RE: Bugs: semi-OT real bug weapons and Los's ant war

At 22:30 24/09/98 -0500, you wrote:
SNIP
>As a side note, PA would be quite necessary against the Bugs - they
would 
>have a lot of natural Chem attacks.  There's a type of and that has
huge 
>toxin glands running the length of it's body - in hard combat, it
performs 
>a very powerful muscle flexion and explodes itself, spraying all the
nearby 
>enemies with some nasty chemicals.  A Bug squad 'detonates' and
suddenly 
>becomes a Chem beaten zone.
SNIP
>Noah

	Some soldier termites have a sort of "toxic glue cannon"- the
head
is drawn forward into a nozzle, and attackers (ants, mostly) get
skooshed
with the stuff.  If the soldier is overwhelmed (ie all his or her legs
being
pulled at once), it fires the gun without opening its valve, so the
animal
explodes, taking several attackers with it!  (Some other termites have
soldiers with straight hard jaws which they squeeze together.  They walk
up
to an attacker and "snap their fingers", shattering the enemy's
carapace.
Some SF-Bugs might be capable of very high-impact attacks at short
range,
and taking longer between attacks than with bites)

	Another splendid chemical weapon insect is of course the
Bombardier
Beetle, which has a small rocket motor in its tail.  The fuel is
hydrogen
peroxide, spiked with some poisons, kept in a binary form and only
allowed
into the reaction chamber in small amounts.  The result is a directable,
pulsed blast of poisoned steam (!) which lets a half inch beetle beat a
toad
in a fight.  For SF-Bugs that seems sort of SMG or even DFFG-ish.  The
poisons are sufficiently nasty to drive of approaching ants at a
distance.
Many ants themselves have a venom\acid spray system.

	There are some cicadas with a special resonator in their
abdomen,
letting them produce 100dB sound- apparently a tree-ful of them doing
this
at once is pretty startling.  Perhaps SF-Bugs could use a screech-weapon
to
drive unprotected figures in a particular direction (eg to some sort of
pen
to be eaten\parasitised\rescued in due course)?

	re: Los's description of the ant war- it may well have been two
slave-raids or simple nest-raids colliding, or it may have been an
actual
war- ant colonies tend to be intolerant of each other, and if foragers
from
different nests meet, they may well rush home to raise the alarm,
leaving
chemical trails as they go.  That would explain the location of the
fighting, as both armies follow their scouts' trails back to the site of
the
original meeting.  The forming up then going into battle together thing
sounds like Formica spp., several of which are slavers, but can survive
happily without slaves.  Interestingly, they have bigger relatives,
Polyergus spp., which are ultraspecialized slavers- heavy armour,
special
jaws etc., which have lost the ability to do anything other than groom
and
raid- if they don't have slaves to put food in their mouths, they starve
to
death!	For SF-Bugs, there might be some situations in which they don't
attack because they're "busy" with another behaviour and can't break the
routine.

	Many arthropods use urticating hairs as a defence, both of
themselves and their nests.  For SF-Bugs, some areas might be
contaminated
with hairs which eg prevent movement of the unprotected, or are
"activated"
(i.e. kicked up) by careless movement.

	Silk\gossamer has several possible uses: 
1) as an obstacle, eg familiar orb webs and cob-webs; 
2) as camouflage,eg assorted trap-door spiders;
3) as a surveillance device in both of the above
4) as a ranged weapon, eg the spitting spider, which sprays a zig-zag of
silk at its prey, glueing the victim to the ground before biting it, or
the
bolas spider, throwing a glueball on a string, then reeling in the
victim.

	Ants often use subtle chemical communications, and some (e.g.
some
of the slave-makers mentioned above) use a "propaganda substance"; they
spray it on opposing ants, which are then misidentified, and attacked as
enemy, by their comrades.  This could be the basis of a weapon against
SF-bugs.

This is much longer than I intended, so I'll stop there
Rob

"Rob Paul

Dept of Zoology
Oxford University
South Parks Road
Oxford
(01865) 271124
----------------------------------------------
"Auld an' bald!"
"