Ants: What The Hell Are These Things, Anyway? Ant-Rant, Ant-Facts and Ant-Lore

This is a brilliant thread and full of good posts. Over a few months ago the kitchen became visited by a whole exploration of ants, the tiny kind most common in the UK. They went everywhere into cupboards, drawers and under beneath the floor cupboards. Ant powder was strategically deployed to curb their flow and also ant traps.
The year before their main activity was located to the front room window sill and the skirting board.

Outside I sometimes watch them intently as they move up and down rose plants and in and out the cracks of the garden path observing their tiny nuances and interaction with each other.

Flying ants are a bit of a nuisance when they swarm and ping against your face and head.

Two good movies about ants, though Phase IV is slightly creepy.

Hey ATS,

Thank you all for making this a very special thread.

You know how memory creeps up on a person sometimes? Well, that has happened to me this morning and my memory was jostled. In the end I am not really surprised that I may be the one guy on this forum that actually has an...

Adam Ant Antecdote

Here it is...

So I am 24 or something and living adjacent to Hollywood (one does not actually want to live in Hollywood) with my girlfriend in a tiny apartment. We had gone to the local independent video store on a Friday evening to stock up on viewing fodder for the weekend. It was a busy and popular place with a cutting edge selection of stuff but an unusual feature of the store was that the 'lanes' for customers to approach the checkout were delineated with and by these sort of grocery-store-type tubular steel 'aisles'. So when it got busy there would be a bit of a crowded but orderly 'stack-up' as folks tried to get to the three registers.

So we are all crowded in the aisles at about 6:30 with the evenings movies, there were probably a dozen or so people and the folks behind the counter. There is the murmur of good humored chatting and as we are going to approach the counter the cashier says. "Hey look, There's Adam Ant".

The place goes silent and everyone looks at once to the right, trying to be cool, which is impossible en masse like that, but it's L.A.. So it gets so quiet that you can actually hear the wallet-chain slapping and jingling on Adam's jeans and the creak-thump of his boots as he makes his way towards 'science fiction'. He is diminutive but seems to weigh 800 pounds.

So we are all sort of staring for a second and I say, "Let's get him".

The whole gang of people falls out and Adam who has caught the exchange and energy guffaws over his shoulder and starts to hurry faster towards the back wall. We were all giggling so hard we almost couldn't get through the video rental transaction.

Anywho,

It was shortly after that episode that Adam came out with his album Wonderful and the title track has always been a little special to me because of that episode...



Thank you again ATS and special friends for making this so much fun.

Sad Battle Report to follow shortly.

X.

Great post. Ants are the only other species on the planet that we know of that farms with other species. That alone is mind boggling. I dont remeber the doc name but there was a documentary about ants I saw. In this documentary they excavated an anthill that they filled with concrete. Going off memory here but it took at least a few hours to gently fill that colony with some 10 tonnes of concrete. Thing is...... They knew about convection currents, methane gas rising etc.. They had rooms for garbage storage that actually had vents to send the warmer gasses throughout.... Wow. Great post on a great subject, and an awesomely humorous narration

Here is a small thing. I thought that it was pretty cool that the meme "EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY" from T.H. White's Once and Future King was put to use so cleverly to describe a principal of quantum mechanics. I certainly would not claim to know a whole lot about that, but I want to quote the Totalitarian Principal so that those that did not click on the link can read it...

In quantum mechanics, Gell-Mann's Totalitarian Principle states: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed this expression from T.H. White's The Once and Future King to describe the state of particle physics around the time he was creating the Eightfold Way, a precursor to the quark-model of hadrons.

The statement is in reference to a surprising feature of particle interactions: that any interaction which is not forbidden by a small number of simple conservation laws is not only allowed, but must be included in the sum over all "paths" which contribute to the outcome of the interaction. Hence if it isn't forbidden, there is some probability amplitude for it to happen.

In any of the Everett-based interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as Bryce DeWitt's many-worlds or Gell-Mann's many-histories interpretations, the principle has a more literal meaning: that every possibility at every interaction which is not forbidden by such a conservation law will actually happen (in some branch of the wavefunction).

en.wikipedia.org...

Seems they might have called that the 'Gell-Mann Universal Re-Bunk Principal'. If what Gell-Mann has observed is accurate then it seems that would be good cause to re-evaluate what we think is possible. It also sounds like a pretty good guarantee that weird stuff we do not have a ready explanation for will continue to happen in the world.

So that's good news.

X.

... silly thread!!! lol!! it really brightened my day. I especially love the picture of the cat... ANTS! rofl too cute.

reply to post by Xoanon


You are hilarious! I feel for you! and for me! Live in Florida and let me say they ARE little #%$#%. I have battled crazy ants, sugar ants, red ants. They are relentless! I have some acreage and when the kids play outside I am forever telling them watch the ant piles! If you fall please get up quickly and check yourselves! Those little devil red ants will swarm your body within seconds, and the bites hurt, itch sting and scar. ARGH!!! We pour gasoline on the pile, oh yea, that helps quickly, but then they just move underground and form another pile somewhere else. I feel like Bill Murray in Caddyshack! They just keep on keepin on and laugh at me the whole time. Oh and they like clean laundry. Came through the window and infested all the folded laundry, yup! Piles of laundry went into a garbage bag and I suffocated them. Then had to re-wash. Argh!!
Oh! and the sugar ants love bathrooms and kitchen. They are so small you can't even see them. I'll be sitting down and have these tiny little suckers crawling on me and not even know it!!! I'm sure I've eaten hundreds on them! Thank God they don't bite. They do have stuff that kills them though. Its some sweet poison and does work very well. First time I saw crazy ants I didn't know what they were! Somebody told me that there is no way to get rid of them if you are in their path. Nice, just nice. Amazing the little red devils aren't even native. Every insect and creepy crawley thing thrives in Florida. Wish I did too.

They've always seemed like extremely advanced robots. You know, because of the chitin.

reply to post by Xoanon


One of my favourite games back in the day




It came from the desert

I did the borax and icing sugar thing ... wow .. they would come get some then jump around like crazy .. come back for more and jump again .... lol ... the big black ones ..carpenter ants I think.. the little red ones were nowhere to be found and those were the ones I was after ... anyways it rained last nite and the feed is all solid now . don`t know if they`ll keep eating it ? and I hope it worked ... nawwww nothing works on those little buggers.

I love the way that the Ant Rant is still top current members pick!

But pleeeease! A whole thread on Ants!

I thought ATS's motto is Deny Ignor-ANTS!

Sorry....

I'll get my coat..........

Rat

Ok,

What I love about this thread is all of these old timers coming out to post. Typically it's swarm-o-newb.

Like me, I suppose.

Ratman?

This is for you...





X.

reply to post by Xoanon


Cheers X

Been lurking in the sewers since 2007.

Occasionally stick my whiskers out to see whats going on.

Try and stay below the radar, but sometimes you have to nibble........

And tonite's a nibblefest.



Rat

My girlfriend and I have a silly game making up ant descriptions:

What do you call a tired ant? A Pant
An ill ant? A Sycophant
A large ant? Yup ... an Elephant
An angry ant? Belligerant
A dictator ant? A Tyrant
An ant who can't sing? Discordant... sigh

the list goes on...

reply to post by Ezappa


The only ant game I ever played was Ant Attack on the ZX 48k Spectrum.
The loading times on the tape deck for these cassette based games lasted sometimes up to 20 minutes. Marvelous. I can still remember the snickle zip snaggle sounds of the loading screen and the trippy border visuals that would send your head into a hypno trance as you waited.

ANTS..............There have been times in my life where I have looked upon them as friends...better yet, have accepted them as pre-rinse!!!

Such a society...........organized, deliberate,highly engineered, survivors to the nth!!!!!!!!!!!!

They truly deserve our respect; albeit, odious at times...

Be natural and responsible in your struggle, please, for they travel and spread whatever they are wearing. Have gone so far as to transplant honeysuckle vines in pots, in the kitchen. Water rules with them always!!!

Namaste!!

Ants really are systems, engineering.stanford.edu...
They operate off algorithms, there are many things that can give a central point (the queen?) feedback as to things like foraging, the article is really cool, I wonder what else this can tell

When I went to Sri Lanka, there were big 2 inch long black ants that would bite me. They left black marks and sometimes ate parts of my skin. After stepping on a colony of them, I swore to never kill any ants for fun.

WOW That was the MOST interesting, well written, and educational thread I have read in such a long time!! Well Done, and thank you!

its really amazing how fast my fresh coconut water surrounded by ants..
i wonder what could happen if ant can grow the size of cockroach

I have had extensive experience with fire ants, and I have the strong opinion that they are EVIL. I remember once sitting in a park on a log bench, not noticing a nest was under it, they got all over one leg, like around 200 ants, and they seemed to sting ALL AT ONCE. It was like they got in position and when they were all in position to sting, THEN they stung. It could be a pheromone that signals to attack, but it was like you were dealing with a hive mind. They are vicous, they will attack ANYTHING that gets by their nest, I was lucky I had been stung before so had a little resistance to the venom, but some people who are stung can have a severe allergic reaction. If you havent been stung by these ants, it feels like a hot needle going into your skin. Not a pleasant experience.