EPTCool result though.
Ants! - Page 2
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foeffa
Belgium2115 Posts
Cool result though. | ||
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Titusmaster6
United States5937 Posts
So basically it's nothing we haven't done before. Humans 1, Ants 0. | ||
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thoraxe
United States1449 Posts
On January 19 2008 03:41 Hawk wrote: That's fuckin sick. I wonder how long it took them to dig that all out If you'd watch the video and pay attention, you'd know. | ||
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fanatacist
10319 Posts
On January 19 2008 10:02 Titusmaster6 wrote: "It's equal to the Great Wall of China." So basically it's nothing we haven't done before. Humans 1, Ants 0. Except ants have done this for ages before the Great Wall, without the technology we have, without a written or oral language, and without any casualties. | ||
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Chef
10810 Posts
Kinda cool and scary at the same time how preprogrammed ants are. It's like they might as well just be machines. and without any casualties. That's unlikely :D | ||
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allowicious
United States972 Posts
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Rev0lution
United States1805 Posts
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micronesia
United States24700 Posts
On January 19 2008 05:53 Diggity wrote: Er what? That sounds very off. Wikipedia offers: ants make up up to 15-25% of the total terrestrial animal biomass (on Earth).I dont have back up numbers for this but I am pretty sure that ants out number humans something like 2:1. And thats just ants. That video started me thinking about ways to put this amazing phenomenon to work... and then I thought of I Am Legend. | ||
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RzzE
Germany20 Posts
I was thinking that a random mutation in a lowly worker ant that changes its behaviour in a favourable way (e.g. making it want to build a ventilation shaft in a slightly more optimal fashion) would never even provide the colony with a survival advantage, since the single ant's contribution is almost negligible over the colony's scale. Then I realised that that line of thought is meaningless anyway, since worker ants are sterile and wouldn't pass on any random mutations, even if they provided a survival advantage. The only mutations that are relevant therefore are on the queens and the male drones. A mutation on the queen that causes her to produce an offspring with a slightly modified behaviour would produce a significant survival advantage for the entire colony, since a significant portion of the colony's worker ants would have been modified. Essentially the "hive mind" has evolved further and e.g. the ventilation shafts are constructed in a slightly more optimum way. This begs the question of whether it is even possible for a hive mind to evolve through natural selection for a society without a "queen figure". I can't think of how it could work. Can anybody think of a counterexample - a species that exhibits "hive" like behaviour without a queen? Or does natural selection imply that hives must always have a queen? | ||
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