futurebird's ants

Look at this big beautiful carpenter ant major from my Camponotus pennsylvanicus colony! I picked her up with the paint brush and just let her wander around on my hand for a bit. She's so gentle and curious.

Termitomyces titanicus

It turns out that fungus growing termites sometimes cultivate Termitomyces titanicus. This is an excellent scientific name. It's a fungi farmed by termites (like ants they do not allow it to produce "fruiting bodies" or mushroom caps while the colony is active.) But when a colony dies it will produce a massive mushroom over a meter wide.

And you can eat it!

Hence the species name.

The fungi farmed by ants also produces mushrooms when their colonies die out. This fungi can't survive without the ants and the ants propagate it by carrying it with them when they found new nests:

So what is the purpose of the mushrooms?

Is it just a hold-over from the days before the fungi was dependent on ants?

I've been trying to find out if you can eat the ones that grow on old ant nests.

This guy named Ben Palmer made an "Immigration tip line" and people call it thinking he's ICE.

He records them and shares it with the world.

What do people sound like when reporting their neighbors, coworkers, students? Are they confident they are doing a righteous good thing?

Witness the banality of evil in these sheepish suburban voices.

It would be very strange to have a living thing from a previously unknown branch of life AND it's this huge giant towering structure.

What if it was the first thing to crack the code for growing large? A runaway.

WHAT IF ITS ALIENS? (someone calm me down please)

OK what if it's Siphonophore-like? Or something lichen like? eg not just one organism?

Here is a video on turtle ants.

When queen ants are looking for a place to found their nest they can be desperate to get underground. Lifeofkush encounters a huge chunky queen just after she removes her wings and stimulates digging by just giving her a little divot in the soil to get her started.

This it makes sense. Breaking the surface would take a lot of effort, and that is more time when her juicy fat self is in full view of birds and people and everything else that would eat her.

It’s actually another one of his jokes: “the human race-conceit of the investigator” is Grove saying that humans do science instinctively. Birds build their nests, the human creature investigates things.

I'm always a little suspicious when some guy from 1947 starts tossing around the word "race" so maybe that's part of why I missed it on the first pass.

Get that cracked distressed screen look that says “apple ain’t done nothing to impress me in years”

There is a scene in “Consider Her Ways” where the ants read by running over the text in books. This was so delightful I drew it. The photos of Atta laevigata by @[email protected] were very helpful.

There is an important post over on Mastodon about this, but I wanted to pass this along to the bug fans on tumblr too. It sounds like they want to use AI to "improve" species suggestions, but is also sounds like google is trying to datamine iNaturalist.

Everyone is a little alarmed by this for OBVIOUS reasons. AI has made learning about insects online so much more awful and iNaturalist is an island of sanity in a sea of slop. I don't want that to change at all.

iNaturalist has said they will make a "blog post" to explain due to the concerns this has raised. And they should. This isn't the community that wants this kind of change.

I hope that they will be reasonable and the alarm is just overblown, but I do think it's justified.

When you search for "ants" on google you get nonsense like this labeled as a macrophoto: