Some Interesting Stuff in the Animal World

I was poking around on the Internets today (well, actually, poking around on Cracked >.>) and found some interesting stuff.

Please note that the following things will not necessarily be connected, except by the fact that they all involve animals, but they all interest me.

All right, first off... ant hive-mind intelligence.

If you take one individual ant out of the colony it will have no idea what to do and will wither and die. However, if you examine the collective intelligence of ant-colonies, the hive-mind, you will note many extraordinary things that they do that you either didn't know about or maybe just didn't give much thought to.

Source (I'd click, it's really interesting): Are Ants Intelligent?

They're the only species on Earth besides humans that wages full-scale war, with battalions and such a level of organization... I mean did you see that video on the site I linked to with the massive mound of ant corpses and the survivors still fighting?

It may not looks too impressive, but think about if you were the size of an ant and you saw that, I mean holy shit.

Also, they enslave prisoners of war. All other animals, when engaged in combat with another animal and gain the upper hand, will either kill it or let it retreat (like if it was just a territory battle or something). The victorious ants round up the enemy survivors and force them into servitude for the rest of their short ant lives. That's pretty damn clever.

I could go on, but just click the link if you didn't, it has all this stuff and more (a lot more).

Next topic, moving on from ant intelligence, which can only hold one's attention for so long...

Dolphins.

Two things about them, in fact.

They're evil, and they're forming armies as we speak.

...

First, for the evil part... dolphins, as we all know, are the only animal on Earth to have a brain-mass to body-mass ratio higher than that of humans. So, theoretically, they could be smarter than us if they possessed (or somehow developed) the advanced cognitive processes that human society today imprints on it's children (thank god they haven't or we'd all be slaving under our new dolphin overlords). They have the raw potential for it. Anyways, continuing... another somewhat widely known fact is that the dolphin language, composed of clicks and whistles, seems from observation to be at least as complex as a modern human language.

Anyways, getting to the evil part. You may know that dolphins are the only animal aside from humans to have sex for fun (pure pleasure rather than only as a means of reproduction). Sometimes a group of male dolphins will kidnap a female and repeatedly gang rape her for a while actually.

Now, this still isn't the evil part. The evil part is that dolphins are also the only animal aside form humans to torture and kill other animals for fun.

I know what you're thinking... "Dolphins? Those cute little bastards?" Yes, dolphins.

They kill porpoises for exercise and entertainment, and they even occasionally kill baby dolphins to pass the time (male and female dolphins both).

Also, watch this video of dolphins playing football with a bunch of poor jellyfish by launching them out of the water with their tails to, we can only imagine, score an aquatic touchdown:

BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | Dolphin football off north coast

Imagine the jellyfish's thought process, if it had a thought process... "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOH--oh, I'm back in the water now, I'm safe... well, that was weird... wait, what's this sudden pressure shiftOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT" etc.

Anyways, moving on to the "forming armies" part...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR9JX...yer_embedded#!

They've started to form groups of thousands of individuals, all over the ocean, which scientists have dubbed "superpods." Scientists think it's due to climate change, but I prefer to think that they're all planning world domination and putting all of the final pieces into place for D-Day (meaning Dolphin Day, of course).

Anyways... hmmm... oh, that's right, I had one more thing I wanted to mention... jellyfish in Japan.

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/ar...9/1889.jpg?v=1

Big jellyfish in Japan.

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/ar...9/1899.jpg?v=1

TONS of big jellyfish in Japan.

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/ar...1/1891.jpg?v=1

There are something in the realm of one bazillion of them, chilling out there in the ocean off the coast of Japan.

And whenever you kill one, it releases its millions of grain-of-rice sized babies in its final moments of life.

I tend to agree with Cracked on this one and think of it as signalling the approaching return of Cthulhu.

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/ar.../29956.jpg?v=1

(And yes, I stole all those images from Cracked, and the videos and links.)


And yeah that's it. :P

Questions, comments, loved it hated it... post! ;)

hmm kitties play with their pray , my cat loves killing moths and watching them desperately trying to escape xp.

Ants also form rescue squads to search for missing/wounded/dead, and then will carry them back to the rest of the colony. Seen it with my own two eyes.

If two queen bees encounter one another, they fight to the death. And bee larvae eat something called "royal jelly" from the heads of drones. True story.

*And some people take that stuff as a dietary supplement. Also true.

I spent a long time on holiday in Greece experimenting with ants. You can establish some cool facts pretty easily. In general they wander around aimlessly until they find sugar. Once they find sugar they follow a chemical trail they have left back to the nest, but they also lay an 'I found sugar' trail. Others happen across this trail by chance (the probability of stumbling across a line is much more than stumbling across a point) and then follow it to the sugar, and then reinforce the trail on the way back. However, they do this thing where instead of following the trail perfectly, they periodically shoot off at tangents and then wander back to it. The effect this has is that over time the trail gets less and less windy, until it's pretty much straight back to the nest. No individual ant has any idea of the big picture of the world, they just follow a set of autonomous rules, but the holistic effect is a system which can efficiently find and collect sugar.

tl;dr: ants are awesome.

You can make an entire thread of how amazing ants are!