Replies to post #194173 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

DesertDrifter -- our petri dish is only so large

whether or not we create this new life form

with our technology, we've effectively broken free of the usual limiting factors that would have constrained our impact on the biosphere, and we're seeing the results even as our population increasingly runs up against the walls of our petri dish -- our status as a species, even as we now continue to cause a new mass extinction of other species, is unstable at best

[fuagf]

Collective intelligence broader than the internet? .. it's a beaut thought ..



the UN feels one step also toward more of .. ok, you mentioned ..



10 Things About Ants You Didn't Know [ DD, am thinking YOU know them all .. LOL .. anyway ]

I'm a freak for insects. Love em. But ants have a special place with me. No other insect species is as unbelievable... as sophisticated, and as ...well, as powerful as ants. They have remained in an un-evolved state of perfection for 6 million years, because they got it right. And if you got it right, why mess with it? This list is only a tiny fraction of all the amazing facts about ants. Think about these ant facts before the next time you step on them for fun.

1. They Are Smarter Than You Think



The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its size is the ant. They are
known to be the smartest species of insects with about 250,000 brain cells

2. Agriculture



Ants began farming about 50 million years before humans thought to raise their own crops. The earliest evidence suggests ants started using agriculture as early as 70 million years ago in the early Tertiary period. Even more amazing, these ants use sophisticated horticultural techniques to enhance their crop yields. They secrete chemicals with antibiotic properties to inhibit mold growth, and devised fertilization protocols using manure. Leafcutter Ants grow mushrooms to feed their colony, a notoriously difficult thing to grow... requiring an enormously sophisticated system of vents and tunnels to control the humidity and temperature.

3. Warfare Techniques

ANT WAR!! ......ANTS FIGHTING UNTIL DEATH!!! [ video looks familiar ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN6w1rIt1wk

Separate species, or hostile factions of the same species, may be seen massed in combat, which can be continued for hours, days or weeks. Some of the most extensive battles observed have been fought between Pavement Ants, but there have been massive battles between Argentinian supercolonies that have left millions of ants dead in days. And not just head-to-head battles are fought either, psychological warfare between species has been witnessed as well. Amazon ants (also known for taking slaves) have been observed surrounding an enemy nest and simply sitting and waiting while their victims became more and more frenzied by the camped-out menace. After two entire days, the Amazons attacked, easily defeating their enemies who had been unable to forage and were disorganized and panicked from the seige.

By combining force of numbers with organized aggression, ants have
become the greatest insect killers on Earth -- even of their own kind.

4. Numbers



Ants make up 1/10 of the total world animal tissue. The total biomass of all the
ants on Earth is roughly equal to the total biomass of all the people on Earth.

5. Supercolonies [ video removed by user, substitute VIDEO only ]

Science at Cal - Neil Tsutsui - Extreme Sociality: Supercolonies of the Invasive Argentine Ant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-UbT8HwlvE

Invasive Argentine ants (these are the little black ants we in LA often see in our bathrooms and around the kitchen sink - they come in for water) form large supercolonies in California. These colonies stretch for hundreds of miles and include millions of nests. Ants from different nests of the same colony rarely show aggression toward each other. The largest supercolony in southern California extends some 600 miles and borders three smaller colonies.

Also, you have to watch that video. It shows a massive excavated ant colony that reached 20 feet deep. [ WOW! OH WELL ]

6. Lifespan [ also, video removed ]
Workers only live for about 45-60 days, but a colony's queen can live up to 20 years. And when she
dies, the colony can only survive a few months after that at best. Queens are only rarely replaced.

7. Carnivores

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOCR6WoBqIw

In Africa and tropical parts of Asia, there are ants that are capable of killing and consuming anything in their massed path. Sometimes called driver ants, safari ants, or siafu, these ants are powerful hunters that can number over 20 million to a colony, and they use those numbers to their advantage.

When Driver Ants are on the march, nothing in their path is safe. They've been known to kill tethered horses, human babies, and have even been used to execute criminals. Soldier ants stand guard over the marching column. The river of ants divides, spreading out over the forest floor. Few victims escape once the ants get a grip. Millions act like a fearsome super-organism emerging from its lair, sending out long tentacles of marching workers to engulf its prey. Soldiers form living archways over the columns, and hold back twigs and leaves. It's a genuine team effort. The ants return home, carrying their spoils underground, where millions of developing grubs are waiting to be fed. Driver ants kills almost everything within range of their nests (up to 100,000 animals in a day), and relocate from time to time to find enough food. Most of their prey are arthropods such as insects and spiders, but army ants can also kill larger animals such as lizards, snakes, chickens, and small mammals. They also climb trees and attack birds in nests.

During flood season in parts of Asia, these massive (sometimes 1/4 mile long) columns will combine themselves into a water-tight ball, connecting together with all their strength. The column floats, safe, on the surging waves til the ball of ants finds dry land again. Pity whatever living things live near it's landing spot once that big ball of killer ants unravels.

8. Ranchers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzUSRPo7PM

Ants farm, they gather, they hunt, and they also raise animals. Aphids, specifically. These are ranching ants.

Honey ants feed off the sweet "honey" that aphids secrete. The ants milk them like cows. Aphid-herding ants make sure their "cattle" stay well-fed and safe. They chose a plant where the Aphids can feed in peace and they guard it religiously to protect their stock. When the host plant is depleted of nutrients, the ants carry their aphids to a new food source. If predatory insects or parasites attempt to harm their wards, the ants will defend them aggressively. Some honey ants even go so far as to destroy the eggs of known aphid predators like ladybugs.

9. Slavery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyzEAlv--9Y

The Slave-Maker ant is so named because it raids the nest of other ants and steals
their pupae. Once the pupae hatch, they are made to work as slaves within the colony.

Actually, quite a few ant species will take captives from other ant species, forcing them to do chores for their own colony. Some honeypot ants will even enslave ants of the same species, taking individuals from foreign colonies to do their bidding. Amazon ants raid the colonies of unsuspecting Formica ants. The Amazon queen will find and kill theFormica queen, then enslave the Formica workers. The slave workers help her rear her own brood. When her Polyergus offspring reach adulthood, their sole purpose is to raid other Formicacolonies and bring back their pupae, ensuring a steady supply of slave workers.

10 Castes



The Queen -- They are usually larger than the workers, they have a bigger thorax than the workers and this is due to the wing muscles of the queen. The abdomen is usually larger to, to hold all the egg producing organs. Once the queen has founded a new colony her only job will be to produce more ants, workers, males or f*ture queens. Queens are the longest living of the three castes and can produce thousands of eggs in her life time.

Males -- Male ants are normally the smallest of the castes, they have only one role in life - to inseminate
a virgin queen during the mating flight. Once they have performed this task they die within a few days.

Workers -- Worker ants are the ants that carry out the daily tasks of the colony such as foraging, brood care, nest repair and defence, and taking care of the queen. These are the ants you will see out and about in the world. Although all worker ants are female they generally do not lay eggs -- however, in certain cases they do lay eggs but these are normally used as food. If the worker laid eggs, which are unfertilised, are allowed to develop they will produce male ants; this may be allowed to happen if the queen of the colony has died.

Soldiers -- Although soldiers are not found in British species of ant, these members of the colony
have a huge head which is packed with muscle. The main job of this caste is defence of the nest.

http://www.ranker.com/list/10-things-about-ants-you-didn_t-know/analise.dubner

========

I always thought Malthus had much going for him, but didn't realize
(lol, probably forgotten) he believed population would peak in his lifetime.

Thomas Malthus: Wrong Yesterday, Right Today?

William Pentland, Contributor - 1/09/2011 @ 4:06PM |3,020 views


Image via Wikipedia

Over the past five years, the world’s population has risen by roughly 80 million people annually, reaching an estimated 6.8 billion in 2009. Barring a sudden reversal in demographic trends, more than 9 billion people will inhabit Earth by 2050. Needless to say, the constellation of challenges created by population growth have placed potentially irreversible strains on the interconnected systems and cycles that comprise the Earth’s climate. Water scarcity, diminishing agricultural yields and biodiversity loss are only a few of the consequences of these forces.

These challenges have contributed to a rebirth of the profoundly misguided philosophy espoused by Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist who lived during the late 18th Century. In 1798, Malthus argued that human population always grows more rapidly than the human food supply until war, disease or famine reduces the number of people. He was wrong – and spectacularly so. The growth of human population, which Malthus believed had peaked during his lifetime, has risen relentlessly and rapidly over the past three centuries. Malthus did not anticipate the development of powerful new vaccines for diseases like small-pox and equally powerful advances in public health infrastructure like modern sewage systems and so forth.

Malthus’ less than impressive track-record has not prevented philosophical copy-cats from peddling similar gloom-and-doom scenarios in more recent years. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a butterfly specialist, argued in his bestselling book “The Population Bomb” that “the cancer of population growth?. . . must be cut out, by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” Ehrlich’s penchant for apocalyptic predictions made Malthus look like an amateur. Here are of few of Ehrlich’s fantastically wrong predictions:

* “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (1969)

* “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . .
. hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death.” (1968)

* “By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because
of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million.” (1969)

Like Malthus, Ehrlich, who is now a professor at Stanford University, failed to appreciate the ingenuity of humanity. The green .. http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland/2011/01/07/green-car-start-up-attracts-more-venture-cash/ .. revolution, which spread enabling technologies of high-yield agriculture across the planet, resulted in doubling of grain production. While many people are undernourished today, mass starvation is rare and mass starvation that is wholly innocent of human interference virtually never occurs.

Despite these wildly-inaccurate predictions, Ehrlich – like Malthus – is no dummy. On the contrary, many of his less-provocative arguments and insights, especially those related to resource scarcity, appear close to prophetic at times. In 1997, Ehrlich argued in The Atlantic Monthly that, “Since natural resources are finite, increased consumption must inevitably lead to depletion and scarcity.”

While this logic is also susceptible to the bête noire of population-control fanatics, namely technology, it is not necessarily wrong. There are physical limits on natural resources. Take oil .. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7302 . Regardless of what you think of the Hubbert Curve and peak oil theory .. http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php .. more generally, the amount of oil on Earth is limited. Like an individual oil field, there are only so many barrels to pump out before the field runs dry.

[ Oil And Gas Production Not Responsive to Techno Advances ]



This has led many like Jared Diamond to shift the blame from “population” to “consumption.” In 2008, Diamond fingered consumption as the likely culprit to lead to a looming doomsday for humanity in an Op-Ed article that appeared in the New York Times .. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html :

"Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce . . . If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate."

Wrong. Population is not the ultimate problem. Nor is consumption. Profligate waste is the problem and efficiency is the solution. Take heat.

[ Energy Lost in Transmission ]



In the United States, consumers only actually use two out of every 100 units of electricity produced – 98 units are lost as heat before reaching the end-user. Efficiency is the most important response to the many challenges facing the planet during the next century and beyond, including: global warming .. http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland/2011/01/05/electric-cars-may-accelerate-global-warming/ .. or any other form of climate change .. http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland/2011/01/07/climate-scientists-deepening-skepticism-of-democracy/ . Robert Kunzig makes this point about the relationship between population, resource scarcity and profligate waste very elegantly in the most recent issue of National Geographic:

"The number of people does matter, of course. But how people consume resources matters a lot more. Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others. The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty—the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda—while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet."

Yes, indeed.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/01/09/thomas-malthus-wrong-yesterday-right-today/

See also:

Premises of Endgame - http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79747525

Old vs. Young - http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76903969

ps: Darwin's restrictions were biologically based, eh .. these robots aren't
.. so the 'limited advantage' may not apply .. was just one of my first thoughts ..