F
:: An alien spacecraft lands on Earth. However, because it is so small, almost no one notices. It is like a tiny meteor—a shooting star entering the upper atmosphere. Then the spacecraft opens, and the ants exit: perfectly ordinary ants, not super-intelligent just regular ants.
They've found a new way to conduct their nuptial flight. They're going places ants have never gone before.
If you really think the second one is true maybe you both messed up. I like the first one though.
Is it really that odd to just like your spouse? He’s my favorite person. Not perfect but no one is perfect. Better than all of the other *people* for me. Even the things he does that annoy me I wouldn’t change. Please tell me this isn’t some lucky fluke. I thought it was the point of being married at all.
I mean I sympathize— but I was able to learn to identify all NZ ants in an afternoon— my progress learning the ants of NYC is still ongoing— there are just so many more ants.
But I could see how being immersed in the ants local to you it’d be annoying to hear “there’s not that much to them” because this is never really true if you look.
@vivtek Do NOT call his beautiful perfect ants “pauperite” ever again.
I want to give Dr. Don a hug for the umbrage he takes to those of us who have said NZ has a surprisingly low number of ant species. He assures us that the species complex will bring the numbers up… but up to what? Two dozen? That’s still not very many ants!
(I have to like anyone who defends their local ants, though)
Camponotus is the most speciose of ant genera, yet it's not unheard of for them to be absent from island ecosystems. (see UK) You're likely familiar with Camponotus by their common name: carpenter ants. Large friendly ants who often nest in rotting wood, soil, or leaf litter. But when you look at the entire genus, the diversity is staggering. Some nest in twigs, others build carton nests from a mixture of silk and dead leaves. Some farm aphids, while others are specialized hunters.
I recently bought a book about the ants of New Zealand.(by Warwick Don) —reading about NZ ants might sound like reading about beekeepers from Manhattan—But just as the rarity of farmers in a big city makes those few that exist all the more intriguing, the paucity of NZ ants makes them especially fascinating. I'm really enjoying the introduction, which lays out the extant genera and their possible origins.
One ant in particular has my attention: the potentially apocryphal Camponotus newzealiandi
Don't forget to follow lots of hashtags. I find this helps me to find posts I might not otherwise see. Such as your post. So you probably already know about this. 
Such a lovely wasp pity she's in the wrong place. Are you going to try and bag the nest and shut them down?
Ravi Nath, the paper's co-first author and a graduate student in the Sternberg laboratory. "But jellyfish are the most evolutionarily ancient animals known to sleep. This finding opens up many more questions: Is sleep the property of neurons? And perhaps a more far-fetched question: Do plants sleep?"
This makes me feel less silly about wondering about plants. Plants don't have neurons. So, my guess is that they probably do not "dream" ... but rest and active phases may exist?
This is incredible!
Even his fantasy of "winning" is bad.
Who would want to be vindicated by AI? It loves everything you feed it. It's a flattery machine. And it can only recognize broad patterns in text and celebrates the normal, in the statistical sense.
It loves the derivative. And generates peak derivative works.
I bet if I fed some of my armchair notions about ant evolution to an AI it'd think I was a genius. But, that's not science it's science fiction!
Link to timestamp (although the whole video is pretty funny)
Did this man just say that we should show the papers to... AI... text salad generators and ask them what they think. And did he just make up a fantasy where the AIs liked his work and say "well what would you do then? if the AIs like it?"
I don't feel like anyone present made enough fun of what a terrible idea this is from the standpoint of having faith in AI.
Canada isn't in the top 50.
I think I saw a density map like what you described, I will see if I can find it again.
Have you considered towing the islands south a bit? /jk
There are only 11 endemic species! And even those don't go back deep into the past. There are some introduced species and they are causing problems.
To be fair ya'll were NOT making the ant species top fifty with just a few dozen species.
It's a little disturbing how few ants are in NZ. It must have been very cold for a period ...