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"Let’s Nerd Out About Ants Before You See Ant-Man" Topic


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580 hits since 17 Jul 2015
©1994-2024 Bill Armintrout
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Tango0117 Jul 2015 12:19 p.m. PST

"Bug scientists are buzzing with excitement over the new Ant-Man movie. Insect-themed superheroes abounded in early comics, but they tended to lack a certain … gravitas. I mean, the Red Bee had poofy pink sleeves, yellow and green striped tights, and kept a bee named Michael in his belt buckle.

It's about time ants get some good press. These little animals run our world; an estimated 322,000,000,000,000,000 ants are on Earth turning over soil and preying on other insects daily. This is a great opportunity for myrmecologists (ant specialists) to drop a little ant science.

For a little background, I talked to ant guys Adrian Smith of the University of Illinois and Kevin Welzel of University of California Davis about Ant-Man and actual ants.

Welzel spent time at Ant-Man's premiere explaining ants to movie stars. Smith is the only person I've ever met more nerdy than I am about comics and insects. We all pretty much agreed that the new Ant-Man comic reboot is wonderfully snarky, beautifully drawn, and has great attention to ant details.

Because an alternate spelling for "scientist" is "p-e-d-A-N-T", we also discussed the ways in which Ant-Man would be mercilessly slaughtered by real ants. Honestly, ants probably would work for Hydra, not the Avengers.

Transportation
Ant-Man's use of winged ants for transportation is highly problematic. The only ants with wings are reproductive males and females. Most ant colonies reproduce in the spring, so for most of the year in temperate climates, there just aren't any winged ants. As long as crimes are only committed between April and August, our tiny crime-fighter will have a winged steed available.

Worse, ant wings detach easily. They are supposed to fall off. Once ants mate, the male dies. The female drops to the ground, tears her wings off, and starts digging a new nest. Relying upon winged ants for travel would probably result in Ant-Man being crushed in a frantic ant sexual embrace, and then plummeting off to his death as the ant wings are discarded.

Perhaps that's why Ant-Man hitched two winged ants to a chariot for transportation in the original comic series…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

Great War Ace18 Jul 2015 6:49 a.m. PST

"Plummeting off to his death?" Hardly! Something as big as a squirrel can fall x-number of miles and survive handily. They don't build up enough momentum to kill them. Ants simply "float" (or fall slowly) until they reach the ground. "Ant Man" (should be "Woman", really) would be able to catch rides with web trailing spiders, who use wind to pull themselves for miles through the air. Trouble is, travel would be very, very slow, and capricious.

Ants are the most warlike and vicious killers on the planet. In the words of Hölldobler and Wilson: "If ants possessed nuclear weapons, they would destroy the planet within a week." Compared to ant warfare, we are a benign species.

That's why "Phase IV" has no sequel: it would be boring, as ants take over each human and manipulate the "giants" by possessing their brains.

There are nearly 10K identified ant species. And collectively, the total weight of ants is c. the same as that of all humans. Each human weighs c. as much as a million ants.

The smallest ants can fit a colony inside the head of the largest ants. Some species are so diverse in the sizes of their workers that the smallest workers (operating inside the "nursery") are five hundred times smaller than their giant warrior sisters, yet belong to the same species.

Some ants subsist entirely on the "honey dew" of their "cattle", herds of aphids. "Honey dew" is a sweet tasting poop, btw. (Bees lick this off the surfaces of stems and leaves, so what we get with our "clover honey" is far more than just nectar!)

Some hordes of ants are so rapacious that it is recorded that untended human infants have been swarmed and snipped to death, literally covered in writhing blankets of ravening ants! When such species go on the rampage, as is their wont, all animal life in the threatened area gets the heck out of "Dodge" as quickly as possible. Those not swift/early enough are eaten. (The sped up scenes in Phase IV of ants swarming over victims and literally stripping them to the bones are not fiction!)

Some ant raids concentrate on genocide and break into the "nursery" chambers and carry off the pupae and larvae back to their own nests, where the captives are raised as members of the raider colony, even though of a different species. The captives adopt the scent of their masters.

One species of ant has the swiftest moving animal action recorded by high speed film. The ants advance with their mandibles open a full 180 degrees. Tiny hairs inside the opened jaws are stimulated by prey and the jaws close so quickly that only "springtails" (their favorite insect prey) have any chance at all of escaping. Hölldobler and Wilson give the comparison that if the ant were the size of a human, the closing speed of its jaws would be faster than a rifle bullet.

"Ant Man" will possibly stimulate interest in real ants. Which, as the old saying goes, are "stranger than fiction"….

Great War Ace18 Jul 2015 6:58 a.m. PST

And btw, Ant Man would be left in the dust by running ants. Their speed relative to their size is much, much faster. (I'm too lazy at the moment to go find some exact comparisons from the book – "Journey to the Ants"….)

Tango0131 Jul 2015 10:45 a.m. PST

Quite interesting my friend! (smile)

I always like ants when I was a boy.

Fascinating little warriors!.

Amicalement
Armand

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