[OT] Ants, Bugs & GZG

 Los wites:

 Jeff Lyon wrote:

> > <snip ant story>  What a sight! Why they were fighting I will never
> know.
>
> I've read about this before.	What you saw was essentially a slave
> raid.
> The red ants attack a colony of black ants, killing off all the adults
> and
> stealing the eggs or pupae.  These are then carried back to the nest
> and
> raised as workers.  Apparently, it's fairly common.

You know, I've seen raids before and perhaps this was the motivation.
But what I failed to mention about this war was that the other ants also
had formed up in a column and travelled down the driveway, (where the
bus stop was) and met the oncoming ants out in the open so to speak. So
you've got two long trails of ants meeting in no man's land. Could both
have been on slave raids simultaneoulsy?

Ever since then (well in my kid years at least)  we tried to recreate
this battle using captured ants, but it seems that though ants will
fight when you toss them into a swarm of other ants, its tough to get a
whole war going. (I know we were sadistic kids)

Los

What you probably had in that case was either an organized war, or a
good 
response to a slave raid.  Ants mainly communicate by pheromones & 
chemicals, and most likely one side's scouts had alerted the colony to
an 
impending raid, and the defenders sortied as well.  Ants show remarkable

organization and co-ordination.  A friend of mine went on a photo-safari
to 
Zimbabwe (It's stunning - as a species, we should be proud to have come 
from somewhere as beautiful as Africa) and brought back video & stills
of a 
soldier ant foray returning to the nest; it's a column of ants about a 
meter long and 20 cm wide - nice shrp edges and everything moved in a
very 
straight path, and apparently attacked everything it came across. 
Anything 
it can't handle would be driven off by the swarm of stinging & biting
ants. 
 And the colony can afford to lose forays pretty often.

Ants are the base for an alien race/predator that I'm working on - the 
morale, command/control & commo rules need a little work, but it's
nearing 
completion - need some minis, too.  Even without any SF BS (How did the
SST 
Movie Bugs get to other planets?) they are pretty formidable.  Ants are 
*tough*.  They will be really scary in DS/SG - no morale checks for 
'expendables' (workers/warriors).  They will close assault all day long,

and never break.  Yikes.

Ants will fight if just thrown together haphazardly, but will only 'war'
if 
allowed to develop a colony.  Get a bunch of the connectable 'Uncle 
Miltie's' ant farms, and get two separate colonies going.  Then connect 
them.  It's fascinating.  Bring food & water, because the war could last
a 
while.	I had some epic battles over one single bottleneck connection. 
To 
throw in a new twist, put in two (or more!) connections.  One colony oce

organized a simultaneous raid down both tunnel connectors - the enemy
could 
not hold up, and were slaughtered, their queen dismembered, their pupae 
stolen; as S.M. Stirling wrote, "This is defeat.  Avoid it."

Noah
"Children will pull the wings off of flies, but most grow out of it. 
Those 
who do not?  Biologists."

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