Leaf-cutter ants have rocky crystal armor, never before seen in insects (opens in new tab)

Nature seems to be trying, using, iterating and reusing all over the place, walled gardens be damned.

Reminds me of the episode of "Primitive Technology" where he turns terrestrial snail shells into lime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek3aeUhHaFY

Isn't it the only thing you've never learned about until now?

Conversely, reading about such animals, my first thought is "can we please sequence their DNA already"?

That's one critical reason for being very upset about us extincting countless species, even those that do not play any significant role in keeping the planet habitable - losing all these genes means losing pages from a book that contains ready-made biotech, and information that helps to explain how things came to be (which helps explain why it works).

Interestingly, vertibrates rely heavily on metals for the strength of their skeletons via the calcium mineral matrix calcium hydroxiapatite, up to 50% by volume and 70% by weight of human bone is a modified form of hydroxyapatite.

And many of our enzymes contain metals (magnesium, a lot), and some transport proteins too (famously haemoglobin).

Zinc is essential in humans for DNA replication. We need chromium and molybdenum in tiny amounts for blood sugar control and hunger regulation.

Though none of these seem quite as spectacular as metal plares body parts!

And various other wasps have heavy metals concentrated near the apex of their mandibles.

There's also resilin, an elastic-like compound(?) that concentrates energy at certain parts of insect joins, used during jumping, or other fast movements.

What user agent is it aborting on?

That is disappointing.

...and it blocks TOR requests with a legitimate web browser (Firefox on Android) with unsolvable captchas.

Thanks, cloudflare. Thanks.

Imagine an alien species that studies humans and a researcher discovers that some humans are wearing chainmail armor to battles. The researcher hypothesizes that wearing armor improves humans' odds in said battles. Of course this calls for a n=5000 study on human gladiator battles where some participants are provided chainmail armor and others are not. Ahh, science. Meanwhile, all the humans are like: uhh, yeah, 5000 of us died for this Sherlock?

Ants individually are just happy to be of service to the queen. They should put a picture of the queen nearby as motivation.

Even wearing chain mail I doubt you'd have a chance much higher than zero against a full grown tiger.

I did the same but I would not call it battle. It was like feeding lions with human slaves during Roman empire.

higher intelligence = higher ignorance?

Thanks for all of your hard work dang! Happy Thanksgiving.

I'd also argue that it _is_ surprising, as we'd expect the majority of unknown species to be similar to known species. It's not like every unknown species is just randomly created-- most will have ancestors that are well known and studied.

I spent this summer learning about the different mushroom in my area in as much depth as possible and it is incredible how little we know about most of them besides a name and very apparent superficial features.