Notices by myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)

The most true and terrible ‘one-sentence horror story’ goes like this:

We can get used to anything.

A brisk cool morning in the lovely South Bronx & the ants who live in the strawberry pot in our roof garden are moving slowly. (same same, girls) These are pavement ants (Tetramorium sp.) When I repotted this plant I saw their queen & managed to save & rehome her. I gave her a cricket leg, since then they have been thriving.

There was a violent thunderstorm and my sweet husband asked “should we bring the strawberry ants inside?🥺” But of course they are fine— they were made for this. #tinycore

They had the signs printed in advanced. Hired a graphic designer. (Wow he did a good job.) Handed them out. Waved them proudly on television. Like they say "Lower Taxes" or something.

There is no neutral way to read this sign. It's about getting rid of people because of who they are. There is no gray area. No fig leaf. Just eliminationism.

It doesn't even say WHO or WHY.

@mistergibson @wa7iut @wmd

I don't have a good feeling about this. "Planting trees" is almost a red flag for me at this point since very few people seem to understand how complex and the real investment needed to plant a tree.

You can't just spam saplings and expect a forest. A forest is a living complex system easier to preserve than it is to build.

"planting trees?" Really? What kind? Are they native species? Who will care for them in the critical first years? Who owns the land?

@mistergibson @wa7iut @wmd

This is why I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to be "planting X trees when you do Y"

These are just indulgences of our modern time.

I decided to find out if any progress had been made on the science behind why some ants are attracted to electrical fields. After filtering out exterminators (it's so demoralizing to search for information on creatures you love and find nothing but people who know nothing about them boasting about how they will kill them all) I found what looked like a blog. But, who the heck is "James Brown"? Never heard of the dude. Maybe he could be my new friend if he likes ants enough to blog about them!

As far as I can tell these people are phantoms. That's cruel on multiple levels. If I was not familiar with this SEO trick I'd spend time looking for them both (to politely tell them about the errors in their blog... which I would assume they would care about since they love insects.)

But I know what this is now. It's probably the exterminators. To get their page ranks up they need "legitimate" pages... like personal blogs by enthusiasts to link to them.

They are pretending to be *ME*😡😳😩

We are expected to take this kind of BS as "harmless gaming of the system." but I find it incredibly distrustful and hurtful. It's making it harder for people to find each other by putting all these fake people in the way. It's LIES the pages are full of half-true nonsense. It's making people know less and filling their heads with false facts.

And this kind of page is what you find FIRST. You won't find @alexwild or the formiculture forum.

You find these mendacious SEO ghosts.

@wmd @alexwild

These fake pages ought to be blacklisted to oblivion. But I don't see any search engines taking this seriously at all.

Not really in their interest to do that. We need to make more noise about just how terrible these pages are. Fake experts? Fake people? Fake images? Fake facts?

Information pollution & fragmentation of natural networks of human learning. A rot on the body of human knowledge: any search engine that puts such pages at the top should be ashamed.

@mistergibson @wa7iut @wmd

Tree planting schemes have been used as green-washing more often than they have been sincere or effective means to care for the earth. Some "tree planting" operations are just logging companies who sell the rights of their monoculture fields to companies who want to claim they planted trees. The trees are harvested years later.

In NYC we planted millions of trees. But they just sent saplings and let amateurs spam them wherever. Years later they have all died.

I'm so sick of "big men" enamored of the trappings of power & anyone impressed with them. I'm sick of the mystique of "all he had to do was wave a finger & you were dead" & that is supposed to be impressive rather than terrifying & childish. I'm sick of their entourages, and the way they stick out their lips, pout, posture, bluster. The way they use other people as decorations.

They way they lie to your face as a power play.

It's all... so embarrassing for the human animal of which I am one.

The bald eagle could have easily gone extinct. But we did all sorts of "woke" things protecting it legally, ran conservation and study programs, banned DDT (that was good for other reasons too) and in 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list.

Likewise pine forests could be dead from acid rain.

The ozone could have a huge hole.

We CAN take care of nature when we want to. And the successes have been worth it.

I feel like we forget this, you know?

Trump has said FOUR times that he will withhold federal funding from schools that require vaccines. Not just COVID. ALL.

This is most schools. This is hitting me where I work. This will lead to children dead from measles. It's obvious, inevitable.

Someone on here said they just couldn't bear to vote for Biden to keep Trump from office since at least under Trump there were better masking rules.

I hope that person sees this.

Worse is worse.

edit: because I don't know measles from smallpox

I love the fedi only more for being the only place I know full of exasperated FORTRAN defenders. How can we insult the original word? Yea, when it was first written we were not yet even born! 🥰

Sometimes the little ant you see on the sidewalk has been to places and knows about things you will never know.

At night she travels down, deeper than your basement, deeper than the grave, deep as the deepest roots of the great trees, where the earth is always warm.

She may know of caverns and pockets of life, scale insects in root-lined galleries, hidden streams, seams of minerals.

For an ant? Secret riches beyond the wildest sugar dreams.

People trying to train AIs are now complaining that all of the AI data on the internet are making it hard for them to get quality training sets of natural language and images.

*bitter snickering*

If you want to cheer up someone who is obsessed with bugs just say something like "Aren’t roaches a type of beetle? I'm so confused can you help?"

Watch them visibly puff up as they explain and get more and more excited.

Today is a good day because one of my students drew me an ant. 🐜 (and it’s a pretty good ant too)

What is Tucker talking about? No one in NYC is "scared to ride the subway"

The worst thing about the subway is the ADA wasn't funded so there aren't elevators at every station.

Do people not in NYC really think it's still the early 80s in NYC? WTF.

Did you know that some ants have a "basket" of hairs under their head used to move sandy soil more efficiently?

The hairs that make up this basket are called ammochaetae, and they are more robust than the sensitive setae that ants use to sense sound and air currents.

The basket of ammochaetae is known as a psammophore. Use it in a sentence today!

"I'm not making trips for all these groceries. I'll make my arms like a psammophore and tote them all at once!"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entomology/comments/74zdrr/california_harvester_ant/