China s Debt Termites

My own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953, while a Harvard graduate student, searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of Cuba, ants that shine in the sunlight metallic green or metallic blue, according to species, and one species, I discovered, metallic gold.

Then, as soon as the ants the first group of ants emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants.

Many ant dispersed seeds have special external structures, elaiosomes, that are sought after by ants as food.

And one day I looked in, they were all dead ants that had gotten into my laptop and perished those poor ants!

But if instead I start to meet a higher number of nest maintenance workers, I'm less likely to forage.

And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores.

One sultry, sticky morning, I woke up to find a long column, about 20 feet long, of tiny black ants trooping through a crack under the front door, up through the entry hall, and into the kitchen. The line of ants climbed up onto the counter, where they were painstakingly carting bread crumbs and grains of soggy cooked rice and white sugar back outside.

Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate?

Some recent discoveries There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica there's a self directed robot scientist that's made a discovery soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years.