Originally published at: Watch these ants turn other ants into living storage tanks of food for the colony | Boing Boing
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What’s for dinner? Uncle Antsky!
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It unlocked a lot of childhood memories. My father gave me this book collection called Illustrated Library of Nature. One of the volumes was about insects and had some cool drawings of these ants.
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I have to admit that ‘replete’ is a much more aseptic term than ‘bodyhorror barn’.
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Some of the fat and protein they extract from the insects will end up inside the repletes…
Workers carry the nectar…inside their own abdomens. Then they transfer it, mouth to mouth, to the ants they’re turning into repletes…
The nutritious liquid stays inside the crop because four valves prevent most of it from flowing into the ant’s stomach, where it would be digested.
Look I believe that there’s no Great Designer, and I 100% believe in evolution, but when my puny mind tries to imagine how something like this evolved, I realize I just gotta have faith.
Not Aunt Tenna?
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