Why are settlers always surprised that Indigenous peoples did and still do things deliberately? www.science.org/content/arti...

You could say that Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas, but probably not where you'd think. Before there was a Chuck Berry or Little Richard, there was those who wanted to be like her. Rosetta Nubin better known as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the godmother of Rock was born on this day

Just the story of his name is one of the coolest things of all time

In the tropics, “pioneer” trees (fast-growing species you see e.g. along the road side) are often “myrmecophytes”, housing ants that defend the tree against herbivores. Here is a sliced Macaranga stem, revealing a founding association of Crematogaster queens with their offspring. Sepilok, Sabah.

To minimise risk of infection, carpenter #ants resort to drastic measures: they amputate injured legs immediately. “Better safe than sorry” – the pragmatic approach proved effective, with survival rates of injured workers more than doubling. Study by @etf1989.bsky.social in @royalsociety.org

Congrats to the Ohio Sheriff's Office for selflessly volunteering to educate the public on both The Streisand Effect and Why You Don't Fuck With A Dude Who Knows How To Play The Dozens For A Crowd in real time

Herman Melville on moderates, all the way back in 1857:

see? here's the thing. A lot of people are like, the earth is fucked, it's beyond salvation, it's hit the tipping point, but time and time again we see that if we just fucking fixed the problem, it rebounds so incredibly fast. Imagine what could be done if people actually cared

This. Ideally everyone would have continued to mask since 2020. But the second best time is right now. If you don’t mask everywhere, at least do it again for higher-risk situations (i.e. traveling, conventions, doctor appts).

Graduating high school before ChatGPT is like having a brain made of recovered steel from warships old enough to not have been weakened by atomic bomb isotopes.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

New Ant Lab video out today - moth biodiversity! youtu.be/I5L3_UW1flY

please read books

With about 100 species, the spiny ants of the genus Polyrhachis form the most diverse group of ants on Borneo. Here are two beautiful examples, the golden P. bihamata (look at those fishing hooks!) and the especially armed P. armata. Danum Valley, Sabah.

A funky Pholcid from Mexico. I had no idea that there were Cellar spiders with weird heads. Weird heads are one of my favourite features a spider can have. Modisimus sp. #Pholcidae #CellarSpider #iNaturalist

NO NO NO YOU DON’T GUYS LET ME PLEASE SPREAD THE GOSPEL OF FREE TAX USA federal is free, state is $16, handles even my chaotic freelancer taxes just fine, same step-by-step “designed for normies” kind of interface as TurboTax but NOT EVIL tell everyone you know www.freetaxusa.com

resonance

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

While photographing the zombie ants at Danum Valley, I noticed this funky larva chomping on and ultimately devouring the entire fungus stalk growing out of the ant’s head. I knew that Ophiocordyceps fungi have been used in traditional medicine for centuries. Turns out other animals consume them too.

Staring down this day like a boss....Colossendeis robusta, a sea spider collected on our research cruise in 2020 in the Weddell/Western Antarctic Peninsula. 🧪🌎🦑🇦🇶🐧🌊

Thanks to micro-CT and www.antscan.info, you can now explore high resolution, 3D ant images from anywhere in the world. Fantastic work from Julian Katzke, Francisco Hita Garcia, @economo.bsky.social, Thomas van de Kamp and colleagues just dropped: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ophiocordyceps zombie fungi infect ants and manipulate their behavior. The ants climb up vegetation, anchor themselves by biting into a leaf, and die. Out of their head then grows a fungus stalk that releases spores into the environment. And so the cycle continues. Danum Valley, Sabah.

Ophiocordyceps infections result in local “graveyards” of zombified ants, often on the underside of leaves in the low vegetation. The ant I posted yesterday actually shared its leaf with another zombie. Here’s the full scene.

Another picture of Diacamma, this time a worker at the nest entrance. Somehow this species seemed to construct unreasonably large entrance funnels (see how small the ant is in comparison). Danum Valley, Sabah.

I know that I sound like a broken record but I think once this society was ok with accepting mass covid deaths just to be able to eat at Applebees then all bets were off.

A Diacamma ant foraging on a leaf in Danum Valley, Sabah. These ponerines are sometimes called fingerprint ants. You’ll see why if you zoom in and look at the cuticular sculpturing on the thorax and gaster.

This is exceptionally thoughtful and well said.

dysphoria 2019 cone 1 terra cotta, glaze

the fursonae

Portrait of a giant forest ant (Dinomyrmex gigas). What an absolute puppy! 🐜 🐶 🐜 Danum Valley, Sabah.

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

The workers of the giant forest ant (Dinomyrmex gigas) are polymorphic, i.e., they come in two sizes and shapes: The minors (first two pictures) and the majors (last two pictures). Both are huge though - minors just over two centimeters and majors up to three centimeters in body length.

Stictoponera menadensis are not particularly small ants. However, they are completely dwarfed by their neighbors, the giant forest ants (Dinomyrmex gigas), whose large workers measure almost 3 cm in body size. Here, the two are foraging next to each other on a buttress root in Danum Valley, Sabah.

Also the model for chalcidoid wasp taxonomy

bothering the cleidogonas

A Stictoponera menadensis (subfamily Ectatomminae) worker foraging in the leaf litter at Danum Valley, Sabah, plus another specimen on white background. Colonies of this species often lack queens. Instead, unlike in most ants, workers can mate and take over egg laying as so-called “gamergates”.

Seems like everyone wants weird arthropods from #Antarctica these days....here's one I haven't posted before. I THINK its a Scaphodactylus sp. but ??? 🧪🌎🦑🇦🇶🌊

Portraits of the Dolichoderus colony members inhabiting the epiphytic myrmecophyte (ant plant) in Danum Valley, Borneo: A queen, a worker, and a male.

ANT

The beautiful Camponotus kaura is a night-active ant endemic to the eastern Caribbean. El Yunque, Puerto Rico.

A few tropical acrobat ants taking nectar from a Heliconia flower. Minca, Colombia.

preystillsees. gouache painting on paper, mounted on wood. 3x3 inches

In the Myrmicaria ant garden, I made a serendipitous discovery: an ant-mimicking spider in the genus Serendib (possibly S. volans?), which I hadn’t seen before. The first image shows a Myrmicaria worker on the carton nest for comparison. The second image shows the spider. Tambunan, Sabah.

Leptogenys diminuta is another species with army ant-like behavior. Colonies are smaller though, measuring only a few hundred workers. The ants are nomadic and hunt in columns. Sabah, Borneo.

OK, one more Leptogenys from Danum Valley before we move on to other ants, just to show off the diversity of this genus. These ants are from a large (many hundred if not thousands of workers) colony I found in and under a rotting log. I don’t know which species this is - suggestions are welcome.

However, I was surprised that, upon closer inspection, the garden seemed to be inhabited and maintained by this species in the genus Myrmicaria. I didn’t know that these ants build ant gardens - most species seem to nest in the soil, and some build small carton nests on the underside of leaves.