this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Somone hit me with one fact please, I want to learn something new today.
Many insects get infected by bacteria of the genus Wolbachia, which modify their behaviour to make them go towards their predators. The Wolbachia complete their life-cycle in the guts of the predator.
Nature being nature, some insects have also evolved symbiotic relationships with Wolbachia.
Somewhere in Poland, there is an ex-Soviet nuclear bunker which was sealed off for radiation. There was a ventilation pipe in which ants would fall down and then become cannibals.
The queen-less colony of worker drowns was about a million strong.
In 2016, they did an experiment, where they installed a wooden board to let them back out to see what would happen.
(I can only assume they did not watch enough trashy c-tier horror flicks, or any kaiju monster flicks, because this is how the world ends. )
butterfly larvae, inside the pupa, melt, into fucking liquid, as part of the transformation process.
And studies have shown that they retain memories between the two stages!
There's a species of ant that lays eggs of a different species of ant.
I need more information
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messor_ibericus
I think they're referring to this species. Although the cloning aspect adds yet another layer of wtf on top.
Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species
Cloning is fairly common. Like aphids will clone during spring and summer and then do sex in autumn.
This is different. The queen is fertilized by another species, but can only have males of that species with a portion of her own genetic information. When she's fertilized by her own species, she can produce Queens, haploid workers, and male drones of her species.
What the fuck?
Valid reaction
I admire this guy's dropping an ant fact like this and then refusing to elaborate
I'm busy playing boardgames. And it was a fact. Mission accomplished.
Some species of termite can effectively molt backwards, meaning they can physically return their bodies to a juvenile stage, AND THEN re-mature from that juvenile stage into a different adult body plan!
So adult worker (medium sized head and mandibles, etc.) -> juvenile morphology -> adult soldier (huge head and mandibles). And other forms I don't remember, think they can go back and then become something with wings, etc. - big bug changes!
And what's crazier is this is done in response to pheromones secreted by the mound's queen. Termite Queen up in the mound playing Sid Meier's Civ lol, controlling her city through different stinks! Too few soldiers after the latest bird incursion? Got a buncha workers with nothing to do? No problem, stink-compel em to go back to goo and come back as what the mound needs!
I got all this from a fairly goofy podcast a buncha years ago - be kind, anonymous grumpy expert, if this is way wrong lol
Stink-compel is definitely going into regular usage for me.
I'm still waiting for my pheromone-overlord 😞
If you've eaten figs you've probably eaten thousands of fig wasps and larvae
I think, the tree actually absorbs the insects completely before it ripens
This is true! Saying figs is wasps is silly in the same way that saying plants are dirt is silly. Like... Kind of? From a certain odd perspective, "sure", with caveats. It's a reductive understanding that's neither literally nor technically true but who am I? A botanist? No. I'm not.
I do know a lot happens between pollination and the fruit we might eat though and most fig varieties we grow for food or buy from stores aren't the kind pollinated by wasps anyway. I found a decent write up with more detail here: https://www.treehugger.com/are-figs-vegan-5203202
Dirt is the byproduct of life after its been on a planet for a while. Plants figured out how to recycle life and death's leftovers. Then mushrooms came along and filled the gaps in weird ways. Animals eat the plants and fungi. Other animals eat those animals. Siiiimbaaaa, right?
We typically don't think we're eating our ancestors when having a salad. We aren't beholden to the idea that we're eating wasps when munching figs either. Even in the odd case where we're eating those specific kinds of figs.
There are parasitoid wasps that lay eggs inside other species of insect and have a symbiotic relationship with polydnaviruses that suppress the host's immune system so it doesn't attack the wasp eggs.
Basically, if you're an unlucky caterpillar, ant, or whatever, a wasp may come along, penetrate you with its girldick (ovipositor), and give you insect AIDS so that its young can hatch inside you and eat your still living flesh...
This might be completely off topic but when I was quite young I thought girldicks were a thing because I witnessed a particularly explicit anime or manga. I had something down there and why wouldn't they?
What was more horrible was that it was my mother who corrected me after she laughed at something I had said (I don't remember what I said and it's not like I understood it enough to be embarrassed either.)
Some aphids are born pregnant.