MachineMachine /stream - tagged with ants http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net The Scariest Zombies in Nature http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Scariest-Zombies-in-Nature.html Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes driven to climb to a high spot. Just before dying, the infected body—a zombie—grasps a perch as the mature fungal invader erupts from the back of the zombie’s head to rain down spores on unsuspecting victims below, starting the cycle again. This isn’t the latest gross-out moment from a George A. Romero horror film; it is part of a very real evolutionary arms race between a parasitic fungus and its… ]]> Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:45:31 -0700 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Scariest-Zombies-in-Nature.html Ants mimic liquids to stay afloat http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2010/11/fluid-nature-ants-mimic-liquids-to-stay-afloat.html Rain may seem a harmless nuisance to us humans, but for ants, it's a big deal. They can get trapped by just a single drop and risk drowning. Paradoxically, it's by mimicking liquids that ants manage to conquer them.

In the video above, Micah Streiff and his team from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta captured writhing groups of ants behaving just like liquids. Working as a group they can turn themselves into a "raft" as they seek dry land or travel down a surface following the same physical rules as a viscous liquid. Thankfully, they… ]]> Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:36:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2010/11/fluid-nature-ants-mimic-liquids-to-stay-afloat.html Colonial Studies http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical... ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:39 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Colonial Studies http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical organization characteristic of human societies, a real ant colony operates without direction or management. New research is showing us how ant colonies get things done without anyone being in charge. Ants, it turns out, have much to teach us about the decentralized networks that operate in many biological systems, in which local interactions produce global behavior, without the… ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:00 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Ants and us http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 What do you think about when you think about ants? An aerial view perhaps, looking down at a line of ants moving along a trail. Go closer. If you stay with it, your view may twist, your ants grow, become singular, each an alien creature, somehow... ]]> Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:38:26 -0700 http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 Ants and us http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 What do you think about when you think about ants? An aerial view perhaps, looking down at a line of ants moving along a trail. Go closer. If you stay with it, your view may twist, your ants grow, become singular, each an alien creature, somehow militarised. As primitives we ate them, they were our crunch, and now they are lodged in our subconscious. We know their noise in the soil, even if we do not acknowledge it. The mandibles dominate, snipping, giving the ant its name in Old English, “aemette”, from the proto-Germanic ai mait, meaning to cut away,… ]]> Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:38:00 -0700 http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 Ancient death-grip leaf scars reveal ant–fungal parasitism http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/08/16/rsbl.2010.0521.short?rss=1 Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an ideal location for spore dispersal from a dead body following host death. Fossil leaves record many aspects of insect behaviour (feeding, galls, leaf mining) but to date there are no known examples of behavioural manipulation. Here, we document, to our knowledge, the first example of the stereotypical death grip from 48 Ma leaves of Messel, Germany, indicating the antiquity of this behaviour. As well as probably being the first… ]]> Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:40:00 -0700 http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/08/16/rsbl.2010.0521.short?rss=1 Tiny diver ants Vs red ants - Ant Attack - BBC wildlife http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL3sHuK3iGE&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:46:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL3sHuK3iGE&feature=youtube_gdata Spiders Devour Ants Front-End First http://www.livescience.com/animals/Spiders-Picky-Eaters-100513.html A spider that only eats ants is choosy about which body parts of its prey it devours based on their nutritional value.

These new findings are the first to demonstrate that "specialist" predators relying on a single food source might have evolved feeding behaviors to maximize what they get out of meal time, the researchers say.

"We found that these spiders do have to balance their nutrient intake by choosing different body parts of their exclusive ant prey," said Stano Pekár, an assistant professor of ecology and zoology at Masaryk University in the Czech… ]]> Fri, 14 May 2010 03:35:00 -0700 http://www.livescience.com/animals/Spiders-Picky-Eaters-100513.html Ant Superhighway http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBf3GcGX64&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:31:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBf3GcGX64&feature=youtube_gdata Incredible Journeys http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/incredible_journeys/ Some animals can instinctively solve navigational problems that have baffled humans for centuries. Now, researchers are uncovering how. The nervous system of the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, with around 100,000 neurons, is about 1 millionth the size of a human brain. Yet in the featureless deserts of Tunisia, this ant can venture over 100 meters from its nest to find food without becoming lost. Imagine randomly wandering 20 kilometers in the open desert, your tracks obliterated by the wind, then turning around and making a beeline to your starting point—and no GPS allowed! That’s the equivalent of what the desert… ]]> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:17:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/incredible_journeys/ Speaking about Ants, Superman and Centaurs http://machinemachine.net/text/out-loud/speaking-about-ants-superman-and-centaurs

This text was read out loud on the 21st November, as part of the Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art-Writing, held at The Whitechapel Gallery

Thanks must go to Maria Fusco and Francesco Pedraglio for asking me to take part…
Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art-Writing

In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future.

Like… ]]> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:29:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/out-loud/speaking-about-ants-superman-and-centaurs Ant mega-colony takes over world http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together. Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica. These introduced Argentine… ]]> Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:10:00 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm I discovered the ants http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html

by Daniel Rourke

I discovered the ants

I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time.

Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren… ]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:22:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html