If they use this knowledge to find a way to kill all fire ants I’ll be pleased. I hate those little monstrous demon-spawned beasts so, so much. The fluidic action is interesting until they’re a flowing mass crawling on your foot and ankle biting all along the way because you stepped near a nest. As a demo of their evil behavior, I set these models on a nest (for science) and this quickly happened.
That’s part of a series that tells a helpful story.
We’ve learned that insects are conscious. Now that we know they behave like fluids, it should be trivial to prove that the molecules making up fluids are conscious.
With that thought, I’ll go back to my conversation with George Dickel.
I wish they could have made that band of text larger and more opaque. I was able to see some of that.
That’s basically the free will theorem but for consiousness!
And therefore…
A witch! A witch!
Why fire ants? Surely, there are other suitable ants which aren’t so hostile to humans. Although, perhaps their hostility makes humans less likely to sympathize with their experimental subjects.
The presentation was structured like a sales pitch, what with that final unifying recap.
I feel ever so slightly ‘managed’. Is there something we’re not being told?
Yeah, I can’t see the undergraduate lab assistants naming them and crying when it comes time to euthanize them.
and now I feel itchy.
I bet you didn’t shed a tear when AntHony died in AntMan?
I used to name the bigger ants (they were non-biting) when I was a tot. I was the youngest of five and there was a huge age gap, so you gotta make your own fun.
Watch at your own risk of nightmares…
Given what these two dudes appear to be up to, the fire-anty wrath of god appears just.
That’s what Reverend Preacher Man tells me, anyway.
So that’s how Homeopathy works!
Neat.
This arguably counts for points in both the ‘evil’ and ‘awesome’ categories; but fire ants also have a delightful proclivity for electrical equipment.
Not as personally painful as stepping on a nest; but losing power and discovering that your transformer housings and electrical panels are shorted out on masses of ant corpses and swarming with their living brethren is not a pleasant start to an electrical repair operation.
We got in the habit of bringing a wood-handled broom with no metal parts (or tape over the wire with electrical tape where the bristles meet the handle), a can of compressed air, and a trusty ol’ can of JS-685* out on trouble calls. Keeping the WAN working out here means keeping fire ants and red wasps from clogging up wiring and junction boxes.
Oh the hilarity of yanking open a junction box in the broiling Texas heat, and finding a solid mass of fried fire ants bridging all the contacts. Looking down, you see you are standing in a still-active mound of the dang things. There’s a reason for wearing boots in Texas. My feet and legs have plenty of scars demonstrating why.
Ants.
Fluids.
Hell on electrical equipment.
*Death in a can, JS 685 sprays on liquid and dries fast, making a 17,000 Volt dielectric strength powder barrier. JS 685 kills insects on contact. The barrier it creates keeps ants and other insects gone for 7 months-ish. I have no vested interest in the company that makes this stuff, it just plain works and is safe around electrical equipment.
can JS685 expel acorns?
(I liked the BBS thread)
My partner and I laughed long and loud at that one. A real knee-slapper!
Me: “Oh thank goodness we don’t have to do service calls for microwave towers.”
Him: “No fire ants up there.”
Me: “I hate working high up off the ground, and around high voltage.”
Him: “Squirrels or fire ants? Which is worse?”
Me: “Nature’s trying to tell us something.”
Him: “I’m not listening.”
Me, after a long pause: “I believe we are missing out on a huge untapped market: erecting oak tree nurseries or farms, underneath or next to microwave towers.”
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