The interactions between Ants and Spiders gave me some associations with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith's Brood). Particularly, I loved how both were painting an alternative evolutionary path but 'grafting on' to existing notions and understandings of what we know to be true in species development. I wish there was more of this! I felt Children of Ruin was weaker in this regard, maybe because the conflict for the species was absent. The Spiders vs Ants and then Spiders vs Humans being conflicts which created a fanstatic narrative to explain alternative solutions to prisoner's dilemma (spiders choosing to co-opt their enemies' strengths or in Lilith's brood, Oankali being a hybrid of alien/human). I'd be curious to learn if there's more examples in zoology/ecology of species choosing this route instead of competition every time - and also, what factors might impact this.
The plot: "After a spectacular and mysterious cosmic event, ants of different species undergo rapid evolution, develop a cross-species hive mind, and build seven strange towers with geometrically perfect designs in the Arizona desert."
(slight spoilers, FYI)
https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue the insanity and create personal growth.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a bit. It feels very Children of Time-y and some might enjoy reading bits of it:
Half-Assed Technical Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nx...
Freeform Creative Writing of Scripted Game Intro:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wET9mWaYae_GMqbm8n37UoNF...
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Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his process for deciding which aspects of an animal's ecology/behavior to represent in his fiction.
Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game) wrote this article called The Simulation Dream, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for creating a rich and engaging simulation is to "Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate."
I would love to know why Adrian chose to give ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other behaviors out.
https://github.com/stassa/nests-and-insects
Haven't worked on that for a while though.
Also : https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=57492.msg497822#ms...
Take my money.
Zoubin Ghahramani argues that intelligence is about motion, that the sea squirt digests its own brain as soon as it settles down. But might there be intelligent communities of static individuals that nevertheless form dynamic networks?
This is really cool. I read the trilogy, time, ruin, memory in 5-6 sessions and I loved it.
Questions I would ask: 1) Where does he draw his inspiration from? 2) Should we expect to continue seeing Adrian putting together such amazing books so prolifically? 3) Does he believe that the outcome of his trilogy would be the most probable? 4) Besides arthropods do any other species stand a chance against primates?
My question is: how successful do you think that’s been for me as a straight man?
- number of matches ? Probably not. - number of fellow fans ? Probably.
There are other socially parasitic ants in this vein: some will infiltrate a colony, kill only the queen without the colony realizing it, and lay their own eggs which are raised by the slowly replace the entire colony. There are also 'cuckoo' ants which simply sneak into the colony, lay their eggs and leave.
I'm guessing by this you mean the species of ants that tend to be enslaved, rather than the enslaved ants themselves?
Alternatively, it’s fairly easy to find queens on your own. AntsCanada offers a starter guide, and there are many other resources that teach you when and where to find new queens. I keep a few test tubes in my truck year-round, just in case.
Note: I’m not affiliated with AntsCanada in any way.
I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The person said that they already gave away the species I wanted, but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They pushed a species which isn't really known to native to my area, but he insisted he found them locally. They aggressively tried to upsell me on expensive extra supplies they said were critical to the care of this species. When I got my ants, they were shipped from several states away.
I reported this to AntsCanada. I'm not sure what happened, but I recently tried to get a different queen from GAN and I ended up talking to the same person under a different identity.
I'm sure there are some great people on GAN, just beware.
I ended up getting a queen from Atlantic Ants. It did ship across state lines, but the species is one that's ubiquitous in my region.
I was under the impression that we would be meeting because they were local, which is how GAN is intended to operate.?Instead, they shipped the queen to me without any USDA permits. The queen also died within a few weeks of arriving. They started a web store not longer afterwards.
That said, I’ve had plenty of good experiences with GAN. This was one bad actor out of many good ones.
....my apologies, I don't mean to ridicule your hobby, it's just I couldn't imagine wanting more of them in my house on purpose.
Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans could probably roundly poison them into extinction if we wanted.
Are we going to give the ants supernatural coordination as well?
What is that, irony?!
We probably could extinct all the ants in the world if we wanted to, if we were content to extinct all other life on the planet as well.
We're happy that AntWeb (https://www.antweb.org/) recently moved their data to TaxonWorks and are now building that site of data curated there. Data for over 250k individuals, with many more coming as we work to aggregate data are there. Check out a wealth of data and images there.
Fascinating to me, and thank you for calling it out. Ants aren't the only "form" that this happens to in the animal kingdom either.
Homo sapiens used to live alongside other similar species like neanderthals etc, and eventually we crowded them all out. Often we tell ourselves it's because we were superior to them. Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today
It would not be great. If you consider the track record human being have of being horrible to those who look very slightly different or have a slightly different culture, how would we treat beings who were far more different?
It would be even worse if they were are mental inferiors. Imagine a world in which scientific racism was proven true rather than debunked. They would be perfect slaves or research subjects.
We've recently has some amazing success with previously "unknown" people contributing to our open-source framework(s). These contributions, and hopefully future ones, will let us deliver additional features in a more timely fashion, for example things like multi-entry and "traditional" taxonomic keys. TLDR - there are opportunities to chip in to the "refresh" efforts on multiple fronts.
RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm not associated with any research organizations but maybe I should be.
We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely interested in facilitating the structuring of communities that link people like you to those doing the science behind the scenes, this is really important for the long term stability of resources like those you're interested in.
This is a dupe from 10 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39400770
When I submit something that is a dupe, it gets labeled as dupe and not posted. But this post was dupe and did get posted.
What are the automated rules?
I'll try the app next time, maybe that bypasses some check.
Or better, next time I submit, I'll use website regularly, and if it flags as dupe, I can switch to app and see if it bypasses the check.
The game worked great when you simply let it run itself without actually playing it.
equivalently
if humans were insects we would be ants
