A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
we conservatively estimate 20 × 10^15 (20 quadrillion) ants on Earth, with a total biomass of 12 megatons of dry carbon. This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass. -- source
If there's a lot of something, we mammals are going to learn how to eat it.
Exactly. The ants were doing a lot more than existing
Do humans count as 13?
Whoa. That's a big fuckin' ant.
Humans are cheating since we'll eat anything that's edible, and a lot of things that aren't supposed to be.
I just ate a burrito drowned in apricot-habanero hot sauce which I further modified by adding extra habaneros and red thai chilis. I'm pretty sure capsaicin was meant to deter mammals from eating hot peppers.
Brace yourselves... farts are comin
It deters me lol
Like petroleum. Well, stuff made from it anyway.
Roasted queen leaf cutter ants?
Mexican Chicatanas (flying ants).
Ah! I have seen these guys on videos before. Neat large species of flying leaf cutters!
A competitor to crabs
Kind of the opposite, looks like evolution is trying desperately to get rid of ants, lol. Possibly replacing them with crabs.
Turn the ants into crabs.
Crab ants crab ants crab ants crab ants crab ants... And now it reads like a slur
Ant-eating crabs will be the ultimate result of evolution.
With ants looking like tiny crabs
... eating even tinier ants
anteaters are a step on the path to crab, confirmed
Any explanation for why there was similar convergent evolution toward goofy names? C'mon, numbat, mongoose, sloth bear, aardvark, pangolin, echidna? No way that's coincidence.
I guess, they'd have a tendency to look goofy, so they can stick their snouts into ant hills, and then we might've named them accordingly?
