Ant Raft

That is really cool. (most) Insects are awesome.

None of the ants are saying it, but they all think that guy's a total douche.

You see how the survivor ants crawl onto the tweezers for safety? Because they want to get away from their dead brothers who made the sacrifice to be on the bottom of the float. They are crawling onto the tweezers in hopes of jumping down on a dry location, and then bringing vital information back to the colony. Once the colony is alerted, they will march into his house at night, and he will be the one floating on a sea of ants. They will then rip him into millions of bits while he screams, all the while knowing with satisfaction that the icing on the revenge cake is that his body will feed and sustain the rest of the colony for weeks.

As Woher said, this is pretty cool. Id like to see them forming the raft, though, not sure how they got it like that. :P

wow i thought it was jell or something, then one of the ants falls in the water and then I realize i'm a retard :(. but really neat

Ants demonstrate an incredible array of behaviors given the size of their circuits. Each behavior must be genetically hard coded. I bet if you examined the neural connections in detail, you'd find greater structural differences between casts (ie: worker vs. soldier) than between "individuals" of the same cast.

Imagine living in a world where nearly everyone else is a perfect clone of you, but at different stages of life. Imagine if this was perfectly normal.

I imagine it would be near impossible to lie, keep secrets, or cheat at anything. I suppose this would foster a deep and innate trust between all members of that "society".

Just read this in the newspaper: The ants actually have a very rough, hairy carapace in which oxygen is held. The ants squeeze so close together that the air is shared throughout the raft, so none of the ants actually die.

looking at that makes my skin crawl