#social insects

[mellodicresonance]

Okay, hear me out.

What if Pern dragons were WAAAAY more like colony insects?

Gold = Queen

Bronze = Drone

Chromatics = Workers

Brown = Soldier/Major

Blue = Media

Green = Minor

So you've got these pretty obvious and almost perfect correlations. But if you make them actually function like their ant/bee counterparts, a bunch of fun things happen!

Queens are still the baby-makers, but Bronzes/Drones are the ONLY ones physically capable of mating with them.

Browns/Soldiers and Blues/Media are not actually "male", they're the same caste/sex as Greens/Minors (which is not exactly "female" either).

Bronzes/Drones do not have fathers! All Bronzes/Drones are born from unfertilized eggs (they have a set of single chromosomes, instead of the full set of chromosome pairs).

Chromatics/Workers can rarely lay eggs, but they can only produce Bronze/Drone eggs because they can't mate to produce fertilized eggs.

Fertilized eggs become Chromatic/Worker eggs.

To get a Queen egg, you need a Queen, a Drone to fertilize her eggs, AND THEN you need a bunch of Chromatics/Workers to coat a Chromatic/Worker egg in Queen goo, causing it to change from a Chromatic/Worker to a Queen.

TO RECAP:

To create a Bronze/Drone, you only need a Queen.

To create any Chromatic/Worker, you need a Queen and at least 1 Bronze/Drone.

To create a Queen, you need a Queen, at least 1 Bronze/Drone, and a hoard of Chromatics/Workers.

I'd also like to note, in RL insect hives, the Queen doesn't direct the workers to create or choose a new Queen. The workers collectively decide when and which egg to convert. I feel like this helps with the common Main Character Syndrome that Golds and Bronzes get in Pern stuff.

So... Yeah. For your consideration.

If anyone wants to do anything with this concept, do! Have fun!

[emptybreath]

Yellow Jacket nest, Frederick, Maryland USA

Vespula maculifrons?

[indigobugs]

Bee -n really busy. I spend most of my art time nowadays working at the day job and when I'm off the clock I've kinda preferred to make wall hangings or paint miniatures. I also finally got married last weekend after a 1+ year engagement, so thats a lot off both me and my wife's minds.

[fantabulisticity]

Original caption: "I think we need both Bug's Life and Bee Movie updates what we now know about social insects #antcolony #antlife #buglife"

[melliferacrash]

Reblogging this here for no particular reason :3

Social Insects in Science Fiction

Hello, my name is Poetry, and I love social insects. Whether they’re ants, bees, termites, wasps, aphids, thrips, or ambrosia beetles, I find them fascinating to learn about. But if the sci-fi books I read as a kid had had their way, I should have run screaming from every ant colony I saw.

From the buggers in Ender’s Game to the Borg in Star Trek to the Vord in Codex Alera to ants and termites themselves from a morph’s-eye view in Animorphs, social insects, and the aliens or artificial intelligences that closely resemble them, are portrayed as “hive minds” with an emotional tone of existential terror. And I’m here to tell you that these portrayals are totally unfair.

What they get right

Here are some features that most portrayals of social insects and their analogues in sci-fi get right. Yes, social insect colonies have queens that are primarily responsible for reproduction. Yes, social insects have very different sensory modalities from ours. We primarily use sight and sound to communicate and navigate the world, while social insects use taste and smell and vibration. Yes, social insects have specialized division of labor to particular tasks, and yes, they are willing to sacrifice themselves in droves to protect the colony. And sometimes, they will enslave social insects from other colonies or even species to serve their own ends (x).

Thus ends what sci-fi portrayals get right. 

What they get wrong: Queens

Almost universally in sci-fi, when you kill the queen, the hive disintegrates into chaos. You’ve cut off the head! The central intelligence of the hive is gone! They’re just mindless borg-units with no idea what to do!

Indeed, in some social insects, such as leafcutter ants, if you kill the queen, the whole colony will die – but probably not for the reasons you think. However, it’s more common for social insects to be able to carry on just fine regardless. In most ants and bees, there are “backup” queens that are reared up by the workers in case the current queen should die. And in many social insects, a worker can step up and become a queen in her place. (Hilariously, a worker ant that steps up to reproduce in place of a queen ant is called a gamergate.)

But here is the most important problem with the sci-fi trope of killing the queen to kill the hive. The queen is not the brain of the hive. She is the ovary.

If you think of a social insect colony as a superorganism, which it’s useful to do in many cases, different groups of insects within the colony act like organs. One caste protects the colony from invaders, which is like an immune system. One caste scouts for new places to forage, which is like a sensory system. Generally, science fiction has a good grip on this idea. Where sci-fi authors fail is that they think the queen is the brain of this superorganism. She is not. She is the reproductive system. The queen does not control what happens in the hive any more than your reproductive system controls what happens in your body. (Which is to say, she has some influence, but she is not the brains of the operation.)

The reason why leafcutter ant colonies die when the queen dies is because the colony has been castrated, not beheaded. Most animals die when they are no longer able to reproduce, even if their brains are still perfectly functional. For castrated colonies with no backup queen or gamergate and no hope of getting one, there is no point in carrying on. Their evolutionary line has ended.

What they get wrong: Swarm intelligence

Here is how social insect hive minds work in science fiction: the queen does the thinking, and the rest of the hive goes along with whatever she thinks.

Now, I’ve already told you that the queen is not the brain of the hive. So where is the brain? Well, that is exactly the point of swarm intelligence. The brain does not reside in one particular animal. It’s an emergent property of many animals working together. A colony is not like your body, where your brain sends an impulse to your mouth telling it to move, and it moves. It’s more like when two big groups of people are walking toward each other, and they spontaneously organize themselves into lanes so no one has a collision (x). There’s no leader telling them to do that, but they do it anyway.

Much of the efficiency of social insect colonies comes from very simple behavioral rules (x). Hymenopterans, the group of insects that includes ants, bees, and wasps, have a behavioral rule: work on a task until it is completed, and when it is done, switch to a different task. If you force solitary bees (yes, most bee species are solitary) to live together, they will automatically arrange themselves into castes, because when one bee sees another bee doing a task like building the nest, its behavioral rule tells it that the task is completed and it needs to switch to a different task, like looking for food.

Individually, a social insect isn’t all that smart, whether it’s a queen, worker, soldier, or drone. But collectively, social insects can do incredibly smart things, like find the most efficient route from the colony to some food (x), or choose the perfect spot to build their hive (x).

What they get wrong: Individuality

The existential terror of the hive mind in science fiction comes from the loss of the self. The idea is that in a social insect colony, there is no individual, but one whole, united to one purpose. No dissent, disagreement, or conflicting interests occur, just total lockstep. I totally get why that’s scary.

The thing is, it’s just not true of real social insects. There is conflict within colonies all the time, up to and including civil war.

A common source of conflict within colonies is worker reproduction. Yes, in most social insects, workers can in fact reproduce, though usually they can only produce males. So why don’t they? Because it’s not in the interest of their fellow workers. Workers are more closely related to their siblings and half-siblings produced by the queen than they are to their nephews, so they pass on more of their genes if they spend resources on raising the queen’s eggs. So, if a worker catches its fellow laying an egg, it will eat the egg. Not exactly “all for one and one for all,” is it?

Worker insects may also fight in wars of succession. If there is more than one queen in a species where queens do not tolerate each other (yes, there are species where multiple queens get along together just fine), such as monogynous fire ants, the workers will ally themselves with one queen or another and engage in very deadly civil war.

Finally, in some species, the queen needs to bully the workers into doing their jobs, and the dominant workers need to bully subordinate workers into doing their jobs (x). Yes, sometimes workers try to laze around and mooch.

Surprisingly human

Here’s what I find weird about depictions of social insects in science fiction. They are portrayed as utterly alien, Other, and horrifying. Yet humans and social insects are very, very similar. The famous sociobiologists E.O. Wilson and Bernard Crespi have both described humans as chimpanzees that took on the lifestyle of ants. 

I think what fascinates people, including me, about ants, bees, and their ilk is that you watch, say, a hundred ants working together to tear up a leaf into tiny bits and carry it back to their colony, or a hundred bees all appearing out of seemingly nowhere to sacrifice themselves en masse to stop a bear from eating their hive, and it looks like magic. It really does look like some kind of overmind is controlling their collective actions. 

But imagine you’re an alien who comes to Earth, and you know nothing about humans or the way we communicate. Wouldn’t we look exactly the same to them as ants and bees look to us? Wouldn’t they look at us sacrificing our lives by the thousands in wars, or working together to build cities from nothing, and think, Wow, how do they coordinate themselves in such huge numbers, why do they give up their lives to defend their borderlines, I guess there must be some kind of mega-brain they all share that tells them what to do, and they just march in lockstep and do it.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the study of both social insects and humans, it’s that any system that looks monolithic and simple from a distance is in fact fractured, messy, and complicated when you look at it up close.

Social insects aren’t scary mindless robot-aliens. They’re a lot like you and me. As much as I was terrified as a kid by the Animorphs book where an ant morphs into Cassie and screams in pure existential horror at its sudden individuality, I actually think an ant would adjust very easily to being a human, and that a human would adjust very easily to being an ant – much more easily, in fact, than humans adjusted to morphing, say, sharks, in the very same book series.

[k-star-holic]

Lee Hyori on 'Gums GIF': 'Should I still suffer after more than 20 years?'

Source: k-star-holic.blogspot.com

[weaver-z]

Nobody talks about the termites killed by anteaters...... it's right there in the name. ANT eaters. No one even cares that they eat more termites than ants. There's a stigma

[mindblowingscience]

In a groundbreaking discovery, bumblebees have been shown to possess a previously unseen level of cognitive sophistication. A new study, published in Nature, reveals that these fuzzy pollinators can learn complex, multi-step tasks through social interaction, even if they cannot figure them out on their own. This challenges the long-held belief that such advanced social learning is unique to humans, and even hints at the presence of key elements of cumulative culture in these insects. Led by Dr. Alice Bridges and Professor Lars Chittka , the research team designed a two-step puzzle box requiring bumblebees to perform two distinct actions in sequence to access a sweet reward at the end. Training bees to do this was no easy task, and bees had to be helped along by the addition of an extra reward along the way. This temporary reward was eventually taken away, and bees subsequently had to open the whole box before getting their treat.

Continue Reading.

[roobiedo]

Made this for the Solarpunk Aesthetic Week server in a sudden creative fever, so I guess I'll post it here too hh

A relative of mine knows someone who teaches kids, so I'm gonna suggest this as an art project for them! The idea is that students could each make/decorate their own shelf, then put them together to form a hive, which could function as mini lockers in their classrooms. Then, by the end of the school year or something, they could either take their own little shelf home (or exchange them with their peers?), or recycle them into materials for the next class! Hopefully it'll teach them about pollinators too 🐝

Idk how doable this project is really, and its scary to imagine one of my silly designs could actually become something tangible irl. But even so, I'm still excited to try 🥰 (And if anyone else attempts this too, please let me know!!!)

[futurebird]

Queen ant perfumes herself with dead ant.

Here is a Formica Rufa queen who is a parasite of other Formica species (these are the famous wood ants of Europe) She has a dead Formica sp. worker and is gathering hydrocarbons from her exoskeleton to disguise herself as a member of the colony. Then she will likely try to sneak into the nest. Sometimes she will replace the queen, other times simply take some pupae and use them to jumpstart her own colony.

She can open and raise the pupae of many sp. in her genus.

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

Bees might be dancers, but wasps are drummers! Studies have shown that some species of social wasp will beat their abdomen, or gaster, against the side of the nest in a rhythmic fashion to alert others of nearby food.

(Image: A northern paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus) by Wayne Beirbaum)

If you like what I do, consider leaving a tip or buying me a ko-fi!

[escapedaudios]

People who act like you're supposed to watch movies with friends in total silence are WEIRD and I DON'T LIKE THEM. Freak ass fascists, I swear they act like it's an unspoken rule when it's actually the whackest shit ever. I stand in defiance of this nonsense. I say you should YAP and BLABBER and GOOF OFF with your friends when you're watching a movie at their house. Who decided you're supposed to be silent throughout a movie and give it 110% attention? Why are we applying library etiquette to a gathering of friends? Dumb. I like commenting over movies with my friends. I like discussing them as they happen. It's FUN. These are the kinds of people who complain about the transcendental and magical experience of hearing an entire stadium full of people sing the chorus of a song in unison at a concert. I literally hate those human slugs, oh my god.

[protagonist-art]

"Uh- I'm Arnold. Bennett. It's profoundly difficult to get your lifes works and studies accepted if your name isn't... yes, oh! Are you a fan of moths, sir?"

NEW RDR2 OC!! a reclusive, clumsy entomologist and bug collector; cooped up in his study of uniformed clutter

[eldritchshapeshifter]

‼️🍉I KNOW WE WILL ALL DIE EVENATALLY 🇵🇸‼️

Guys, your money will go to save my family😔🇵🇸

Hello, I'm Eslam from Gaza, a mother of two girls, Hanaa, 5 years old, and Alma, 1 year old. My house, my car, and my husband's job were destroyed. I lost 11 people from my family in GAZA'S GENOCIDE and I cannot bear to lose more.

Imagine that my 5-year-old daughter surprised me by saying that she feels that she will soon die from a missile that will tear her apart.

Is it fair that my daughter dies while she is still dreaming of life?

I am asking for a small donation of 35$ or 50$ from each person to save my daughters from extermination.

I need your help if you can 🥺😢

🍉‼️If you have $10 and you don't donate i you are participating in the extermination of my children‼️🍉.

🇵🇸🍉 https://gofund.me/a2ccf744 🍉🇵🇸

[stagefoureddiediaz]

A break in my mental health tumblr break to say

BEES!!!!

The metaphors are metaphoring and I am here for it!!!

[raytm]

I wanna write ships so bad but I fucking forgot how to like idk be like hey bestie wanna ship 💅