumor has not grown beyond a certain size. These substances can be administered orally, intravenously, or intramuscularly. Not only are the iridodials more effective and much less expensive than other anticancer agents, but they are non-toxic and can be used without complication for an unlimited time. Never, in forty years of treating cancer, have I experienced more positive results than I have with the iridodials."

Edited September 7, 2013 by SallyD

[paradox]

some of my my thoughts are that the individuals in a colony can sort of be seen as individual neaurons that function together to create a single brain. it's a cool thought, another demonstration of the fractal iterations in nature.. you can look at humanity in that way too. each of us is as though a single neuron in the collective human brain, the collective consciousness. individual humans representing the neurons of the 'conscious mind' aspect of the Gaian brain.. but that word has come to sound a little dippy..

Edited September 7, 2013 by paradox

[Weirdo]

I once watched bullants or jumper ants (depends where you're from) actively hunting flies. Stinkhorn funghi had emerged in mulch I had laid down. Large flies were attracted to the smelly brown masses on top of the funghi and the ants would lie in wait for them. Sometimes they would leap with amazing accuracy and speed to ambush a fly, grapple with it, sting it to immobilize it and hurry off back to the nest with it and then return to the funghi to pounce on another unsuspecting victim.

I give these buggers a wide berth because they are very aggressive and have an extremely painful sting. What also makes them stand out is how they turn their heads to look at you, something I haven't seen other ants do. Love them or hate them, ants are surely fascinating and definitely have their place in the world.

[paradox]

i haven't ever looked into jumping ant venom & what it consists of, but some interesting observations are that some people, the sting is extremely painful & apparently last for days.. in my job i get bitten quite often by jumping ants & the sting for me is not too extreme & completely disappears in about 5 mins.. i wonder whats going on there? maybe people are just wimps hehe.. but i've had the convo quite a few times & people seem to either fall into one of those two catagories, extreme pain for hours or even days or very short lived moderate pain.. & the same people seem to consistently get the same effect.

also i have a few times been unfortunate enough to have been sitting on a jumper nest without realizing it & have been bitten maybe 10 times at once & have experienced amazing euphoria & sharpened awareness, visual distortions & mdma like effects. perhaps it's just pain endorphins? or is there something more chemically interesting going on there?

[Bert&Ernie]

 

[Weirdo]

A friend of mine, a very petite woman, was severely stung by bullants whilst sitting down doing some gardening. They swarmed all over her and stinging her so badly that she went into anaphylactic shock (or however you spell it) and would have died if not for a passerby who raised the alarm and she was taken to a doctor. She now has to carry a syringe loaded with adrenalin in case she is stung even once by any kind of ant, wasp etc. She was not allergic to ant venom prior to the attack.

I found that Aloe vera gel rubbed on the sting relieved the pain quite quickly.

Edited September 7, 2013 by Weirdo