(Not really, but it makes a good title)
A couple days ago, I stumbled across an article calling itself "Ants may be the undead." It turned out that wasn't exactly what it was about, but it did get my attention and the real subject was still interesting. The theory is, to aid in the disposal of dead comrades, ants always have chemicals signaling "dead ant, take to the garbage heap" on them. While they're alive, they also produce other chemicals signaling "just kidding, not dead yet, still a live worker ant." Researchers tested this by putting the "dead" and "not dead yet" compounds on ant pupae (which would usually be carried to some safe nursery location) and leaving the pupae around the worker ants, who either left them alone as if the pupae were also live worker ants or hauled them off to the garbage pile as if they were dead worker ants.
Well, it was more interesting than my work at the time anyway. At least it should prevent things like this:
2 comments:
haha, I love the matching clip though. Hey, I just finished all the poems for my final portfolio. I remembered that the 8th poem was optional, fuck that, 7 is fine for me. I just finished the last one, I shall post them all soon, thanks for the help Cyrusse :)
I thought what this post was referring to was the actual zombie ants that result from a flying parasite whose larva eats their brain until the ants head falls off. I just read a post about it on C&L today. Apparently Texas is using these symbiotes to control the fire ant population. Somehow I can see this going terribly wrong... we're gonna need mini-ant-shotties. article here:
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/zombie-ants
grats on finishing the poems Steve!
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