@Photo55 @futurebird That's possible, but they *can* sleep through an entire winter without drinking; reptiles and amphibians can't.

@futurebird @Photo55

Here's a review paper by some collaborators on dormancy, which might be helpful? Part of the reason they wrote it was to try and unify understanding across different types of animals.

Just a moment...

(besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

@BenAveling @moira @Photo55 @futurebird

Might be most straightforward to say "ants go dormant" as a concept that can be understood? Avoid semantic arguments?

@llewelly @futurebird @lemgandi @moira @Photo55

The endothermy in bees is related to use of their flight muscles...most of what I've observed suggests that while ants are very temperature sensitive (e.g. repositioning brood to take advantage of temperature gradients), they're unlikely to display nearly as much endothermy as bees.

@llewelly @futurebird @moira @Photo55

Ah, well taken. Still, next summer it might be fun to get out there with a thermometer. I'd have to figure out an ant-proof way to insert it. Or maybe just put it in, run away, and come back later.

Even with that neotropical origin, they seem to do pretty well here in North Georgia, where the outside temperature dipped into the teens a couple of days ago.

@lemgandi @futurebird @moira @Photo55
Georgia is subtropical anyway, and not that different climate-wise from northern Argentina, which is the southern limit of the natural range of S. invicta , and occasional dips down into the teens (Fahrenheit) occur there also.

@moira @futurebird @Photo55 I really appreciated the moment of helpless giggling this injected into a fairly grim day, thank you!

@moira @futurebird @Photo55 I hate to interrupt, but it's an interesting coincidence that Lindsey Nicole just released a video about this very subject-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKMUucn-Pz4

@Ambulocetus @moira @Photo55

That is the video that started my confusion. (I added it to fediTV, the shared youTube playlist that I've been trying to get people to add things they watch to)

@futurebird @moira @Photo55 I suspected something like that. It did seem like a coincidence.

@futurebird @moira @Photo55
I occasionally get called out to do some animal relocation, and for the past decade or so, climate change has been disturbing the winter weather here. We will have 50 or 60 degree days right in the middle of a deep freeze.
This wakes up the bats, and if the bats are in your attic, they can't go outside, so they come down into your living room looking for something to eat. They have no choice: it's either look for food or try to go back to sleep and hope you don't starve before spring. If they stay awake they won't make it.

@moira @futurebird @Photo55
*I* liked it a *lot!*

@Bumblefish @futurebird @Photo55 they BRUMATE! which is DIFFERENT! somehow

@Photo55 @futurebird Random tangential trivia: Aforementioned Igor is what you might call a placental reptile. Not in the sense that his species is in any way more closely related to placental mammals than all other reptiles are ... but, well, they have placentae. There are many reptiles that bear live young, but most of those are ovoviviparous and simply carry eggs inside their bodies until they hatch. Blue-tongues (and most of the rest of the wider group of large Oceanian skinks they belong to) take it a step further: They have a mammal-like placenta, umbilical cord and everything, and they live off nutrients from their mother during embryonic development, just like mammals. Newborns even have bellybuttons, though they heal entirely and are gone after the first moult. In some of those species (though not Northern blue-tongues like Igor) there is even extensive parental care; shingleback skink parents (who form lifelong pairs) will watch over their young for several months, and prehensile-tailed skinks live in large family groups with a mated parent pair or two and their young - some of which will stay with the group into early adulthood, taking part in guarding their younger siblings. Great Desert skinks live in large underground burrow complexes which a family can maintain across multiple generations.

@datarama @futurebird
(Fascinating. I meant to distinguish the two groups of placental mammals from the interesting Echidna-Platypus crowd. Echidnae are less good at handling heat than the marsupials are, and shut down in the middle of a lot of days, I gather.

The various systems for it have probably developed and converged more than once even in mammals, I think, but there may be some shared primitives.