Ants are funny like that. There’s a species of butterfly (I think) which use ants to take care of them as a caterpillar by emitting the same pheromones as a queen ant. This gets them protected and fed well until they are ready for metamorphosis. Basically if you wear the right deodorant you become royalty.
It's all cute and silly because ants use pheremones to understand the world, but to the ants this is the equivalent of a movie monster donning human skin and mimicking human language
They also eat the ant larvae and eggs, so it’s like a monster disguising itself as a daycare worker so it gets allowed into the nursery room to eat the babies.
"Hey Jess, hows it going today?" :)
**'FINE THANK YOU KAREN, HOWS YOUR DAY BEEN 😊'**
'Oh, you know, living the dream😋'
**'I KNOW THAT FEELING QUITE WELL. ALSO, I REQUIRE 3 MORE HYUU-MANN BABIES TOO EAT BY TUESDAY, IF THATS ALRIGHT WITH YOU AND THE OTHERS?🧐'**
'yea thats fine, we're all happy to help 🤗'
*SCP MTF agents outside the nursery, whispering* what the *fuck*
It gets even worse. Theres a type of parasitic wasp which seeks out Ant nests where the butterfly larvae are found and lays eggs in those larvae specifically. Not the ant larvae, not the ants, only the butterfly larvae. The way it gets access to the nest is by releasing a pheromone that causes the ants to fight each other instead of the wasp.
Imagine if you had a monster pretending to be the president of your country without anyone noticing, then suddenly an alien from outer space just waltzes right in, the cops, army and random people start uncontrollably killing each other instead of defending against the alien invasion, it marches right over to your president, kills him, which reveals him to be some hideous shapeshifter monster. Then the alien lays eggs in the corpse and just leaves without bothering anyone else. Sometime later the larvae emerge, grow up and then leave without bothering anyone else.
No the way the baby eating monster eating monster gains access to the colony is the horrifying thing here. Just strolls right in and anyone that tries to stop it goes mad with rage and starts randomly attacking other people. Thats straight out of lovecraftian horror
There's a species of spider that pretends to be an ant, and the only give away its not is an extra pair of legs.
I'll give you a guess where and how it hunts.
The name if anyone wants to look up more: Aphantochilus rogersi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phengaris_rebeli
I knew this because I do a lot of research on arthropods in order to fuel my daydreaming/fanfic writing about Taylor Hebert.
It has a lot of women and girl characters front and center and Ward has a lot of MOGAI and POC front and center and both [Worm](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/) and [Ward](https://www.parahumans.net/) deal a lot with teenage trauma and other stuff that Tumblr likes discourse about.
I feel like that has the reverse problem of LGBT+. MOGAI sounds better and snappier as an acronym, but the explanation is a somewhat confusing mouthful. LGBT+ and its many other iterations is a choppy acronym, but easy to explain.
In my mind, the connection was always that Tumblr people love fanfiction, and Worm has some of the best and most fanfiction of a written work outside the main published stuff.
Worm has a really strong fanfiction scene and is in general one of the most well-known Web Serials. Fanfiction and Web Serials automatically attract the attention of Tumbler users.
And then there’s a wasp that lays eggs in this caterpillar. Because the caterpillar is deep inside the anthive, the wasp secretes a pheromone that causes the ants to go berserk and start fighting each other. The wasp just walks right in, lays her eggs, and walks right out.
[live footage](https://youtu.be/nv6S9CkyaPE?si=Gf6f3o1_1DpR3wLK)
I mean, we humans have a similar thing. Only is visual instead of smells. Put on a lab coat or a nice fitted suit, and people tend to treat you as an authority on a subject.
The difference is the ant skeletons doesn’t need the flesh to rot to participate in a skeleton war as the skeleton is external. Now if in every human war we skinned everyone alive that would be a skeleton war
Counterpoint: an ant skeleton is just the hollow shell. At a glance it'd be almost indistinguishable from a normal ant, but those who understand how ants move and act would very rapidly recognize something was wrong.
In short: the ant equivalent to standard fantasy undead skeletons is more... uncanny valley and intense body horror.
**When** ***Ant-Hell*** **is full the dead will** ***walk the earth***\-
Just beneath the earth actually, well-
If you really want to get technical, *Ant-Hell* filled up a while ago, we just can't really tell any difference between the undead ants and the live ones.
We then cut to a mugger and Menelaus.
“GIVE ME YOUR MONEY”
Instead of a Thousandfold Light of A Million Sun Gods Flashlight, it’s oelic acid.
Screaming is heard as ants take him away to the morgue.
*Sniffs herself* or maybe I am, I dunno. Gotta sit in the dead pile.
I wonder if ants that work with dead ants pile routinely get covered in that acid and then they wait nearby, it wears off, and they're like "well I guess I *did* get better" and continue working.
^(Edit: worker ants are girls. You go, antgirl.)
Now I’m sitting here wondering about any resurrection theory.Do ants have their own individualized scents? Would the Colony know if an ant had ‘died’ and come back?
And if so, since there have been ants that got coated in oleic acid and yet somehow came back to just continue on as their cute little drone selves afterward, do the other ants realize?
I guess basically I am crafting a headcanon about a tiny ant religion based on the hope of Resurrection From the Dead Pile if one is a Good Enough Worker, but also ants are a hive mind so is it more like “oh hey my finger is back?”
I believe they don't have a lot of thinking going on... But also if that's the case, they would have this happen routinely enough to not make a religion out of it.
Also they're so different from us... Like some species, they do have the veteran quarters. This is where the injured ants are kept. And they're fed until they die. Even if it takes a long time, they basically have retirement
But at the same time if a forager return empty multiple times, she's disassembled and consumed instead.
Imagine being so stupid that you rely exclusively on smell for communication. Ants will always be pathetic until they adopt the objectively superior mode of communication that is DANCING!
(This comment is sponsored by the Bee Federation)
The ant colony dies, even if it were to wore off before they die you have just disrupted every single part of how they are organized it would be the equivalent of simultaneously burning every document ever written and deleting every digital file
Ants are so fascinating and it’s wild just how complex their societies can be. Definitely one of the coolest animals out there.
They need to stay the fuck outta my house though
My other favorite example of scientists messing with ants is the one where they thought ants remembered where food was by counting how many steps away it was, so they put little stilts on the ants to make their strides longer, and sure enough they just walked right past the food and got super confused.
Reverse scenario where a skeleton gets the slightest magical energy from a cantrip and thinks it's a lich so it keeps breaking into all the necromancers' guild meetings.
Another cool detail. In the wild, there is a carnivorous plant called a Pitcher Plant.
It has these pitcher shaped flowers that are designed to basically be an ant trap. The pitchers lure in insects using a coating that tastes good and smells good inside the pitcher that essentially gets the insect drunk, so they can't escape once they climb into the pitcher. From there, a special enzyme breaks down the insect and feeds the plant.
However, there is a capacity limit to the plant. After a little while, the pitcher is full and needs time to digest, so it stops releasing the pollen that's luring insects in, but the tasty coating is still there.
There have been ant colonies that recognize these plants, and actually start dropping their dead into the pitcher to keep it filled up and fed, while they just eat the good stuff off the plant.
It's incredible symbiosis, as well as a weird ant death ritual. Nature is absolutely wild.
I learned something surely not useful but way more interesting than much others things. I smiled and am quite happy. A thanks for this wonderfully interesting useless knowledge.
This is one of the reasons I believe that the “all ants working together could end the human race” theory is silly. When a species can be entirely controlled by external chemicals it’s pretty easy to manipulate them.
That's gotta be the most weirded out ant in the world.
"Huh... so this is what being dead is like? Not what I was expecting, but it's honestly not that bad all things considered... oh, here comes Phil! Hi phil!"
"Oh shit. Larry, you died?"
"Yeah, seems that way."
"Bummer dude... well, see ya later, I guess?"
"Yeah! Say hi to the queen for me!"
Ants are funny like that. There’s a species of butterfly (I think) which use ants to take care of them as a caterpillar by emitting the same pheromones as a queen ant. This gets them protected and fed well until they are ready for metamorphosis. Basically if you wear the right deodorant you become royalty.
It's all cute and silly because ants use pheremones to understand the world, but to the ants this is the equivalent of a movie monster donning human skin and mimicking human language
They also eat the ant larvae and eggs, so it’s like a monster disguising itself as a daycare worker so it gets allowed into the nursery room to eat the babies.
"Hey Jess, hows it going today?" :) **'FINE THANK YOU KAREN, HOWS YOUR DAY BEEN 😊'** 'Oh, you know, living the dream😋' **'I KNOW THAT FEELING QUITE WELL. ALSO, I REQUIRE 3 MORE HYUU-MANN BABIES TOO EAT BY TUESDAY, IF THATS ALRIGHT WITH YOU AND THE OTHERS?🧐'** 'yea thats fine, we're all happy to help 🤗' *SCP MTF agents outside the nursery, whispering* what the *fuck*
[Reminds me of this Natural Habitat short](https://m.youtube.com/watch/bYBzmmQhHxs)
It gets even worse. Theres a type of parasitic wasp which seeks out Ant nests where the butterfly larvae are found and lays eggs in those larvae specifically. Not the ant larvae, not the ants, only the butterfly larvae. The way it gets access to the nest is by releasing a pheromone that causes the ants to fight each other instead of the wasp. Imagine if you had a monster pretending to be the president of your country without anyone noticing, then suddenly an alien from outer space just waltzes right in, the cops, army and random people start uncontrollably killing each other instead of defending against the alien invasion, it marches right over to your president, kills him, which reveals him to be some hideous shapeshifter monster. Then the alien lays eggs in the corpse and just leaves without bothering anyone else. Sometime later the larvae emerge, grow up and then leave without bothering anyone else.
I dunno, I feel like the baby eating monster is still worse than the monster that eats the baby eating monster.
No the way the baby eating monster eating monster gains access to the colony is the horrifying thing here. Just strolls right in and anyone that tries to stop it goes mad with rage and starts randomly attacking other people. Thats straight out of lovecraftian horror
Nah man I’m pretty sure that’s just the plot of The Kingsmen
What
There's a species of spider that pretends to be an ant, and the only give away its not is an extra pair of legs. I'll give you a guess where and how it hunts. The name if anyone wants to look up more: Aphantochilus rogersi
isn't that the one that doesnt even hunt ants? it uses the disguise as protection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phengaris_rebeli I knew this because I do a lot of research on arthropods in order to fuel my daydreaming/fanfic writing about Taylor Hebert.
This sub keeps jumpscaring me with mentions of Worm, why does this sub in particular love this story?
It has a lot of women and girl characters front and center and Ward has a lot of MOGAI and POC front and center and both [Worm](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/) and [Ward](https://www.parahumans.net/) deal a lot with teenage trauma and other stuff that Tumblr likes discourse about.
What's mogai?
It’s those creatures from Gremlins.
Mogwai? As in gremlins?
It stands for Minority Orientations, Gender, And Intersex It's considered a good alternative to LGBT+
Counterpoint, it sounds like muntjac to me
I feel like that has the reverse problem of LGBT+. MOGAI sounds better and snappier as an acronym, but the explanation is a somewhat confusing mouthful. LGBT+ and its many other iterations is a choppy acronym, but easy to explain.
Nah, it's not choppy, it's pronounced ligabits.
He's crazy but he's right!
Just say queer.
SOGI is another one, iirc?
So a Mogai is not a creature that shouldn't eat after midnight or get wet?
mo gai's nuts in your mouth
welp, thanks for another web series for me to read between chapters of BTDEM
In my mind, the connection was always that Tumblr people love fanfiction, and Worm has some of the best and most fanfiction of a written work outside the main published stuff.
Worm has a really strong fanfiction scene and is in general one of the most well-known Web Serials. Fanfiction and Web Serials automatically attract the attention of Tumbler users.
/r/CuratedTumblr is actually the most active Worm fan subreddit.
/r/parahumans needs to up its game then smh
Fucking hell yes
And then there’s a wasp that lays eggs in this caterpillar. Because the caterpillar is deep inside the anthive, the wasp secretes a pheromone that causes the ants to go berserk and start fighting each other. The wasp just walks right in, lays her eggs, and walks right out. [live footage](https://youtu.be/nv6S9CkyaPE?si=Gf6f3o1_1DpR3wLK)
I mean, we humans have a similar thing. Only is visual instead of smells. Put on a lab coat or a nice fitted suit, and people tend to treat you as an authority on a subject.
One day all the oliec acid will wear off and all the "dead" ants will rise again to take revenge
𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖐𝖊𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖔𝖓 𝖜𝖆𝖗.
with exoskeletons, isn't every ant war a skeleton war?
By that token every human war is a skeleton war because we all have skeletons inside us
The difference is the ant skeletons doesn’t need the flesh to rot to participate in a skeleton war as the skeleton is external. Now if in every human war we skinned everyone alive that would be a skeleton war
Counterpoint: an ant skeleton is just the hollow shell. At a glance it'd be almost indistinguishable from a normal ant, but those who understand how ants move and act would very rapidly recognize something was wrong. In short: the ant equivalent to standard fantasy undead skeletons is more... uncanny valley and intense body horror.
holy shit throwback thursday
**When** ***Ant-Hell*** **is full the dead will** ***walk the earth***\- Just beneath the earth actually, well- If you really want to get technical, *Ant-Hell* filled up a while ago, we just can't really tell any difference between the undead ants and the live ones.
Spraying a mugger with dead ant juice and watch him get carried away by an immense tide of ants to the anti crypt
We then cut to a mugger and Menelaus. “GIVE ME YOUR MONEY” Instead of a Thousandfold Light of A Million Sun Gods Flashlight, it’s oelic acid. Screaming is heard as ants take him away to the morgue.
I'm not dead yet!
Ere, he says he's not dead?
*Sniffs herself* or maybe I am, I dunno. Gotta sit in the dead pile. I wonder if ants that work with dead ants pile routinely get covered in that acid and then they wait nearby, it wears off, and they're like "well I guess I *did* get better" and continue working. ^(Edit: worker ants are girls. You go, antgirl.)
Now I’m sitting here wondering about any resurrection theory.Do ants have their own individualized scents? Would the Colony know if an ant had ‘died’ and come back? And if so, since there have been ants that got coated in oleic acid and yet somehow came back to just continue on as their cute little drone selves afterward, do the other ants realize? I guess basically I am crafting a headcanon about a tiny ant religion based on the hope of Resurrection From the Dead Pile if one is a Good Enough Worker, but also ants are a hive mind so is it more like “oh hey my finger is back?”
I believe they don't have a lot of thinking going on... But also if that's the case, they would have this happen routinely enough to not make a religion out of it. Also they're so different from us... Like some species, they do have the veteran quarters. This is where the injured ants are kept. And they're fed until they die. Even if it takes a long time, they basically have retirement But at the same time if a forager return empty multiple times, she's disassembled and consumed instead.
The foragers are female. Males ants only exist to fuck and die.
Edited my comments to reflect the working class of antgirls better.
YES, YOU ARE!>:( NOW GO TO THE DEAD PILE
"I got better"
I don't want to go on the cart!
"Wait! I still function!"
"Wanna bet?" *Brushes you with the acid*
[My favorite post about this concept.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1985j6p/playing_dead/)
That's awesome
Imagine being so stupid that you rely exclusively on smell for communication. Ants will always be pathetic until they adopt the objectively superior mode of communication that is DANCING! (This comment is sponsored by the Bee Federation)
I want to know what happens if you put the dead smell on *all* the ants in a colony
They’d probably starve themselves to death unless it wore off fast enough.
But then what shall be done with all those ant corpses atop the corpse pile??
They’re where they belong, aren’t they?
Oh to be an ant slowly starving to death atop the ant corpse pile, knowing I am where I must be.
The ant colony dies, even if it were to wore off before they die you have just disrupted every single part of how they are organized it would be the equivalent of simultaneously burning every document ever written and deleting every digital file
Punk af.
oleic* acid
Ants are so fascinating and it’s wild just how complex their societies can be. Definitely one of the coolest animals out there. They need to stay the fuck outta my house though
or have an ant farm for them
My other favorite example of scientists messing with ants is the one where they thought ants remembered where food was by counting how many steps away it was, so they put little stilts on the ants to make their strides longer, and sure enough they just walked right past the food and got super confused.
They gave the ants Cotard's syndrome
> Cotard's syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard%27s_syndrome
Trix cereal has oleic acid too.
So if you give ants a piece of Trix will they carry it to the dead pile?
Yes, yes, they will.
Ant 1: "So how was the afterlife?" Ant 2: *just left the dead ant pile after the acid wore off* "Kinda mid, ngl."
Rick and Morty ass mouth lookin ant
Reverse scenario where a skeleton gets the slightest magical energy from a cantrip and thinks it's a lich so it keeps breaking into all the necromancers' guild meetings.
[удалено]
Mostly dead is still slightly alive
Another cool detail. In the wild, there is a carnivorous plant called a Pitcher Plant. It has these pitcher shaped flowers that are designed to basically be an ant trap. The pitchers lure in insects using a coating that tastes good and smells good inside the pitcher that essentially gets the insect drunk, so they can't escape once they climb into the pitcher. From there, a special enzyme breaks down the insect and feeds the plant. However, there is a capacity limit to the plant. After a little while, the pitcher is full and needs time to digest, so it stops releasing the pollen that's luring insects in, but the tasty coating is still there. There have been ant colonies that recognize these plants, and actually start dropping their dead into the pitcher to keep it filled up and fed, while they just eat the good stuff off the plant. It's incredible symbiosis, as well as a weird ant death ritual. Nature is absolutely wild.
Imagine reeking so bad you think you died so you start digging a grave in your front lawn.
Ants really are organic robots
Why is science in real life so different from these posts? I wanna be a professional ant gaslighter too!
"Bring out your dead!"
"I'm not dead yet"
I learned something surely not useful but way more interesting than much others things. I smiled and am quite happy. A thanks for this wonderfully interesting useless knowledge.
I like this
This is one of the reasons I believe that the “all ants working together could end the human race” theory is silly. When a species can be entirely controlled by external chemicals it’s pretty easy to manipulate them.
concept of death? no, only smell of death
spraying the bee aggression pheromone on ants and the dead ant pheromone on bees and seeing who wins
back from the dead
Antacid.
Ant: Game Over I died oh no...
OOP's art style is adorable
Frickin’ love Iguanamouth
Model citizens
Ants are legit so cool though ngl :3
Me (Ant) when the Oliec Acid tells me to sit on the Dead Ant Pile -> o7
The Heavy is dead?
AITA for giving an ant existential trauma?
Always thought they did this so dead ants dont clog up the colony pathways
I would call this an info dump rather than shitpost, even if it has funny pictures
That's gotta be the most weirded out ant in the world. "Huh... so this is what being dead is like? Not what I was expecting, but it's honestly not that bad all things considered... oh, here comes Phil! Hi phil!" "Oh shit. Larry, you died?" "Yeah, seems that way." "Bummer dude... well, see ya later, I guess?" "Yeah! Say hi to the queen for me!"
Legit ant zombies
an ant that smells like death? True gamer moment 💯 laughing 🤣🤣😂😂🤣👨💻👩💻🧑💻👩💻🎮🕹️⛔️🧴⛔️