Thread: Humans aren't the only senitent creatures on Earth....

Originally Posted by Seismosaur

Now... What do you think?

I think an ant-war just made my list of things I have to see before I die.

Originally Posted by Seismosaur

Now... What do you think?

Hmm...kinda makes me want to get a magnifying glass. And NO, I don't mean to fry them.

Originally Posted by Aquanina

Hmm...kinda makes me want to get a magnifying glass. And NO, I don't mean to fry them.

Frying ants is the best!!! Dude, i could go to town on an antpile for hours. Theres so many of them!!! On my cousins' farm we shoot hunting rifles at 2 foot high ant piles and watch them explode. Good fun. The cow-pie mushrooms make it even better Pour lighter fluid on them and cook marshmellows, brewski in my left hand. This is takin me back to the good ol' days.

What about dolphins and elephants. I once heard elephants morn their dead.

Originally Posted by Half/Dreaming

Frying ants is the best!!! Dude, i could go to town on an antpile for hours. Theres so many of them!!! On my cousins' farm we shoot hunting rifles at 2 foot high ant piles and watch them explode. Good fun. The cow-pie mushrooms make it even better Pour lighter fluid on them and cook marshmellows, brewski in my left hand. This is takin me back to the good ol' days.

What about dolphins and elephants. I once heard elephants morn their dead.

1. killing ants is awful!!!!

2. cow-pie mushrooms...you mean...like...of the psychedelic variety??

3. yes, elephants do mourn their dead...it's actually a really sad sight

Haha, imagine if ants built an actual dirt castle...that'd be an odd sight.

You forgot something--some ants make slaves of other ant species that they conquer.

Oh... I've never heard of that before. But that does add to the list of human similarities.

Yeah, I have a new respect for ants after seeing them in action.

Whenever I'd go out to the porch to smoke, there would always be a few small ants running around the table. One night, I put a Coke can over an ant (covered it with the dome in the bottom), just for the hell of it, and left it there. (I think I told this story once before on this forum.)
The next day, I went out to smoke again and lifted up the can, to see what was up with the ant. Well, it was dead. I sat there for a while, smoking and just looking around. A few minutes later, (this is the next day, mind you) a group of three ants come up onto the table. Say I was sitting at 6 o' clock: the three ants all come up at 12 o' clock. The two ants on the sides go to either side of the table; one at 9 o' clock, one at 3 o' clock, pacing back and forth as if keeping a lookout. The third ant then walks straight up the middle, to the center of the table, picks up the dead ant and drags it off of the table, back up at 12 o' clock, as the other two ants converge at the same spot, and they all travel off the table together, pulling the dead ant with them.

Another time, on the same porch, I was sitting there smoking, when a wasp seemed to fall out of the tree over me, landing on the ground right beside my foot. I sat there and looked at the wasp, noticing that an ant was actually hanging onto its backside (which was REALLY funny, at the time, as if the ant had taken down the wasp, in mid-air, and was hanging on, for dear life.)
As I sat and watched, a lizard came out of the grass, obviously stalking the wasp, which was flailing around with the ant on its back, as if it couldn't fly anymore. The lizard moved in, slowly, closer, and was obviously prepared to strike and eat the writhing wasp. Just as it was moving in for the kill, another lizard ran in, out of nowhere, swooped up the wasp and ant in its mouth, right in front of the other lizard, and took off. Lol.

The first lizard sat there, for a moment, like "What the fuck??? " and then just went on about its business. Haha. It was classic.

[Edit: Dogs have been known to mourn their dead companions also. A good number of them actually starve themselves to death, after the death of their companions.]

I saw an ant war when i was kid, im telling you it was *fights the temtpation to go SPARTAAA* awesome!

I was doing some random kid stuff at my cottage, and i had thrown this old newspaper to a ditch, after a few hours or so i walked past the same ditch and there were red and black ants RAGING WAR on it, cant remember much since its so long ago but the mayhem was outstanding, HUNDREDS/ THOUSANDS OF ANTS battling over.. who knows, sport pages?

oh and Naut, awesome story specially the first 'coke' part.

My brother and I debated over this very issue a few weeks ago. He thinks that ants and all insects are practically plants and don't have conscious experiences. I completely disagree. The complexity of their behaviors, which several people have talked about in this thread, makes me think that consciousness would be necessary for all of those tasks to be performed. One of the most complex and bizarre things ants do is raid the colonies of ants of a different color (much like humans), steal larvae, bring the larvae back to their own colonies and raise the newborn ants of the different color to be their slaves. I'm completely serious. I saw it on a nature show recently. Here's a link...

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=2&gl=us

Man, I saw an episode on ants once done by David Attenborough. Firstly I don't get how they got a camera in there so well, but anyway, ants build connecting chambers of all sorts and one of those chambers is specifically for the dead. They pile in their dead ants there. To use as building material or what??

Ants are racist. The black ones always fight the red ones.

Maybe they have a collective consciousness. based on pheromones or something...
One ant would be stupid, but a whole colony thinking together could be very smart. maybe it's like a network based intelligence, kinda like the computer virus from Terminator 3.

oh another thing ants do. If you put say 10 ants in a bowl of water, they will swim toward each other and then hold onto each other to make a round shape. If it's a lot of ants. They will form a ball. This seems to be a way to make a better flotation device, so at least some dont drown.

If you give ants a large piece of food, that they cannot carry or cut, for example a candy, and you put it on soil, than the ants will bury it by covering it with dirt.
If you put a very large amount of food that they can carry, such as lots of sugar, on soil, then they will not bother to carry it, instead they will move their colony and built it around the sugar. smart!

Ants are brilliant. Did you know that in wars, they even have spies? Somehow they can mimic the smell of the other colony they are fighting or something.

Still, ants make way to cool sounds Not to burn them with a magnifying glass.. at least, it used to be fun

Mucho respect for ants, besides that.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

[Edit: Dogs have been known to mourn their dead companions also. A good number of them actually starve themselves to death, after the death of their companions.]

Yes, this is true. When my older dog was killed, her companion (whom she raised) stopped eating, and just sat under a tree, looking at her burial site. It was a good thing he had another dog to comfort him... Else he would have died.


This thread was just to show that humans AREN'T alone. And i'm glad i have many people who agree . Me an my sister once LITERALLY built a small ant hill next to a black-colored sugar ant hill. We then placed 34 fire-ants in it, and a mound of sugar, and bits of bread. Within 10 minutes, the 34 fier-ants were killed, and the black sugar ants had moved to our hill. While watching this. I saw that several black sugar ants had taken the dead fire-ants and buried them . They stayed at the spot for a moment, as if to pay respect or something, them walked off to help with the rest of the hill. I'll NEVER forget that.

Originally Posted by dodobird

Maybe they have a collective consciousness. based on pheromones or something...
One ant would be stupid, but a whole colony thinking together could be very smart. maybe it's like a network based intelligence, kinda like the computer virus from Terminator 3.

Damn... wrote a long reply which got sent to the great internet blackhole.

I'm too lazy to reproduce the whole thing, so I'll just say that your view was touched upon in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (the greatest book I've ever read) in a wonderful way. He sees an ant hill as functioning very much like a brain, and writes a short humorous story about learning to "talk" to the anthill.

Ants have not got a collective intelligence, however their behavior is somewhat more complex then other animals.

just for the record, we are Sapient.

LOL. The term is sentient. Sapient refers to homo sapiens ability to rationalize, make religion, etc. Ants are one of the most sentient creatures on the planet. DEAL WITH IT. I'll bet you got that off of wikipedia. Well, if you hadn't noticed, the article was so wrong, and SOO F*cked up, it sayed at the top that it would need a complete re-write.

I didn't say that they weren't. I'm not even wrong. We are sapient. Just about every mammal is sentient. Sentient means aware.

I repeat: We are sapient. That is why we are called Homo Sapien Sapien

This is religions terrestrial scale:
@-------------------------------------------------------------------*
^not sentient.......................................... ..........................Sentient^

@ = animals * = Humans (H. Sapiens) - = Nothing, we just had to make it as long as the real chart .

This is (a summerized version of) science's sentiecy chart:
@--------------#---------------$-----%--------------^====+=][][!*

^...........................................^..... ............................................^
little-No sentiecy.................Moderate sentiecy.........................Supersentiecy

@ = bacteria # = Equus $ = Modern Birds of Prey % = Most small Therapods (i.e. Velociraptor) ^ = Chimpanzees and other Non-Homo primates = = Sentiecy gap + = Ants (all species) ][][ = early - mid Homo species ! = H. Neanderthalensis * = H. Sapiens

Sentient means aware conciously. Sapient refers to H. Sapiens version of sentiecy. As this is the driving force behind our "soul" which has yet to be even REMOTLEY proven to even POSSIBLY exist.

avoiding a religious discussion, are you saying I am wrong to call us Sapient?