@Poogona
@hexbear.netAny characters with the duo dynamic of Don Quixote/Sancho Panza is top tier imo
Privileged fancylad whose delusional mode of existence is born from his alienated life but paradoxically is also what allows him to connect with people in a way that is free of judgement, alongside a devoted pragmatist born of poverty who discovers the vocabulary for a kind of imaginative happiness through being unable to deny his instinct to care for the ridiculous person he is forced by circumstance to travel with
It is based it IS based and the people who do it have extremely correct opinions and are attractive
I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/
That study has a great diagram:
Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones
Friend: You finished your book? Let me read it!
Me (clutching my face with white knuckles, shivering, wide-eyed): Of course dear friend, just needs a few tweaks
These losers want to turn one of our greatest evolutionary gifts, our ability to recreationally nut, into a problem
Fuck that, I'm not going back to breeding seasons or heat cycles.
I could but I worry my command of bug facts has limits since most of these ant facts I picked up doing research for a book. Maybe though, it would give me an outlet for my larger stockpile of reptile trivia
THE ANT GENERAL LIVES
I present the Saharan Silver Ant:
Why are they silver, you ask? Sadly they are not chrome-plated, instead they are covered in silvery hairs that reflect sunlight. This is because the Saharan desert is in fact very hot, like super hot, like hot as hell, extremely very really hot.
They have this really cool lifestyle where they wait until the short period of time when the heat is too much for predatory lizards, but not quite beyond their threshold, and they come rushing out at high speed to collect any critters who croaked in the extreme heat before the lizards re-emerge. They basically live like divers except they dive into hot desert air instead of water.
Their bodies even "hold their breath" in a sense. Most animals release heat-shock proteins in response to heat, but these ants somehow build them up beforehand and get their foraging done while the proteins are still concentrated in their bodies. It also helps that they are maybe the fastest ants in existence. They run so fast that they end up running on 4 legs with their front two in the air like little dinosaurs.
It's also worth mentioning that individuals triangulate their position with the colony and use the sun for navigation. And unlike many species of ant, pretty much the entire colony forages, with only a few staying behind to keep watch. Life is tough for a silver ant.
Okay I'm gonna add to this by bringing up tandem running. You can potentially see this behavior right now if you go look for some ants on the porch or whatever. It's just learning and teaching, it's cool as hell.
Basically an ant (usually a younger one) that is looking to "learn" a path, usually because another ant has the scent of a good spot on them that's fresher than their own (implying the route is faster), will engage in this tandem running with the ant that knows the better path already. The leading ant stops periodically along the way, and the follower will typically run all over the place before returning to the leader and tapping it with its antennae so that they can continue. They'll do this routine many times before they reach the end of the path, and voila, the follower ant has learned a new path through those intermittent bursts of exploration.
Here's a good video of ants doing it (good in that it's clear, the music and video quality is all pretty early YouTube)(https://youtu.be/X2C7Sy2oPik)