Monday, September 10, 2007

Ant city: form & function.

This is an amazing discovery of the function, formation and shapes of a giant ant colony; unfortunately many ants did not survive.

9 comments:

Greybishop said...

Holy smokes!
That was just cool.

From the comments, it appears that the rancher was going to destroy the colony regardless, so at least science got some useful data before the mass concrete galosh-ing took place.

Take that Frank Lloyd Wright.

Anonymous said...

Well, that was interesting, but I sure do feel sorry for the hard-working innocent victims of that scientific expedition ....

On another note, there will be a follow up story in tomorrow's (9/11/07) Dallas Morning News about that giant spider web that we discussed below.

Greybishop said...

Cool!
Post a link if you can, Lady!

Anonymous said...

OK. Let's see if this works. It's a long one and the only way I know how to get it here is to type it in.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091107dnmetspider.2676a2d.html

I'm glad that this thing is 50 miles away from me....

Anonymous said...

Well, all of the address didn't post, so add this to where it ends at latestnews

/stories/091107dnmetspider.2676a2d.html

Sorry.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, I just noticed something. They say that reading your newspaper online is the way of the future. But, I just discovered that the articles online aren't as comprehensive as the ones in my paper copy. While the text is the same, this article didn't include several photos, location maps and a neat list of some of the spiders found in the web.

I'm not a fan of killing trees but, since I read almost ALL of my paper, I think I'll stick with what I'm doing. It's too easy to miss stuff the online way....

Greybishop said...

Thanks for the link lady. It worked perfectly.

What a cool story. It'll be interesting to see if the same thing happens this time next year. That MIGHT indicate an evolutionary step (although for SEVERAL species to co-operate isn't "evolution", a predisposition to do so where such a predisposition didn't previously exist MIGHT be an evolutionary step. Evolution is usually biochemical rather than social, but perhaps there's an environmental factor at work that might be influencing the various species.) it IS at the least exceedingly interesting.

I'm still glad it didn't happen in my backyard.

Anonymous said...

Glad you enjoyed it, GB.

I'm certainly no scientist, but I think it has more to do with an evironmental Perfect Storm, so to speak. Im sure it will be compared at length for environmental similarities with the British Columbia incident.

As to social evolution, I think that is learned behavior which is passed on from one generation to the next. That's a possibility but it would be a lengthy process. Time will tell.

Did you happen to notice the nearby article about maggots, paint and kids? You'd probably find that story cool too.

Sawsee said...

Interesting story Lady! I've posted the maggot art story too, as that was something I've never heard before!

GB! Interesting thoughts: social evolution! What a concept!