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2024-12-24 at 5:28 AM UTC in What are you doing at the momentThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-12-22 at 10:46 PM UTC in Could be a serial killer
Originally posted by Dirtbag A few weeks ago a man went missing, last said he was going for a hike. Now there's another man missing, he's vulnerable and doesn't drive. I don't know why the first man hasn't been found if he just went for a hike, why haven't hikers found him? It stands out that they were both vulnerable. I'm wondering if it's a serial killer or if it's refugees doing this. One of them stabbed a social worker in the face.
didn't everyone expect you are a serial killer? didn't you make reference to this? are you confessing ?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-12-18 at 2:41 AM UTC in What are you doing at the momentI feel much better now, I got all the bullshit done and made a video then moved it to my phone and watched it, now im done for today, tomorrow ill figure out how to edit on my lap top.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-12-17 at 9:20 AM UTC in &TOTSE/totse.com. Old Babbage Bi-Monthly articleIn a forgotten alley, where the streetlights buzzed with dying voltage and shadows swallowed the pavement, there was a bar only whispered about: The Temple of the Screaming Electron, or simply TOTSE. No one advertised it. No flyers, no Yelp reviews, and certainly no website. But if you needed to find it, somehow, you did.
The entrance was easy to miss—a narrow door, blackened by time, with no handle and a single brass buzzer below a faded sign. The letters T-O-T-S-E were etched unevenly, like someone had carved them with a knife in a moment of frustration. If you rang the buzzer, there’d be no response at first, just silence. Then, a voice—warped and distorted—would crackle through a hidden speaker:
“Shall pass no law”
The door opened inward, and suddenly you were inside.
The first thing you noticed was the sound. It wasn’t music, at least not in the conventional sense. Speakers mounted in the corners hissed static, interspersed with fragments of broken transmissions: a news broadcast from the '50s, a Soviet-era number station, the chirp of a modem connecting to nowhere. Underneath it all, the low hum of electronics pulsed like a heartbeat.
The bar itself sprawled in impossible ways. At the center was the counter, a slab of old, pockmarked steel lined with mismatched stools. The bartender, an enigmatic figure known only as “Warden”, never smiled, never laughed—just served drinks with the precision of a machinist. A pair of thick, taped glasses magnified his eyes to cartoonish proportions, and his stained apron seemed to have more burn marks than a welder’s coat.
The drinks were infamous. No cocktails with umbrellas or sugared rims here. Instead, there were concoctions named "Short Circuit," "Blue Screen of Death," and the lethal "Rootkit." Rumor had it the last one contained absinthe, espresso, and something that glowed faintly under black light. Warden would sometimes mix them without looking, as though the bottles knew exactly where to land in his hands.
The regulars at TOTSE were the kind of people you didn’t meet anywhere else. In one corner sat a man known only as “Null,” tapping endlessly at a mechanical keyboard hooked up to nothing—no monitor, no wires. Across from him, a woman with silver hair and mirrored sunglasses argued passionately with a man wearing a tinfoil hat. They spoke in riddles, throwing around phrases like “signal interference,” “crypto-lattice walls,” and “the electron is screaming again.”
Scattered booths with torn upholstery lined the walls, each one home to a different enigma. Writers hunched over notebooks, scribbling furiously. Hackers tapped away on laptops with cracked screens, the keys worn bare. Philosophers leaned over half-empty glasses, muttering about the collapse of society, the rise of machines, or the beauty of chaos.
And the chalkboard. The blackboard behind the bar was sacred. Anyone who thought they had something to say could stand up and write on it—whether it was lines of code, fragments of manifestos, or a question no one could answer. Warden would always wipe it clean by morning, but somehow, pieces remained, buried under layers of chalk dust like ghosts of ideas unspoken.
The lights above the bar flickered unpredictably, casting shadows that didn’t always make sense. Some said the wiring was shot; others claimed the bar was alive. Occasionally, the hum would shift to an eerie silence, the kind that made you hold your breath without realizing it. That’s when you’d hear the stories.
People said TOTSE had always been there, in some form or another. Before it was a bar, it was a speakeasy during Prohibition. Before that, a forgotten basement where alchemists mixed poisons and cures alike. Some claimed it was older still, built on ley lines, drawing power from energies no one could name. But in its current form, The Temple of the Screaming Electron was something else entirely—a sanctuary for ideas no one else would host.
The hum, the walls, the name itself—it all echoed a singular philosophy: Speech is power, and power must never be silenced. This was TOTSE's creed, scrawled above the bar in jagged letters:
“Freedom of speech: Enter at your own peril.”
Here, words were sacred, dangerous, and limitless. People came to TOTSE because they had nowhere else to go—no other place where they could speak without fear, where their ideas could live or die on merit alone.
Some newcomers embraced it. Others fled, overwhelmed by the raw, unenhancemented nature of it all. But those who stayed? They found a kind of freedom most people only dreamed of. They became part of the conversation—a chaotic, electric current that screamed across the dark void of silence.
TOTSE wasn’t just a bar; it was a battleground for ideas. Some were mad, some were genius, and some were both. But all of them were given the space to exist. And if you walked out those doors feeling unsettled, electrified, or forever changed—then TOTSE had done its job.
Because, as the Warden often grumbled while wiping down the bar, “Speech is free. But freedom? That’ll cost you.”
When you left TOTSE, whether it was after one drink or a lost weekend, the outside world never felt quite the same. The city seemed quieter, the air heavier, as though some unseen force had rearranged the atoms of reality while you were inside. Streetlights buzzed louder, their glow harsher, and even the graffiti on the walls seemed to watch you with newfound intent. The hum of traffic no longer blended into the background—it gnawed at your ears, sharp and insistent. People on the sidewalks moved differently too, faces down, eyes blank, their conversations muted and empty compared to the chaos and electricity you’d left behind. The world felt sanitized, muffled, as if someone had turned down the volume on life itself. You’d check your phone, only to find it frozen, or your clock inexplicably wrong, as though time had been rewritten while you were gone. And lingering in the back of your mind, like the fading whisper of a dream, was the hum—the low, pulsing reminder that you had been somewhere real.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-12-17 at 9:04 AM UTC in &TOTSE/totse.com. Old Babbage Bi-Monthly articleOnce upon a time, in a forgotten corner of a bustling city, there was a bar known only to those who wandered far enough off the beaten path: The Temple of the Screaming Electron, or TOTSE for short. Hidden behind a flickering neon sign and a door with no handle—just a buzzer—TOTSE wasn’t your typical dive.
The moment you stepped in, the hum of electronics filled the air, as if the walls themselves were alive. Old CRT monitors looped static and cryptic messages. The jukebox didn’t play songs; it emitted distorted sounds that somehow felt like music after your third drink.
At the bar, the drinks had names like "404 Not Found", "Packet Lost", and "Electroshock Martini"—each one stronger and stranger than the last. The bartender, a mysterious figure with a soldering iron instead of a bar spoon, swore he could "reboot your soul" if you had the right mix.
The regulars were misfits: hackers, writers, philosophers, and conspiracy theorists—all huddled in booths, whispering about secrets that could change the world or ruin it. Every so often, someone would get up and scribble something on the chalkboard behind the bar: a manifesto, a piece of code, or a question that no one could answer.
TOTSE wasn’t just a bar; it was an idea—a place where the unspoken got spoken, where chaos met creativity, and where you were always one drink away from uncovering the truth or losing your mind entirely.
And if you ever found yourself there, you didn’t stumble upon it by accident. You were meant to find it.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-12-07 at 8:12 PM UTC in What are you doing at the momentThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-12-06 at 6:46 PM UTC in THE FURNITURE FILESThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-12-04 at 11:54 PM UTC in What are you doing at the momentjust say moo with ya dick out. chicks dig it
type shitThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-12-04 at 5:40 PM UTC in My mom is dying of alcoholism.
Originally posted by Netflxchillr Many healing wishes & prayers, for your Mama, Braders. 🙏🌹🙏
Also he could easily go take care of his moms. He has the means, he doesn’t pay rent and he gets food stamps, SSI, and disability every month that he squirrels away god knows where. Literally nothing stopping him from getting his parole transferred and go staying with his mom to help her out if she keeps breaking bones and shit.
Literally not a single reason he couldn’t stay there or at a recovery house nearby. But he doesn’t want to do that, he doesn’t care that much, he cares barely enough to make a post about it here to try and garner your sympathy.
What a piece of shitThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-11-24 at 6:49 PM UTC in I'm a million dollar nigga that needs to borrow some money.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-11-21 at 2:04 AM UTC in Best & Worst User on this site (Opinions)He’s a good gont.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-11-18 at 10:06 PM UTC in Infowars shut down
At least when we want to listen to assholes from Texas we still have Ghost.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-11-18 at 2:57 PM UTC in T2k1 is DENYING our long standing bromantic relationshipyou slept with him didnt youThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-11-12 at 7:28 PM UTC in What are you thinking about....Disney has invested heavily in technology that synchronizes communication through body language and gestures. The satanic pedo elite want their communications impossible to decipher so theyve been looking into alternative means of communication. Any country or city where gangstalking/stasi zersetzung is rampant, youll find more child sex trafficking if you investigate. They obscure the official numbers of children missing in certain places and the Democrats' have made it easier by allowing unaccounted for illegal alien children and adults to pour into the country. Theyre undocumented for a reason. Amazon is also known to be heavily involved with microwave based gesture mapping and synchronization and works with a well known stasi zersetzung company known as Security Industry SpecialistsThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-11-12 at 7:13 PM UTC in What are you thinking about....Disney, Youtube and Amazon are all involved at the highest level with the satanic pedophile networks. Theyre also involved in technology that uses chaos magic to keep their operations safe, manipulate people through livestreams etc
Disney and Amazon in particular are involved with technology for this purpose and youtube implements some of it while allowing sexualization of children content to remain as a means of manipulating and recruiting for their pedo network operations.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-11-11 at 10:38 PM UTC in What are you doing at the momentJust took my first dose of k r a t o m for the day! just 2g! down from 30 to 2, 'bout god damn time too.
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2024-11-08 at 7:06 PM UTC in Battles among Ants Resemble Human Warfare
The most breathtaking example of colony allegiance in the ant world is that of the Linepithema humile ant. Though native to Argentina, it has spread to many other parts of the world by hitching rides in human cargo. In California the biggest of these “supercolonies” ranges from San Francisco to the Mexican border and may contain a trillion individuals, united throughout by the same “national” identity. Each month millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with three other colonies in wars that may have been going on since the species arrived in the state a century ago. The Lanchester square law applies with a vengeance in these battles. Cheap, tiny and constantly being replaced by an inexhaustible supply of reinforcements as they fall, Argentine workers reach densities of a few million in the average suburban yard. By vastly outnumbering whatever native species they encounter, the supercolonies control absolute territories, killing every competitor they contact.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-of-war/
What gives these Argentines their relentless fighting ability? Many ant species, as well as some other creatures, including humans, exhibit a “dear enemy effect,” in which, after a period of conflict, death rates sharply decline as the two sides settle on a boundary—often with an unoccupied no-man’s-land between them. In the floodplains where Argentine ants originated, however, warring colonies must stop fighting each time the waters rise, forcing them to higher ground. The conflict is never settled; the battle never ends. Thus, their wars continue unabated, decade after decade.
The violent expansions of ant supercolonies bring to mind how human colonial superpowers once eradicated smaller groups, from Native Americans to Australian Aborigines. Luckily, humans do not form superorganisms in the sense I have described: our allegiances can shift over time to let immigrants in, to permit nations to fluidly define themselves. Although warfare might be inescapable among many ants, it is, for us, avoidable.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-11-08 at 7:05 PM UTC in Battles among Ants Resemble Human Warfare
Battles among Ants Resemble Human Warfare
Battles among ants can be startlingly similar to human military operations
By Mark W. Moffett
December 2011 Issue
The Sciences
The raging combatants form a blur on all sides. the scale of the violence is almost incomprehensible, the battle stretching beyond my field of view. Tens of thousands sweep ahead with a suicidal single-mindedness. Utterly devoted to duty, the fighters never retreat from a confrontation—even in the face of certain death. The engagements are brief and brutal. Suddenly, three foot soldiers grab an enemy and hold it in place until one of the bigger warriors advances and cleaves the captive’s body, leaving it smashed and oozing.
I back off with my camera, gasping in the humid air of the Malaysian rain forest, and remind myself that the rivals are ants, not humans. I have spent months documenting such deaths through a field camera that I use as a microscope, yet I still find it easy to forget that I am watching tiny insects—in this case, a species known as Pheidologeton diversus, the marauder ant.
Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants (and termites) form tight-knit societies with members numbering in the millions and that these insects engage in complex behaviors. Such practices include traffic management, public health efforts, crop domestication and, perhaps most intriguingly, warfare: the concentrated engagement of group against group in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these respects and others, we modern humans more closely resemble ants than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in far smaller societies. Only recently, however, have researchers begun to appreciate just how closely the war strategies of ants mirror our own. It turns out that for ants, as for humans, warfare involves an astonishing array of tactical choices about methods of attack and strategic decisions about when or where to wage war.
Shock and Awe
Remarkably, these similarities in warfare exist despite sharp differences between ants and humans in both biology and societal structure. Ant colonies consist mostly of sterile females that function as workers or soldiers, occasionally a few short-lived males that serve as drones, and one or more fertile queens. Members operate without a power hierarchy or permanent leader. Although queens are the center of colony life because they reproduce, they do not lead troops or organize labor. Rather colonies are decentralized, with workers that individually know little making combat decisions that nonetheless prove effective at the group level without oversight—a process called swarm intelligence. But although ants and humans have divergent lifestyles, they fight their foes for many of the same economic reasons, including access to dwelling spaces, territory, food and even labor—certain ant species kidnap competitors to serve as slaves.
The tactics ants use in war depend on what is at stake. Some ants succeed in battle by being on the constant offensive, calling to mind Chinese military general Sun Tzu’s assertion in his sixth-century b.c. book The Art of War that “rapidity is the essence of war.” Among army ants, species of which inhabit warm regions around the world, and a few other groups, such as Asia’s marauder ant, hundreds or even millions of individuals proceed blindly in a tight phalanx, attacking prey and enemies as they come across them. In Ghana I witnessed a seething carpet of workers of the army ant species Dorylus nigricans searching together across an area 100 feet wide. These African army ants—which, in species such as D. nigricans that move in broad swathes, are called driver ants—slice flesh with bladelike jaws and can make short work of victims thousands of times their size. Although vertebrate creatures can usually outrun ants, in Gabon I once saw an antelope, caught in a snare, eaten alive by a colony of driver ants. Both army ants and marauder ants will drive rival ants from food—the sheer number of troops is sufficient to overrun any rivals and control their food supply thereafter. But army ants almost always hunt en masse with a more malicious aim, storming other ant societies to seize the colony’s larvae and pupae as food.
The advancing phalanxes of army and marauder ants are reminiscent of the fighting formations that humans have used from ancient Sumerian times to the regimented fronts of the American Civil War. Marching together in this way, without a specific target, as humans sometimes did, makes every raid a gamble: the ants might proceed over barren ground and find nothing. Other ant species send a far smaller number of workers called scouts out from the nest to search separately for food. By fanning out across a larger area while the rest of the colony stays home, they encounter more prey and enemies.
Yet colonies that rely on scouts may kill fewer adversaries in total because a scout must return to its nest to assemble a fighting force—usually by depositing a chemical called a pheromone for the reserve troops to follow. In the time it takes a scout to assemble those troops for battle, the enemy might have regrouped or retreated. In contrast, the workers of the army ants or marauder ants can immediately summon any help they require because a slew of assistants are marching directly behind them. The result is maximal shock and awe.
Allocating the Troops
It is not just the huge number of fighters that makes the army and marauder ants so deadly. My research on marauder ants has shown that troops are deployed in ways that increase efficiency and reduce the cost to a colony. How an individual is deployed depends on the female’s size. Marauder ant workers vary in size more than workers of any other ant species. The tiny “minor” workers (the foot soldiers of my opening description) move quickly to the front lines—the danger zone where competing ant colonies or prey are first encountered. A single minor has no more chance against the enemy than would an equally small scout of a lone-hunting species. But their sheer numbers at the front of a raid present a commanding barricade. Although some may die along the way, the minors slow or incapacitate the enemy until the larger workers, known as the medias and the majors, arrive to deliver the deathblow. The medias and the majors are much scarcer than the minors but far more lethal, with some individuals weighing 500 times as much as one minor.
The minors’ sacrifices on the front lines assure a low mortality for the medias and the majors, which require far more resources for the colony to raise and maintain. Putting the easily replaced fighters at greatest risk is a time-honored battle technique. Ancient river valley societies did the same thing with conscripted farmers, cheaply obtained and available in droves, who absorbed the worst of the warfare. Meanwhile the elite soldiers, who received the best training and the finest weapons and armor, remained relatively safe within these hordes. And just as human armies may defeat their enemies by attrition, destroying unit by unit rather than attacking a whole force at once—a tactic known to military strategists as “defeat in detail”—so, too, do marauder ants mow down enemies a few at a time as a raid advances instead of engaging the enemy’s entire strength.
In addition to killing other enemy species and prey, marauder ants intensely defend the areas around their nests and food from other colonies of their own kind. The medias and majors hang back while each minor grabs an opponent’s limb. These confrontations last for hours and are deadlier than the jostles that occur between the marauder and its other competitors. Hundreds of little ants become interlocked over a few square feet as they slowly tear one another asunder.
This insect variant of hand-to-hand combat represents the common mode of killing among ants. Mortality is nearly certain, reflecting the cheapness of labor in a large colony. Ants that are less cavalier about loss of troops employ long-range weapons that allow them to hurt or impede the enemy from afar; for example, stunning their enemy with a Mace-like spray, as Formica wood ants from Europe and North America do, or dropping small stones onto enemy heads as Dorymyrmexbicolor ants from Arizona do.
Research conducted by Nigel Franks, now at the University of Bristol in England, and his colleagues has demonstrated that the organized violence practiced among army ants and marauders is consistent with Lanchester’s square law, one of the equations developed in World War I by engineer Frederick Lanchester to understand potential strategies and tactics of opposing forces. His math showed that when many fights occur simultaneously within an arena, greater numbers trump individual fighting power. Only when dangers become extreme do the larger marauder ants put themselves at risk—for example, workers of all sizes will rush an entomologist foolish enough to dig up their nest, with the majors inflicting the most savage bites.
Still, just as Lanchester’s square law does not apply in all situations for warring humans, neither does it describe all the behaviors of warring ants. Slave-making ants offer a fascinating exception. Certain slave makers steal the brood of their target colony to raise as slaves in the slave maker nest. The slave makers’ tough armor, or exoskeleton, as it is termed, and daggerlike jaws give them superior fighting abilities. Yet they are greatly outnumbered by the ants in the colonies they raid for slaves. To avoid being massacred, some slave makers release a “propaganda” chemical that throws the raided colony into disarray and keeps its workers from ganging up on them. In so doing, as Franks and his then University of Bath graduate student Lucas Partridge have shown, they are following another Lanchester strategy that at times applies also for humans. This so-called linear law holds that when battles are waged as one-on-one engagements—which is what the propaganda substance allows—victory is assured for the superior fighters even when they are outnumbered. In fact, a colony besieged by slave makers will often allow the invaders to do this plundering without any fighting or killing.
Among ants, a fighter’s value to its colony bears on the risks the ant takes: the more expendable it is, the more likely it is to end up in harm’s way. The guards lining marauder foraging trails, for instance, are usually elderly or maimed workers that often struggle to stay upright while lunging at intruders. As Deby Cassill of the University of South Florida reported in Naturwissenschaften in 2008, only older (months-old) fire ants engage in fights, whereas weeks-old workers run off and days-old individuals feign death by lying motionless when under attack. Viewed from the ant perspective, the human practice of conscripting healthy youngsters might seem senseless. But anthropologists have found some evidence that, at least in a few cultures, successful human warriors tend to have more offspring. A reproductive edge might make combat worth the personal risk for people in their prime—an advantage unattainable by ant workers, which do not reproduce.
Territorial Control
Other humanlike military strategies emerge from observations of weaver ants. Weaver ants occupy much of the canopy of tropical forests in Africa, Asia and Australia, where colonies may span several trees and contain 500,000 individuals—comparable to the enormous populations of some army ants. Weavers also resemble army ants in being highly aggressive. Yet the two have entirely different modi operandi. Whereas army ants do not defend territories because they stay packed together while roaming in search of other ant species to attack for food, weaver colonies are entrenched at one site, spreading their workers wide within it to keep competitors out of every inch of their turf.
They handily control huge spaces within the trees by defending a few choke points such as the spot at which the tree trunk meets the ground. Leafy “barrack nests” placed strategically in the crowns distribute the troops where they are most needed.
Weaver ant workers are also more independent than army ant workers. Army ant raids function by stripping away the workers’ autonomy. Because the army ant troops confine themselves to the close quarters of their advancing pack, they require relatively few communication signals. They respond to enemies and prey in a highly regimented way. Weavers, in contrast, wander more freely and are more versatile in their response to opportunities and threats. The differences in style call to mind the contrasts between the rigidity of Frederick the Great’s armies and the flexibility and mobility of Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops.
Like army ants, weaver ants take similar tacks in dealing with prey and destroying an enemy: in both cases, a weaver deploys a short-range recruitment pheromone from its sternal gland to summon nearby reinforcements to make the kill. Other weaver ant communiqués are specific to warfare. When a worker returns from a fight with another colony, it jerks its body at passing ants to alert them to the ongoing combat. At the same time, it deposits a different scent along its path, a pheromone released from the rectal gland that its colony mates follow to the battlefield. Moreover, to claim a previously unoccupied space, workers will use yet another signal, defecating in the spot, much as canines mark their territory by urinating on it.
A Matter of Size
For both ants and humans, the propensity to engage in true warfare is related at least in a rough way to the size of a society. Small colonies seldom conduct protracted battles except in defense. Like human hunter-gatherers, who are often nomadic and tend to live hand to mouth, the tiniest ant societies, which contain just a few dozen individuals, do not build a fixed infrastructure of trails, food stashes or dwelling places worth dying for. At times of intense conflict between groups, these ants, like their human counterparts, will often choose flight over fight.
Modestly sized societies will likely have more resources to defend but are still small enough to be judicious about jeopardizing their troops. Honeypot ants of the southwestern U.S., which live in medium-size colonies containing a few thousand individuals, provide an example of danger mitigation by these insects. To harvest nearby prey unchallenged, a honeypot colony may stage a preemptive tournament near a neighboring nest to keep the enemy busy rather than risking deadly battles outright. During the tournament the rivals stand high on their six legs and circle one another. This “stilting” behavior mirrors the mostly bloodless, ceremonial displays of strength commonplace in small human clans, as biologists Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University and E. O. Wilson of Harvard University first suggested. With luck, the colony with the smaller stilting ants—typically from the weaker colony—can retreat without loss of life, but the winning side will wreak havoc on their enemies given the opportunity, devouring the loser’s brood and abducting workers called repletes that are swollen with food they regurgitate on request for hungry nest mates. The honeypot victors will drag the repletes back to their nest and keep these living larders as slaves. To avoid this fate, reconnaissance workers survey the tournament to assess whether their side is outnumbered and, if necessary, set in motion a retreat.
Full-bore conflicts appear to be most common for ant species with mature colonies composed of hundreds of thousands of individuals or more. Scientists have tended to consider these large social insect societies inefficient because they produce fewer new queens and males per capita than smaller groups do. I see them instead as being so productive that they have the option to invest not only in reproduction but in a workforce that exceeds the usual labor requirements—much like our bodies invest in fatty tissue we can draw on in hard times. Different researchers have posited that individual ants have less work to do as colonies grow larger and that this leaves more of them inactive at any one time. Colony growth would thereby amplify the expansion of a dedicated army reserve that can take full advantage of Lanchester’s square law in its encounters with enemies. Similarly, most anthropologists see human warfare as having emerged only after our societies underwent a population explosion fueled by the invention of agriculture.
Superorganisms and Supercolonies
Ultimately the capacity for extreme forms of warfare in ants arises from a social unity that parallels the unity of cells in an organism. Cells recognize one another by means of chemical cues on their surface; a healthy immune system attacks any cell with different cues. In most healthy colonies, ants, too, recognize one another by means of chemical cues on their body surface, and they attack or avoid foreigners with a different scent. Ants wear this scent like a national flag tattooed on their bodies. The permanence of the scent means ant warfare can never end with one colony usurping another. Midstream switches in allegiance are impossible for adult ants. With perhaps a few rare exceptions, each worker is a part of its natal society until it dies. (Not that the interests of ant and colony always coincide. Workers of some species can attempt to reproduce—and be thwarted—much as conflicts of interest between genes can occur within an organism.) This identification with their colony is all ants have because they form anonymous societies: beyond distinguishing castes such as soldiers from queens, ant workers do not recognize one another as individuals. Their absolute social commitment is the fundamental feature of living as part of a superorganism, in which the death of a worker is of no more consequence than cutting a finger. The bigger the colony, the less a small cut is felt.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-11-07 at 2:11 AM UTC in Random image thread
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-11-07 at 1:34 AM UTC in How are you feeling at the moment..
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
