Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@DaveMWilburn @Nonya_Bidniss

Yeah... but... if they try to do romance it can be pretty amusing.

@Nonya_Bidniss

IDK there is something more personal about it being one person who wrote all the nonsense in things like these and it's a little window into their mind. Such as it is.

If the insects were gone I would assume it was The Rapture.

So this is why I rejoice when I see the ants again. When the bees return, and even maybe the mosquitos (some of them) and the shy beetles, and the gnats to tiny too name.

Consider the slow creeping horror of a spring with no insects. The uncanny unspecified silence of the night. The emptiness and around you the whole ecosystem would be failing from the bottom up... without making a single sound.

You might make it to fall, maybe through the first winter but beyond that? When the soil fails? When most of the birds and river fish are gone?

It would be the end, but how many would notice it had begun?

@Nonya_Bidniss

I hate how, because of LLMs, reading such things will almost never be as amusing as it once was.

It's now too easy to just churn out nonsense and you don't even need to read it before you print it. No one needs to read it. It's just a book as a symbolic object.

The Fenway Park Lemur
(Also known as The People From Boston Can't Recognize a Raccoon)

is the funniest Cryptid.

Though maybe it could have been a cat. Pica has a very long tail and could make a good lemur if you added rings to her tail and made it fatter. She even jumps like one.

But then she'd have little hands...

NO. No thank you.

@apLundell

cromagnANTS

@LuisCrespo

Description: a person holds a peeled clementine showing it to a gray tabby cat with a round face.

The cat sniffs the air and makes a face like "yuck".

The person encourages the cat to sniff again. The cat makes the same face and walks away.

@kimlockhartga

No. Seems like prudent planning.

@Moss

I have those in my book.

@charette

Well army ants need to keep moving since they eat all of the insects in one area so they need to leave and hunt somewhere else for a bit so they don't destroy the ecosystem.

@datarama

People are ALWAYS saying that to me.

I wonder if there have ever been migrating army ants?

Ants that don't build a nest and live in the south in the winter then make their way north as the weather warms eating everything in their path?

Maybe army ants just can't make enough progress in a day to get that far.

... but what if they brought back their wings?

@michaelgemar

Mostly they do go deep, but they are also somewhat cold tolerant. But if there are very cold winters it will take longer for the ants to get their numbers back up again.

@violator

It depends on the species. Ants aren't harmed much by staying active in winter if they are used to being more seasonal, the issue is the queen my die younger since she never takes a break from laying eggs. (though tropical species don't take such breaks)

Carpenter ants are very hearty and just making things more cool and feeding them less is good enough.

@michaelgemar

Depends on the species. But some Carpenter ants can tolerate freezing temperatures.

My pet ants aren't very cold (though I do put them in a cooler place for winter) Diapause isn't as extreme as hibernation. An ant may have a small snack or groom her sisters. But mostly they rest.

Starting in the warm days of March they will wake up and begin a big push to increase their numbers for Spring.

The saddest thing about this time of year is the lack of ants.

I have my pet colony, (carpenters) and the ants at the museum. (honeypots and leafcutters) ... but I never see any ants in the park, or on the sidewalk or trees.

It's so lonely.

Have you wondered where all the ants go?

In winter ants like my carpenters enter "diapause" which is similar to hibernation in mammals. They prepare their bodies for cold and move slowly. Deep in the earth and in the trees they rest in a big pile.

@foone

I like the floppy logo.