Dedicated to a Happier Year.

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.

Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”

While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”

Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.

In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”

We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.

The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.

A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”

The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”

The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”

A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”

Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)

A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”

Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”

All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.

Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.

for racist language it becomes even more obvious. "r*dskin" is clearly a slur, whereas "savage" (in the context of an indigenous person) is derogatory language

Several species of ants will 'herd' aphids around (a type of plant lice)- even picking them up and putting them back with the group if they wander off. The ants will attack anything that approaches their aphid herds, defending them. The aphids produce a sugary excretion called honeydew, which the ants harvest and eat.

Some ants will even 'milk' the aphids, stroking the aphids with their antennae, to stimulate them to release honeydew. Some aphids have become 'domesticated' by the ants, and depend entirely on their caretaker ants to milk them.

When the host plant is depleted of resources and dies, the ants will pick up their herd of aphids and carry them to a new plant to feed on - a new 'pasture' if you will.

Some ants continue to care for aphids overwinter, when otherwise they'd die. The ants carry aphid eggs into their own nests, and will even go out of their way to destroy the eggs of aphid-predators, like ladybugs.

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Microhylids – or narrow-mouthed frogs - have an interesting symbiosis with Tarantulas.

While the spiders could very easily kill and eat the much-tinier frogs, and DO normally prey on small frogs, young spiders instead will use their mouthparts to pick up the microhylid frogs, bring them back to their burrow, and release them unharmed.

The frog benefits from hanging out in/around the burrow of the tarantula, because the tarantula can scare away or eat predators that normally prey on tiny frogs, like snakes, geckos, and mantids. The tarantula gets a babysitter.

Microhylid frogs specialize in eating ants, and ants are one of the major predators of spider eggs. By eating ants, the frogs protect the spider's eggs. The frogs can also lay their eggs in the burrow, and won't be eaten by the spider.

So it's less 'livestock' and more like a housepet - a dog or a cat. You stop coyotes/eagles from hurting your little dog/cat, and in return the dog/cat keeps rats away from your baby.

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Damselfish grow algae on rocks and corals. They defend these gardens ferociously, and will attack anything that comes too close - even humans. They spend much of their time weeding the gardens, removing unwanted algaes that might overtake their crop.

The species of algae that they cultivate is weak and and sensitive to growing conditions, and can easily be overgrazed by other herbivores. That particular algae tends to grow poorly in areas where damselfish aren't around to protect and farm it.

Damselfish will ALSO actively protect Mysidium integrum (little shrimp-like crustacians) in their reef farms, despite eating other similarly sized invertebrates. The mysids are filter feeders, who feed on zooplankton and free-floating algae, and their waste fertilizes the algae farms. Many types of zooplankton can feed on the algae crop, and the mysids prevent that.

While Mysids can be found around the world, the only place you'll find swarms of Musidium integrum is on the algae farms that Damselfish cultivate.

Damselfish treat the little mysids like some homesteaders treat ducks. Ducks eat snails and other insect pests on our crops, and their poop fertilizes the land. The ducks can be eaten, but aren't often, since they're more useful for their services than their meat.

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There are SEVERAL species of insect and animal which actively farm. They perform fungiculture and horticulture: deliberately growing and harvesting fungus and plants at a large-scale to feed their population.

Leaf-cutter ants and Termites both chew up plant material and then seed it with a specific type of fungus. The fungus grows, and the termites/ants harvest the mushroom as a food source.

Ambrosia beetles burrow into decaying trees, hollow out little farming rooms, and introduce a specific fungii (the ambrosia fungi), which both adults and larval beetles feed on.