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In a recent development of the story about wood ants trapped in a post-Soviet nuclear weapon bunker in Poland, scientists, led by Prof. Wojciech Czechowski, with the decisive contribution of Dr. István Maák, both from the Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, deduced that the "colony" (in quotation marks because only workers were found), while lacking other food, had to survive on the corpses of imprisoned nestmates. By using an experimentally installed boardwalk, the ants were helped to get through the ventilation pipe that led out of the bunker and back to their maternal nest on the top.
The ants were discovered in 2013 thanks to a yearly campaign set to count hibernating bats in the same bunker. The scientific report was published in 2016 also in Journal of Hymenoptera Research. At that time, the scientists estimated the presence of at least several hundred thousand workers, arguably close to a million. The insects ended up in this situation as a result of large numbers of wood ants continuously falling down a ventilation pipe to never return to their nest on top of the bunker. Several years later, the "colony" still appeared to be thriving, despite being trapped in a confined space with no light, heat and obvious source of food.
In the newly published paper, the scientists sought out whether while lacking alternative food, the wood ants would consume the dead bodies of their conspecifics that were accumulating on the bunker floor. In nature, a similar behaviour occurs frequently during spring, when protein food is scarce. These are the so-called "ant wars", which serve to set the boundaries of the territories of neighbouring conspecific colonies of wood ants, while simultaneously providing food in the form of the fresh corpses of the numerous victims.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday November 05 2019, @11:27AM (4 children)
We are a lot more like these ants than meets the eye.
Our planet is a deep hole where many things are scarce, we can hardly get out or only a few of us can, the equivalent of an ant being able to crawl a little ways up pipe. The presence of light some of the time makes it less spooky, but we are like people who fell in a hole and got trapped with each other, in the perspective known as 'cosmic.'
The ants survived because they managed contaminants, somehow without thinking about it, but what if one of the ants had invented something like a plastic that added a toxic chemical in their environment?
What if they threw these plastics away in their normal trash(or pile of dead bodies)?
Gradually in a closed environment like ants in a bunker or humans in a gravity well, the percent of toxic to healthy would increase.
This is what may kill humans off eventually(if the blobs of gel the chinese discovered on the moon doesn't get us first), if lead, mercury, cesium and whatever other bullshit gets attached to every collection of organic molecultes on the planet, that will be a real showstopper.
Underneath all the talk of rising tides and high temps, you've got to really recognize that if I were a species of aliens who wanted humans gradually off of this rock, I would be shooting as many depleted uranium shells, distributing 9volt batteries and manufacturing as many plastic water bottles as possible.
Then just watch it all mix up in big piles of dirt and ocean gyres, watch the habitat die while everyone in the city wonders why the price of fish is so high and they get headaches all of the time and sperm count is nearing 0 and they have to wear surgical masks on the bus.......
The person who takes the long view in which we are all eventually dead so why care about pollution(which must be the attitude of apex management at amazon, at least), at some point accrues the equivalent karmic burden of an actual murderer, of species. You'd think this would carry a moral weight that might catch the attention of even psychopaths, but apparently not.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:01PM (3 children)
Corporations are people too!
They think in the short term. We'll shoot ourselves in the foot if it helps us make this quarter's numbers.
As individuals, it seems people no longer care about other people -- if they ever truly did. We seem unconcerned about problems that will affect future generations and even our own generation. As long we we got ours.
Maybe our species has no business getting off this planet in any meaningful way. And certainly has no business going to the stars.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ze on Tuesday November 05 2019, @08:58PM (1 child)
I think this is one of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox: Those who can't manage cooperation and sustainability never make it off their planet, those that do don't go spreading unchecked and polluting the cosmos so they're pretty much incognito.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:32PM
+1 informative
There is a unified war at the moment AGAINST the people saying 'hey everybody we can sort this out', which is a bummer for me because I am such a person. None of this conflict has any reason behind it, its a bunch of petty faux strongment flicking each other on the underpants while thousands of people needlessly die by the minute.
And it is a real, actual world war, going on now. We are not at peace. Nato is technically fighting itself at the moment which has created a real dusy of a conundrum for the people who have to explain this on TV so they have to put shark warnings on CNN.
Hm its like if you put the people who make weapons in charge of the mass media, it leads to permanent war, who would have imagined it except every intellectual in the history of the world.
I wonder sometimes if anyone else ever watched the Outer Limits or Stargate, or heard of Issac Asimov but comments like yours help me know I am not alone which is nice.
It is getting difficult to advocate for a human perspective on planet earth, which is more indicative of the state of alien relatioons than all the handicam footage. Someone seems to want us fighting constantly like ants, and should we all die out will gladly file our history in a dusty shelf with the dinosaurs and who knows what else.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:16PM
They think in the short term, they shoot us all in the foot for their personal gain.
My friends and I are a different kind of people, and we are a definite side you could choose to be on.
It is not like the choices are
a. help evil people destroy the world
or
b. watch evil people destroy the world on tv
If you are having trouble thinking of a c. option, you should read my website until you do.
Start here:
https://jmichaelhudson.net/top-smart-quotes/ [jmichaelhudson.net]