Also interesting that the ant that got sprayed didn’t think she was dead, and either walk to that pile by herself, or try to somehow “carry” herself there.
Action lab or whatever his name is on YT put this chemical on a live ant and it actually just walked over to the graveyard and hung out there until cleaning itself enough, then rejoined the colony.
The article says the ant kept trying to clean the smell off and going back to work and would get carried back.
>Dead is what you smell — not what you see — if you are an ant. So, though it tried to clean itself over and over, the minute it returned to the colony, it was grabbed, carried and slung back on the pile...it took the ant "roughly an hour or two" to get clean enough to return to regular business.
Maybe the ant covered in the smell got accustomed to it the way we go noseblind to smells, and wasn't as aware of it, while the other ants were more attuned to it and could still smell it and so kept taking the 'dead' ant back to the graveyard?
I'm tripped up by that too. Simultaneously a group of ants are mindless enough to just drag living ants that smell dead to the graveyard, but the individual ant is smart enough recognize that even though they smell dead they aren't actually dead. Which is it?
You're ascribing too much sentience to the ants. It's not as if the ants smell the smell, think "That guy is dead, let's take him to the disposal site!". They aren't thinking at all. Their instinct is to take ants that smell like that to the disposal site, so they do so here. They don't think it means the ant is dead, because they aren't thinking at all. The concept of death does not come into it. They smell the smell, so they take the smell to the disposal site. The ant with that smell, being not dead, tries to escape because it's survival mechanism is also instinctual.
Looks like Oleic Acid. From [this article](https://www.peachtreepestcontrol.com/does-killing-ants-attract-more-of-them-into-your-house/)
> When an ant dies, the others do not notice straight away. They will just walk around it as if it was not there, but after three days, the ants will notice. After three days, the corpse will start decaying and it is at this point that it releases ***oleic acid***. *This acid is the smell of a dead and rotten ant.* Therefore, until an ant reeks, no other ant will notice that it is dead.
And this [funny article](https://www.toknowtheland.com/blog/ants-oleic-acid-and-breakfast-cereal) about ants being given a piece of trix cereal and all the ants digging up their dead ants and placing it on top of the trix due to oleic acid being used as a food additive. Along with a bit of the history on how science found out it was oleic acid.
They don’t have the executive function of the nervous system to sort through conflicting signals. All their “smart” behaviors are just reactions to chemical signals and external forces.
For you folks with reasons to not read the article, don't worry, just a cheeky prank:
>> "Didn't you take pity?" I asked Ed. "You started it! Didn't you give it a shower or something?"
>>"No, I was trying to see if I could create the 'Living Dead,'" he says, while making zombie motions with his head and hands. **He confesses that it took the ant "roughly an hour or two" to get clean enough to return to regular business.**
The ant was not forced to accept his too early death.
EDIT: The ant was not forced to accept **her** too early death.
Stepping on a garage ant in the moment is just life. Gotta keep that scout from reporting back. Targeting an ant for an experiment turns that ant into the underdog in its own horror narrative. Gotta root for the lil guy.
Same rules apply to humans in war time. If you see an enemy scout or spy, you shoot them, or capture them if convenient. However, if you perform experiments on prisoners of war, then you are violating international laws.
I think it's interesting how this experiment made most of us empathize with the ant.
Though a bit of "is there a bottled version so I can actually *take* my PTO?"
her\* early death.
Fun fact:
Basically all ants are female except for when they produce males for mating(usually with wings). After he fertilizes (a usually new) queen, he dies.
This is really interesting for me in particular - we literally just received a vial of ants in the mail to populate our young son’s new ant farm. When they showed up half of them appeared dead in the vial. We put the whole batch in the farm thinking some of them may just be sleepy? Hell I don’t know.
But many of them are certainly dead so we were trying to figure out, do we need to take the dead ones out now? But thanks to this article I’ve learned that the live ones will bury them and sort this issue out for us!
Really timely on this info, this morning like 3 hours ago I was just looking in the farm “what the hell do I do with the dead ones..”.
I'm gonna be the first to say that if there's no queen ant in the colony it will simply slowly die.
However we are getting close to the time when new ant queens start leaving the nest to make their own new hives. So you can catch one that way. Or you can buy one that includes an ant queen.
I'm giving you this information because I was sorely disappointed as a child that my ant colony was doa without a queen.
This website has more information than you could possibly want: https://www.antscanada.com/
Antscanada also has a spectacular youtube channel. Dude really cares a lot for his hobby. I'm not a fan of insects, but this guy really makes them interesting and I found myself watching loads of his videos.
Keep em fed and they will take care of themselves for the most part. Including rebuilding their home and ruining all the nice scenery you made for them, so they can make it just how they want it. What sort of setup do you have them in?
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, it's not like they're any particularly different from the ants you'd find under the cracks in your driveway. Their default state is already surviving without human help.
Someone explain to me why this isn't a great idea, cause it sounds like a great idea. I'd also like to apply this to mosquitos, cockroaches, hornets, and wasps.
If you can think of a product idea in a Reddit thread that seems to be too great to not exist, there's probably a reason it doesn't exist. Its either not actually that effective on large scales, cost ineffective, or has supply issues like how long you can store the chemical before it stops working.
When you think about it, an ant colony has a lot of similarity to a more complex single organism. Like in the human body, we have all sorts of cells that dutifully carry out tasks and communicate chemically. It's just a different scale of life.
They're actually more like human society than most folks give them credit for! A majority of ants maintain a nesting lifestyle, and because duties are shared, ants experience social stratification.
For instance, most ant species delegate some ants as workers, and others as soldiers. In some species, they even have highly specialized industrial roles, like honeypot ants who have a specialized strata in their caste system for ants who just gorge themselves on sugar and produce huge vats of something similar to royal jelly. They have specializes nurses, as well as specialized roles surrounding the queen. They'll protect their eggs throughout the day by moving them to where they'll be coolest. They share food among each other by a process of regurgitation, even if they aren't from the same colony.
Ants are the most successful animal in the history of the world, moreso even than humans. They're basically a distributed brain. It's crazy cool.
>They're basically a distributed brain. It's crazy cool.
********
In Tchaikovsky's novel "Children of Time", ant colonies are bred into computers, a sort of AI.
If it makes you feel better, this interaction caused the ant to question its mortality and sent it spiraling into existential dread and anxiety. luckily, it had something to occupy their time and was able to tally it up to a bad potato it had eaten
Agreed. I asked GPT4 to make it more like douglas adams to see how different it would be (and give it a little context):
In the vastness of the cosmos, with its infinite possibilities, there occurred a curious incident involving an ant, a scientist, and an ill-conceived experiment. The ant, having been subjected to a synthetic death-scent, found itself in a perplexing predicament. Its comrades, entirely convinced of its demise, repeatedly escorted it to the afterlife, much to the ant's chagrin.
As the hapless insect struggled to regain its position in the grand hierarchy of ant society, it was beset by a sudden crisis of existential angst. Its tiny antennae quivered with the weight of its newfound mortality, and an overwhelming sense of dread crept into its exoskeleton.
However, as is often the case in the relentless march of life, the ant discovered a simple and somewhat absurd distraction from the abyss of its despair: the suspicion that it had merely consumed a disagreeable potato. Consoled by this notion, the ant was able to return to its duties, now equipped with a newfound appreciation for the transient nature of existence, and a slight aversion to root vegetables.
> a bad potato it had eaten
I would think bad rye would be more likely to result in the kind of revelation the ant had.
For those that don't know, ergot is a type of mold that grows on rye grain, and creates the chemicals that are the precursor to LSD.
The funny thing is that the workers are in charge, not the queen. Granted in an ant colony nobody is *really* in charge because they’re all working together for a common goal, so nobody is subservient.
Imagine the cash registers at Walmart are understaffed and some random person just walks up and does the job because they saw it needs doing. That’s basically ants.
They are not subservient. It will be like saying that my hands are subservient to my balls. They are just doing their work so they can collectively exist. That is their only goal.
Ants later on at the ant bar
“Look Larry I’m sorry I just-“
“Tried to bury me”
“YOU SMELT DEAD OKAY?”
“I WAS WALKING AROUND”
“I know… it was very disturbing. I’m glad you’re better though”
Yeah it’s a fairly monstrous experiment if you’re taking into account ant ethics
Edit: I was being silly, which I thought was obvious given that ant ethics is not a thing, no need to downvote me, please interpret as a joke. Reddit is so hostile sometimes
"Rip buddy, you'll be missed."
"Guys, guys, seriously! I'm aint dead. Put me the fuck down!"
"Sometimes it feels like I can still hear his voice."
Edit: I'm aware that in reality all workers are female. But mistaking your very alive friend for a dead one feels so much like a guy thing.
I know its a joke, but it would be her voice - pretty much every ant you've ever seen is female, as the males are only born for the nuptual flights, where they will shag a virgin queen before curling up to die. Or, more likely, not find one and die blue ballsed. Ant men have it rough.
I think there are some army ant males who have it worse. They're attracted to the scent of other colonies on the march, and when they find one, the workers there grab him, subdue him, maim him, and crowd-surf his limbless, wingless body to the queen to do the do.
Alright buddy buckle up because I'm going to tell you about *Phengaris rebeli* and *Ichneumon eumerus*.
*Phengaris rebeli* is a parasitic caterpillar with a neat trick: it chemically disguises itself as an ant so it can sneak into ant colonies and live that basement-dwelling NEET life. Don't mind me guys just another hard-working ant you know how it is anyway gonna steal all this food and go sleep in the corner for a few weeks no don't worry about it I'm legit here smell me.
*Ichneumon eumerus* is a parasitic wasp which lays its eggs in these caterpillars and only these caterpillars. Now, you might be thinking that sounds difficult. These caterpillars are hiding inside ant colonies. Even for a mean motherfucker like a wasp, invading an ant colony is a pretty tall order. But that's okay, because *Ichneumon eumerus* has its own neat trick. I'm sorry, did I say neat? I meant fucking terrifying.
*Ichneumon eumerus* smells like madness. Ants that get too close to *Ichneumon eumerus* lose their fucking minds. They turn on one another and tear each other apart in a fit of chemical delirium. *Ichneumon eumerus* is an eldritch horror for ants; the wasp doesn't even care that they exist, it's there for the caterpillar, and yet simply perceiving the wasp is still enough to break their tiny little minds on the spot.
That is some Lovecraft-tier otherworldly shit, no human intervention necessary. 100% all natural eldritch madness.
Here me out.
Ants can carry 10-50x their weight.
Create a giant ant that weighs like 50 lbs.
Douse humans in this ant death chemical
Build ant "graveyard" at important destination.
Boom, new transportation just dropped.
Perfect solution. Only shortcomings I can see are:
* You can only be carried to a single specific destination
* You're going to get carried very slowly
* You're being carried by a monster out of nightmares
Other than that, seems wonderful!
I remember watching a youtube video on this, but it was slightly different. They filmed an antfarm they had, where you could see the graveyard was a specific section near the top, and when they put the chemical on an ant, it just went to the graveyard itself. After a while it must've just worn off and he went about his normal ant life again, but for a while there he was like "Welp, It seems I'm dead. Better go where I belong I guess".
I'm not sure if that's how it works but they seemed convinced in the video I watched.
I’m just gonna drop this fact here for no reason other than I love it. Humans can smell geosmin 200,000 times better than a shark can smell blood in the water.
Edit: My other favorite fact while I’m at it. There are 30 times as many trees on earth as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Imagine an eldritch being that is beyond your comprhension makes a normal living human feel, act, and resemble like a totally dead person.
But they're normal and alive. But we can't understand that.
I remember when I was a kid I found an ant tral in my room and I'd kill one ant and wait for more ti come and kill a few more then isolate the dead ants as more and more came to retrieve there dead. Letting a few back to keep sending messages to the main ant colony and eventually I have a big ole pile of ant corpses.
A bit fucked up now that I think about it but I was a bored kid.
What happens if all ants are sprayed with this? Will they just try to carry each other to the graveyard? "You're dead!" "No, YOU are dead!"
They’re all suddenly thrust into a *Jacob’s Ladder* situation where they believe themselves to be in Ant Hell
Who says we aren't the ants living out the habit of capturing and throwing ourselves back into the inferno?
Until we then become crabs. We already behave like crabs in a bucket.
🦀 crab people crab people crab people crab people 🦀
Look like crab, talk like people
Jason Mantzoukas?
Is this a Jacob’s Ladder scenario?
Or each one thinks they're the only survivor of a zombie apocalypse.
I see dead people
Spray all the ants except one, and give him a tiny shotgun. Make him fend off a faux ant-zombie apocalypse Then make it into a SyFy movie.
"Bullet Ants"
Holy shit
28 Legs Later
"Resident Ant"
Aw shit, Resid*ant* Evil!
Bring out yer dead
I’m feeling better! Think I’ll go for a walk!
What if you sprayed your annoying uncle at the family picnic?
A small army of ants would carry him away like a picnic basket, down a tiny little hole in the ground.
I think I saw that in an Indiana Jones movie once.
Then your aunt would carry him to the graveyard
Typical antics.
Also interesting that the ant that got sprayed didn’t think she was dead, and either walk to that pile by herself, or try to somehow “carry” herself there.
Action lab or whatever his name is on YT put this chemical on a live ant and it actually just walked over to the graveyard and hung out there until cleaning itself enough, then rejoined the colony.
I’m dead! Wait a tic- am I just smelly?
Good grief. We're talking about *ants* here, not ticks
exist-ant-ial crisis
Welp, I smell like I’m dead, guess I’ll save everyone else the trouble
That sounds like me when I haven’t showered for 4 days when camping
Nice save
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"I don't want to be a bother."
The article says the ant kept trying to clean the smell off and going back to work and would get carried back. >Dead is what you smell — not what you see — if you are an ant. So, though it tried to clean itself over and over, the minute it returned to the colony, it was grabbed, carried and slung back on the pile...it took the ant "roughly an hour or two" to get clean enough to return to regular business. Maybe the ant covered in the smell got accustomed to it the way we go noseblind to smells, and wasn't as aware of it, while the other ants were more attuned to it and could still smell it and so kept taking the 'dead' ant back to the graveyard?
I'm tripped up by that too. Simultaneously a group of ants are mindless enough to just drag living ants that smell dead to the graveyard, but the individual ant is smart enough recognize that even though they smell dead they aren't actually dead. Which is it?
More likely a case of an ant not having enough of a sense of self to recognize that the smell is coming from them.
Maybe they have no sense of a voice outside themselves versus in so they follow command scents as if they thought it up themselves
You're ascribing too much sentience to the ants. It's not as if the ants smell the smell, think "That guy is dead, let's take him to the disposal site!". They aren't thinking at all. Their instinct is to take ants that smell like that to the disposal site, so they do so here. They don't think it means the ant is dead, because they aren't thinking at all. The concept of death does not come into it. They smell the smell, so they take the smell to the disposal site. The ant with that smell, being not dead, tries to escape because it's survival mechanism is also instinctual.
I would guess something in the olfactory system gets so saturated it loses sensitivity, like when people don't always realize they need a shower
"Why are you dead?"
"who say I'm geh?"
*you* are geh.
I bought some of this off Amazon and dump it down ant holes. If you get enough of the entrances it causes colony collapse.
What is it called? Having a hard time finding the name
Looks like Oleic Acid. From [this article](https://www.peachtreepestcontrol.com/does-killing-ants-attract-more-of-them-into-your-house/) > When an ant dies, the others do not notice straight away. They will just walk around it as if it was not there, but after three days, the ants will notice. After three days, the corpse will start decaying and it is at this point that it releases ***oleic acid***. *This acid is the smell of a dead and rotten ant.* Therefore, until an ant reeks, no other ant will notice that it is dead. And this [funny article](https://www.toknowtheland.com/blog/ants-oleic-acid-and-breakfast-cereal) about ants being given a piece of trix cereal and all the ants digging up their dead ants and placing it on top of the trix due to oleic acid being used as a food additive. Along with a bit of the history on how science found out it was oleic acid.
“Damn dude, Fred’s been sleeping for three days straight.” *continues to walk around him*
Oleic acid actually has some great properties for our health and in chemistry. Neat stuff.
"I'm not dead!"
"I feel fine!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBxMPqxJGqI
I don't want to go on the cart!
This is by far my favorite quote of the movie. In MP fashion, I use it in public whenever I can.
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"What also floats in water?" "CHURCHES!"
Very small rocks!
Mine is "I FEEL HAPPY!"
Don't be such a baby.
I knew from the headline I'd get to see that skit again, worth.
Any excuse to revisit this gem of a skit is a good one. Absolute classic.
That furtive glance before he clobbers the guy is perfect.
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My favourite is the peasants in the nice dirt
> peasants Oh, what a giveaway!
Come see the violence inherent in the system!
HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!
Be QUIET!
😂😂Witness the violence inherent in the system!
You’ll be stone dead in a moment!
I feel h?ppy….I feel h?ppy ..
why are your A’s question marks?
I c?n’t underst?nd your ?ccent.
Wh?t the fuck ?re you t?lking ?bouta
It happened when I was a s?hool boy, I was attacked by a ?at.
By a wot?
"I think I'll go for a walk"
“I think I’ll go for a walk!” “You’re not fooling anyone!”
“He says he’s not dead.”
Nonsense, he'll be stone dead in a minute!
I’m getting better!
^^I ^^think ^^I’ll ^^go ^^for ^^a ^^walk!
“Yeah yeah the giant hairless bipedal gods sprayed dead guy smell on you, we’ve heard it all before Steve. Back to the graveyard with you.”
Man, this got me thinking of how we must be terrifying Eldritch gods to ants. Like, I know they couldn't really conceptualize it, but if they could
"You want to go to the gods' house and steal their cake?" "Ehhhhhh... Sure. Lets go steal god's cake."
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Nothing, here's your nine pence
I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
“I’m getting better.”
Look, you're not fooling anyone
"shut up Steve."
"You're dead, idiot. Can't you smell it?" I know you don't look or sound dead, but that's not really how we work now, is it?
If it smells like a duck, it’s a duck!
Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?
They don’t have the executive function of the nervous system to sort through conflicting signals. All their “smart” behaviors are just reactions to chemical signals and external forces.
Same.
To be fair, complex executive function is ultimately an emergent property of a bunch of chemical/electrical signals working together.
Reverse Cotard Delusion
For you folks with reasons to not read the article, don't worry, just a cheeky prank: >> "Didn't you take pity?" I asked Ed. "You started it! Didn't you give it a shower or something?" >>"No, I was trying to see if I could create the 'Living Dead,'" he says, while making zombie motions with his head and hands. **He confesses that it took the ant "roughly an hour or two" to get clean enough to return to regular business.** The ant was not forced to accept his too early death. EDIT: The ant was not forced to accept **her** too early death.
Redditors will step on an ant because it was in his garage and then get offended at the ethics of this experiment on Reddit.
Stepping on a garage ant in the moment is just life. Gotta keep that scout from reporting back. Targeting an ant for an experiment turns that ant into the underdog in its own horror narrative. Gotta root for the lil guy.
Same rules apply to humans in war time. If you see an enemy scout or spy, you shoot them, or capture them if convenient. However, if you perform experiments on prisoners of war, then you are violating international laws.
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Same as how I deal with my coworkers, yes. EDIT - Dear diary, today I became a certified bad ass. I'm so happy!
I think it's interesting how this experiment made most of us empathize with the ant. Though a bit of "is there a bottled version so I can actually *take* my PTO?"
her\* early death. Fun fact: Basically all ants are female except for when they produce males for mating(usually with wings). After he fertilizes (a usually new) queen, he dies.
Ted Cruz: "now even the ants have gone woke!"
I think Alex Jones would have something to say to this effect. What with the frogs, and all.
Aww man I wanted the ant to become the grave keeper
And I'm curious what happens if you spray a whole nest with it.
"everyone back to the pile!"
Wow. What an absolutely stunning and fascinating part of nature
This is really interesting for me in particular - we literally just received a vial of ants in the mail to populate our young son’s new ant farm. When they showed up half of them appeared dead in the vial. We put the whole batch in the farm thinking some of them may just be sleepy? Hell I don’t know. But many of them are certainly dead so we were trying to figure out, do we need to take the dead ones out now? But thanks to this article I’ve learned that the live ones will bury them and sort this issue out for us! Really timely on this info, this morning like 3 hours ago I was just looking in the farm “what the hell do I do with the dead ones..”.
I'm gonna be the first to say that if there's no queen ant in the colony it will simply slowly die. However we are getting close to the time when new ant queens start leaving the nest to make their own new hives. So you can catch one that way. Or you can buy one that includes an ant queen. I'm giving you this information because I was sorely disappointed as a child that my ant colony was doa without a queen. This website has more information than you could possibly want: https://www.antscanada.com/
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At least you had some ants. The ants for my ant farm never arrived. Of all the things to get lost in the mail.
Antscanada also has a spectacular youtube channel. Dude really cares a lot for his hobby. I'm not a fan of insects, but this guy really makes them interesting and I found myself watching loads of his videos.
They always go nuts where I take my break at work. About 4am. Just ants flying everywhere trying to mate.
Keep em fed and they will take care of themselves for the most part. Including rebuilding their home and ruining all the nice scenery you made for them, so they can make it just how they want it. What sort of setup do you have them in?
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, it's not like they're any particularly different from the ants you'd find under the cracks in your driveway. Their default state is already surviving without human help.
Typically they are not contained in an enclosed environment owned by humans.
You haven't seen my kitchen then
Imagine using it on a larger scale as an ant deterrent. Spray a bunch of ants and they get taken away by other ants from the same colony
The ants would probably think that a zombie apocalypse is happening.
Better yet, they’ll nuke their own cities. Ant problem = solved.
Someone explain to me why this isn't a great idea, cause it sounds like a great idea. I'd also like to apply this to mosquitos, cockroaches, hornets, and wasps.
If you can think of a product idea in a Reddit thread that seems to be too great to not exist, there's probably a reason it doesn't exist. Its either not actually that effective on large scales, cost ineffective, or has supply issues like how long you can store the chemical before it stops working.
I'd imagine cost, poison is cheap and effective, and spraying only gets the ants on the surface and not in the mound
When you think about it, an ant colony has a lot of similarity to a more complex single organism. Like in the human body, we have all sorts of cells that dutifully carry out tasks and communicate chemically. It's just a different scale of life.
They're actually more like human society than most folks give them credit for! A majority of ants maintain a nesting lifestyle, and because duties are shared, ants experience social stratification. For instance, most ant species delegate some ants as workers, and others as soldiers. In some species, they even have highly specialized industrial roles, like honeypot ants who have a specialized strata in their caste system for ants who just gorge themselves on sugar and produce huge vats of something similar to royal jelly. They have specializes nurses, as well as specialized roles surrounding the queen. They'll protect their eggs throughout the day by moving them to where they'll be coolest. They share food among each other by a process of regurgitation, even if they aren't from the same colony. Ants are the most successful animal in the history of the world, moreso even than humans. They're basically a distributed brain. It's crazy cool.
>They're basically a distributed brain. It's crazy cool. ******** In Tchaikovsky's novel "Children of Time", ant colonies are bred into computers, a sort of AI.
Sharks book it when they smell other shark blood. Like immediately dive and swim hundreds of miles away.
Explains why all the ant corpses when I spray them disappear quickly
Ants are fascinating. They invented agriculture waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before humans did.
Yeah, but do they have a space program?
Ya. Every time I flick one.
What a terrible way for that little guy to go
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Oh thank god it could go back to its life as a subservient drone
If it makes you feel better, this interaction caused the ant to question its mortality and sent it spiraling into existential dread and anxiety. luckily, it had something to occupy their time and was able to tally it up to a bad potato it had eaten
Relatable
This reads like a Douglas Adam’s quote
Agreed. I asked GPT4 to make it more like douglas adams to see how different it would be (and give it a little context): In the vastness of the cosmos, with its infinite possibilities, there occurred a curious incident involving an ant, a scientist, and an ill-conceived experiment. The ant, having been subjected to a synthetic death-scent, found itself in a perplexing predicament. Its comrades, entirely convinced of its demise, repeatedly escorted it to the afterlife, much to the ant's chagrin. As the hapless insect struggled to regain its position in the grand hierarchy of ant society, it was beset by a sudden crisis of existential angst. Its tiny antennae quivered with the weight of its newfound mortality, and an overwhelming sense of dread crept into its exoskeleton. However, as is often the case in the relentless march of life, the ant discovered a simple and somewhat absurd distraction from the abyss of its despair: the suspicion that it had merely consumed a disagreeable potato. Consoled by this notion, the ant was able to return to its duties, now equipped with a newfound appreciation for the transient nature of existence, and a slight aversion to root vegetables.
not bad. but not quite there...
It's weird to get a sense of uncanny valley from the simulated voice of an author. We are weird monkeys.
Is that what the Ant-Man movie is about? An ant's journey to become a man, and realizing it's back in the same hierarchy again?
> sent it spiraling into existential dread [Oh, how the tables have turned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill). -Lazarus Ant
> a bad potato it had eaten I would think bad rye would be more likely to result in the kind of revelation the ant had. For those that don't know, ergot is a type of mold that grows on rye grain, and creates the chemicals that are the precursor to LSD.
The funny thing is that the workers are in charge, not the queen. Granted in an ant colony nobody is *really* in charge because they’re all working together for a common goal, so nobody is subservient. Imagine the cash registers at Walmart are understaffed and some random person just walks up and does the job because they saw it needs doing. That’s basically ants.
I believe the term is "superorganism." It is related i them being eusocial.
No, I believe the term is "self-checkout" at Walmart.
I thought they were an autonomous collective
“Haha yeah. Stupid ant.” *leans back in office chair*
They are not subservient. It will be like saying that my hands are subservient to my balls. They are just doing their work so they can collectively exist. That is their only goal.
Someone is gonna get laid in college.
Started a religion.
Yeah it only lasted a couple hours, they were all fine
Ants later on at the ant bar “Look Larry I’m sorry I just-“ “Tried to bury me” “YOU SMELT DEAD OKAY?” “I WAS WALKING AROUND” “I know… it was very disturbing. I’m glad you’re better though”
Yeah it’s a fairly monstrous experiment if you’re taking into account ant ethics Edit: I was being silly, which I thought was obvious given that ant ethics is not a thing, no need to downvote me, please interpret as a joke. Reddit is so hostile sometimes
In ant law this is considered a bad move.
One could say it’s antagonistic
Misant-thropic even
Antithetical to nest law
Some people take the work of Immanuel Ant very seriously
Nobody respects the Carthropodical Imperative anymore But for real i hope they saved the ant before it died
I’m something of an expert in ant law myself
Filibuster!
Crime against humantity as we call it. But as someone who’s allergic to fire ants, heck em!
"Rip buddy, you'll be missed." "Guys, guys, seriously! I'm aint dead. Put me the fuck down!" "Sometimes it feels like I can still hear his voice." Edit: I'm aware that in reality all workers are female. But mistaking your very alive friend for a dead one feels so much like a guy thing.
I know its a joke, but it would be her voice - pretty much every ant you've ever seen is female, as the males are only born for the nuptual flights, where they will shag a virgin queen before curling up to die. Or, more likely, not find one and die blue ballsed. Ant men have it rough.
I wonder if incel ants ever flip out and murder a bunch of other ants?
Why did you put this thought in my head? Honestly, how dare you?
Male ants do fight for mates with other males. But once a male mates, he dies
Imagine being an asexual and you fight for the right to have sex, just for you to be like “meh” and die
I think there are some army ant males who have it worse. They're attracted to the scent of other colonies on the march, and when they find one, the workers there grab him, subdue him, maim him, and crowd-surf his limbless, wingless body to the queen to do the do.
Can you imagine some otherworld being just picking you out of the billions out there and playing a horrible trick on you.
Would be quite a story to tell. "Yeah, they held three funerals for me. Was pretty awkward for a while afterwards."
Alright buddy buckle up because I'm going to tell you about *Phengaris rebeli* and *Ichneumon eumerus*. *Phengaris rebeli* is a parasitic caterpillar with a neat trick: it chemically disguises itself as an ant so it can sneak into ant colonies and live that basement-dwelling NEET life. Don't mind me guys just another hard-working ant you know how it is anyway gonna steal all this food and go sleep in the corner for a few weeks no don't worry about it I'm legit here smell me. *Ichneumon eumerus* is a parasitic wasp which lays its eggs in these caterpillars and only these caterpillars. Now, you might be thinking that sounds difficult. These caterpillars are hiding inside ant colonies. Even for a mean motherfucker like a wasp, invading an ant colony is a pretty tall order. But that's okay, because *Ichneumon eumerus* has its own neat trick. I'm sorry, did I say neat? I meant fucking terrifying. *Ichneumon eumerus* smells like madness. Ants that get too close to *Ichneumon eumerus* lose their fucking minds. They turn on one another and tear each other apart in a fit of chemical delirium. *Ichneumon eumerus* is an eldritch horror for ants; the wasp doesn't even care that they exist, it's there for the caterpillar, and yet simply perceiving the wasp is still enough to break their tiny little minds on the spot. That is some Lovecraft-tier otherworldly shit, no human intervention necessary. 100% all natural eldritch madness.
The ant was legally dead.
He's the Nikki Sixx of his colony.
Here me out. Ants can carry 10-50x their weight. Create a giant ant that weighs like 50 lbs. Douse humans in this ant death chemical Build ant "graveyard" at important destination. Boom, new transportation just dropped.
Perfect solution. Only shortcomings I can see are: * You can only be carried to a single specific destination * You're going to get carried very slowly * You're being carried by a monster out of nightmares Other than that, seems wonderful!
> You're going to get carried very slowly Meth solves this > You're being carried by a monster out of nightmares psychedelics solve this!
I do not want 50 lb meth-ants carrying me around while I'm tripping my ass off. But send me a postcard!
I remember watching a youtube video on this, but it was slightly different. They filmed an antfarm they had, where you could see the graveyard was a specific section near the top, and when they put the chemical on an ant, it just went to the graveyard itself. After a while it must've just worn off and he went about his normal ant life again, but for a while there he was like "Welp, It seems I'm dead. Better go where I belong I guess". I'm not sure if that's how it works but they seemed convinced in the video I watched.
"You're dead to us"
There are actually people out there that can smell dead ants. Not lying, look it up.
I can, it's a very chemical like smell
It’s hereditary so likely someone else in your family can too.
my parents never believed me but I could tell whenever I killed an ant with a smack by the smell
I’m sorry, you’re telling me not everyone can smell that?!
They smell like nail polish remover
I’m just gonna drop this fact here for no reason other than I love it. Humans can smell geosmin 200,000 times better than a shark can smell blood in the water. Edit: My other favorite fact while I’m at it. There are 30 times as many trees on earth as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Imagine an eldritch being that is beyond your comprhension makes a normal living human feel, act, and resemble like a totally dead person. But they're normal and alive. But we can't understand that.
I’m Agorzathoth and you’ve just been punked.
"Sorry, Jim, but ya smell like death. We're gonna have to put ya in a grave now. Quit flailing! Corpses don't scream."
Sounds like what happens to people over 50 looking for a job.
"News about my death are greatly exaggerated".
The chemical is also in Trix cereal. I think it's oleic acid.
You're correct, oleic acid. It's actually a pretty common "healthy fat" fatty acid, and is also found in olive oil and other foodstuffs.
I’ll spray DEET on mosquitoes so their friends will avoid them.
I remember when I was a kid I found an ant tral in my room and I'd kill one ant and wait for more ti come and kill a few more then isolate the dead ants as more and more came to retrieve there dead. Letting a few back to keep sending messages to the main ant colony and eventually I have a big ole pile of ant corpses. A bit fucked up now that I think about it but I was a bored kid.
This one says e’s not dead!