Ant

i read a tumblr post a while ago about seeing an ant on a bus, and the horrifying and sad situation that must be

taken kilometers away from everything you know, no way for you to return, all because of the accidental effects of the whims of some greater beings you could never comprehend the motivations of

no matter how long you follow the pheromone trail, you won't get home

that post stuck with me. a lot. structuring cosmic horror as mundanity is something i haven't seen much of (maybe the inciting incident of hgttg? but even then, it's a parody of human systems, not some greater system we could never understand). and the fact that it's real, to some degree... it gets to me.

wild sharks will get fishing hooks stuck in their mouths, recognize humans who remove them, and then communicate to other sharks with the same issue that the humans are there to help

i once saw a video of a man rescuing a sick lost pet cat. he found out about it because every day, he sets out food for the feral, unsocialized cats in his neighbourhood. after a certain point in a cat's development, you can't tame them - they'll remain feral and generally hostile and neither you nor them will be happy with the arrangement. but you can still regularly set out food, and the cats will come to learn of you as someone who helps them. what got to me was, the sick cat wasn't feral. it was just lost or abandoned. but not only did the feral cats allow it to eat, they would specifically make sure the sick cat ate first and was safe before eating themselves.

pet cats and populations that grow from lost pet cats are a major cause of extinction in urban areas. you bring in a good hunter and don't offer much cover for small animals and let it loose most of the day.

you can't rescue a feral cat. you can try to spay them, but you can never neuter the entire population of a city

i used to watch ants crawling in and out of sidewalk cracks as a kid. the cracks fill up with dirt, and then ants tunnel through them. the tunnels must lead somewhere but sidewalk blocks are big, so i figure they must have a cramped space, even by their standards.

my hometown had frequent earthquake drills. some kids would get chosen to pretend to be trapped under rubble or lost in the school, because they were drills both for the school and for the first responders. i learned at one point that part of the reason sidewalks are arranged into blocks is because it means if something makes them move or crack, like a tree, or an earthquake, it only does that to one of them. i wonder what the ants would think about those earthquakes.

some ants will accept other ants of the same species into their group. some ants will form colonies with multiple queens, joining them together. some ants will form peaceful relations with other ant species. many ants will frequently go to war with other colonies of the same species.

a biome is a loose term. what might be a tiny part of an area for us may be a large biome for many smaller species. but generally, when i talk about biomes, i mean on the level that would matter to us as humans

there are a lot of animals that change parts of their environment. but only two that intentionally and rapidly change biomes. humans, and beavers

if a beaver is put into a place with a speaker that plays loud rushing water, it gets confused and tries to block the speaker with wood. ive heard that be used as evidence that they have some instinct to block the sound of water, but if a speaker was playing loud rushing water next to me i might try to block it as well.

some ants secrete formic acid to kill saplings of most plants, leaving plants that are beneficial to them alive. you end up with "gardens of death," small areas of a forest with strangely low biodiversity and a lot of ants.

anteaters are really scary, when you look at them.

there's a wikipedia article for a war which went on across two ape tribes. jane goodall witnessed it and it apparently affected her quite a lot, changing her views on apes for life. between the two tribes, one of them lost a single ape, while the other was completely massacred. the tribe that was completely massacred was not the aggressor in almost all of the conflicts. it seems to me like that is not a war.

would we be able to tell the difference between an alien studying us and an alien wanting to communicate with us?

im tired.