Wednesday, September 17, 2008

i communicate with ants

Ok, that's not entirely true, but I know people who can! They told me that ants love to chat about current political events. It's all "Obama this" and "McCain that" and "Who has the better economic philosophy to help us with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and credit crunch?" Frankly, I find it a little boring.

Ready for the big news? We have a new member of the ant family! It's true! My ant-talker friend, we'll call him Scott (comic book reference), told me that they found a brand new ant! Yeah! Isn't that exciting!

It was roaming around some fungi in the Amazon rainforest looking for the latest issue of "Politics Today" when some scientists realized we haven't seen an ant like this before. How did they know? Well, can't you look at an ant and tell whether it's a Leptanillinae or an Aenictogiton? I thought you could. So can the scientists. They noticed this little ant was different from all the other ants out there and decided to do a DNA test.

Guess what? It's the father!

Ha! No, it's not the ant version of Maury. They actually found out that this was probably one of the oldest species of ant ever. Dating back 120 million years. That's one crazy old ant family. They might have been around for the first election ever. They may have voted for Washington himself! I know, that's a loooooong time ago. I wonder if they had TV then? Hmmmmm...

They call this new ant the "ant from mars" because it's green and travels in little flying saucers. You might wonder why we haven't seen them all around the world if they can fly anywhere they want. Well, the little saucers have VERY little gas tanks, so they can really only go about a meter before they have to fill up. Hey, to an ant, that's, like, around the world!

So, if you're a myrmecologist, then you probably know all about this and are already having a "we're excited because we haven't found a new species of ant since 1923" party, but if you're an ASPIRING myrmecologist and you didn't know about it, I'd suggest looking up real information about this new ant and not using this blog as science fact. It is in my head, but not always to real people.

I'm off to lift 50x my own weight...oh, wait...I mean 1/50th my own weight...yeah...that seems doable.

Enjoy!

-DJ

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