Chebucto Regional Softball Club

You may not like it ... peak performance ... etc etc.

When atta are cutting a leaf they make stridulations (vibrations too hight-pitched for human hearing) by moving their exoskeleton. This noise isn't just a result of the cutting, it's an extra noise that carries through the plant, letting other ants know the quality of the leaf. The higher quality the leaf the more intense the sounds she will make calling more ants to the place where the leaves are at the perfect level of development for fungus farming.

Wonder if plants are alarmed by this?

She's a cutting machine! Like a circle cutter with legs come to life!

Her body is designed to cut and haul maximum LEAF.

What a triumph!

@workingclassgames @markh

May I ask some lazy questions?

1. Can I post things I make with this on my website and it is self contained?

2. Can I run the editor/creation software on my website? (I'm thinking of using this in an educational context)

3. Is there scripting?

I plan on digging around in this to find out more, but if anyone knows the answers to these questions off of the top of their head it would save a lot of time.

The book “Gardening Ants: The Attines” (Weber) is old but it has so many banger illustrations. Here is one showing the size difference in Atta cephalotes minors and majors. This difference is entirely caused by how the ants are fed and cared for. Ants have so much variability in gene expression and they use it to shape their population to fit the work that needs to be done. (I love the naturalistic placement of the minor on the major’s head, they do hang out like this.) #antbooks #diagrams #ants

@DemocracyMattersALot

She is OBVIOUSLY not in distress.

@DemocracyMattersALot

Ruining a romance between a nice space spider and a woman sounds JUST like him. ugh.

@Taweret

Put "Phase IV" in a poll.

But for next week the Gorgon could be good.

@MichaelWhelan

Which one is you?

I had a dream last night that stuck with me. I was waiting for the 4 train at 86th street. Then there was sound of the train coming, but when it pulled up it wasn't the train... it was #picaTheCat. She was as large as a subway train and stopped at the station and started eating the people on the platform like kibble. "No, Pica! No!" I cried, but she wouldn't listen.

I distinctly remember thinking "But I STILL support public transit"

Then I woke up, Pica was on my chest staring at me.

In the hagfish cosmology the universe is a great knot. This knot, like all knots, is slowly working itself apart, and when it is at last untied only then will paradise (which is a chunk of the universe we cannot see beyond the knot) be free'd from the substance of deep space, like a chunk of flesh, and all those who are slimy will get to go to paradise.

Those without slime? They will become a part of a new knot... in the next universe.

Wanting to live in the end times is kind of cowardly since it absolves of you of the burden of building a better future. Some great compelling force will come down from on high and sort it all out.

Since you don't really know what times you face it's more responsible and brave to live as if these are the "Beginning Times" instead. And with great effort you may do a tiny bit of good that lasts a few decades beyond your grave.

A group of ants arguing about lady bird conservation. Some of the aphid rancher ants complain that the ladybirds, especially the larvae eat too many of their steer. But the urban ants think they are majestic creatures who don't deserve to be hunted and they even have a whole study showing that hunting them isn't effective.

Much ant grumbling and arguing.

No one thinks it's odd at all that the ants too sometimes eat aphids. (They're our aphids!)

It's kinda strange to me that my students can get this joke.

They deserve new media IMHO.

Still an oldie but goodie.

Check out this incredible 200-day timelapse of the agracultural work of a leaf cutter #ant colony kept as pets by Attines.

The way the fungus mound grows and cycles must be what's happening in their underground chambers all over the Americas.

There are species of leaf-cutters that live as far north as CT. Though the northern species tend to farm fungus on dead, rather than living leaves. #video #antsofmastodon #antvideo