gorillamom

That reminds me of our Senior Keeper who when we got the Leaf Cutter ants in for an exhibit and they escaped. He was stomping on them and I casully walked by him and said "Didn't the zoo just pay ten thousand dollars for those ants?" He stopped stomping on them. Too funny. I wish they would have attacked the idiot! I hated him, but couldn't help laughing because he was part of the zoo managment. When one of our gorillas, Amanda, escaped we got her back in and the next day this idiot climbed the tree she used to get out trying to cut the limbs. I told him the hot wires were still on, but he didn't listen. They were on high too, enough to burn human skinn. Well, he touched one and fell hitting every hotwire on the way down. All i could do was laugh my ass off! Too funny. The only good thing about zoos is the stupid human behavior!

Ouroboros

Whatever you say, Antboy!

Heretic

There's one ant species that literally handles their own air defense by spraying their poison up into the air to hit people or bears in the eyes and to hose down invading wasps or yellow jackets.

But grass cutter ants have the most caste-based body types of any colonial insect and the largest nests, some 20 feet deep and five hundred square feet in area. The nests are so large and numerous that ranches used them as landmarks to know their location by and can't do anything to get rid of them other than wait for wildfires to temperarily clear the ants out and remove the chemical trails.

__________________
"In space no one can hear you scream. in D.C. it won't matter..." -Clinton Resurrection: The Alien Queen lives!

Heretic

Just you wait, apeman. When we get the sucker punch from nature it's the ants who'll be wearing the boxing gloves.

__________________
"In space no one can hear you scream. in D.C. it won't matter..." -Clinton Resurrection: The Alien Queen lives!

Ouroboros

Where I live, Arnold Schwarzenegger sprays us with experimental pheremones from the air.

Don't ants and wasps have a fairly recent common ancestor?

gorillamom

Yes, we had those at the zoo too. Interesting little being if you ask me. Can we set a few loose in the White House?

gorillamom

I don't know. I'm not an ant person, but I can find out.

Heretic

More recent than is the case with most insects, but that's still two hundred millions years back. It's just that, as a zoological order, they didn't change much because where they're at now is highly suited to most warm climates regardless of rainfall or landscape. Plus their behaviors give them such an edge that few physical changes need occur. It's only a matter of time and disaster for a particular ant to start using all or most of the survival mechanisms currently spread across many species to then become a real civilization.

It'll be that one species which both grows fungal crops as well as raising livestock like aphids and meally bugs, even to the point they begin to selectively bread them into domestication. The tool use thing is just as likely, because some ants use pebbles atop their nests to regulate heat night and day. Grass cutter ants already practice primative medicine/sanitation by placing dried pine tree sap at the nest entrances in order to disinfect bacteria from themselves as they walk over it. They also regulate heat, humity and gas concentrations in a structure equivalently as larger as any major complex [like the Pentagon] without electricity.

Then there's the part where they use chemical warfare and military organization to take down animals far larger than themselves. in the Vietnam War there would be guys dubbed "tunnel rats" who would go into the Vietnamese earthen bunkers to fight it out inside. Some ants do the same thing, having the larger castes tear holes open, even through the joins of crab exoskeletons, for the smaller castes to climb in and begin carving out pieces of meat to carry home as the larger ants then serve as traffic cops by lining either side of the path with their manibles aimed out and lookin' for some shit.

Yeah, if ever they decide they've had their fill of the apeman we're so fucked.

__________________
"In space no one can hear you scream. in D.C. it won't matter..." -Clinton Resurrection: The Alien Queen lives!