Thinking - Multi-individual organisms (ants and so forth)

A while ago I wrote about the time I saw a cockroach die of old age. At the time it put me off killing things for a while because I was just about to kill it when it did the getting all dead thing. But...

Not long after that, I was sitting on the street in front of my workplace enjoying the smells of the traffic, and eating my lunch.

We didnt have a tree, and there was no other shade.

As the inevitable crumbs dropped to the ground, the ants started to wander around picking them up and taking them home presumably to feed their kids. I watched with exactly the amount of interest such things demand until I suddenly became slightly more excited.

!

An ant had decided to bite me.

And whats more, it too was taking it's newly acquired bit of food back home to feed the kids.

The ant was eating me.

It was holding a huge lump of my leg with it's face.

It didnt care at all that it was taking a few cells at a time with, I'm guessing, an ultimate goal of taking all my cells. At least all the squishy ones.

I murdered it of course.

But then I remembered I didnt like killing things because of the cockroach event.

But then I remembered that an ant cant really live on it's own. It's just a few cells out of a much bigger creature that is the entire nest. Some critters that live like this cant even feed themselves without other critters from the hive helping. Bees and ants (except for solitary varieties) are just tiny bits of a bigger organism.

So if one bites you and takes some of you home...

Murder it.

Somebody else will take care of their kids.

The hive won't even care.




120 Things in 20 Years wants to acknowledge things are killed on my behalf all the time, that I kill things to eat all the time, and the bees and ants we might normally meet dont actually have kids. Also we all eat thousands of cheese mites (found on cheese, flour, plant leaves etc. I just thought you should know.

Aquaponics - Dipel works

If I hadn't replaced my first sentence with this, my second one would have made a lot more sense.

Actually it doesn't seem to have a smell to love, in the morning or at any other time.

But I didn't, so there you go. I hate censorship, even when I do it to myself.

Dipel turns out to work really well, and doesn't seem to have a smell or be toxic in any way. It's certified organic, and makes caterpillars dead.

In short, I love the stuff.

Dipel is a bacteria that makes caterpillars get a little ill and go off their food.

Sorry Vegetarians.

Do vegetarians kill caterpillars, but just not eat them? I'll have to ask my veggie friends. I'll get back to you on that one.

At first I didn't mind it when I was losing leaves to caterpillars, but when they started eating fruit on my tomato vines, I had to draw a line in the sand. Or in my case I had to draw a line in the scoria.

I actually like it when I see pests in the garden, because as long as they are not in plague, they keep the predators around and well fed. If the predators are not around when a plague brakes out, there is too much of a lag between the time of the pest and the predators breeding up enough to restore balance. As long as pest and predator are both in place, we see everyone getting along just fine. (providing you consider being attacked and eaten getting along just fine). I suspect things that eat grass always breed more readily than things that eat meat. Probably because you need to invest so much energy raising a hunter with the big brains and tactical minds and all, but grass eaters can get away with brains that spend more time thinking grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass grass.

Whilst some humans spend time pondering their relationship with grass, many others spend their allotted hours on things like war, driving really fast, and baking.

At first I thought the Dipel wasn't working because I didn't see any sleepy caterpillars lying about on my scoria. Later I found ants quickly whisking them away and then not spending their ant days waiting under the caterpillar tree in the hope for more. For some reason they just left one or two ants waiting and everyone else went home to watch TV or something. But after watching them for way too long I would see them come running out whenever I knocked off one of my dead caterpillars from the tomato vine.


120 things in 20 years - It's kind of, like, you know, about everything really.

Aquaponics - Honeydew

So...

Apparently, aphids eat plant sap, and then for some reason secrete a sticky fluid known as honeydew.

Ants like sticky.

And then I'm told, a black sooty mould follows.

That sounds a lot like what I'm seeing on my strawberries.

Here is a picture of an ant licking some PVC and enjoying some sticky.

120 things in 20 years - not just Aquaponics - Honeydew

Aquaponics - Ants

I have some new and exciting visitors to my system.

Ants.

There sure are a lot of ants when there are ants.

For the last few weeks, there has been something sticky forming on the leaves of the strawberry plants. I'm not sure if its got anything to do with the mould, but it does seem to be on those varieties of strawberry that were also trying their hand at mould farming.

Interestingly the leaves were so sticky that they were forcing aphids to stay longer than they had originally intended when landing on the sticky leaves.

I was going to write a post about how good my strawberry plants were at pretending to be sticky traps, but it turns out, ants ate the dead aphids (you can still see some aphids on the leaf to the left), and now seem to be eating the sticky.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Currently, it's just a thing.





I'll be getting a little upset if they run out of leaf sticky and discover that strawberries are chock full of sticky, but until then, like everyone who isn't a caterpillar, a snail or a slug, they will remain welcome.

My only accommodation has been to move the create I sit on over a little to give them room to cut across what used to be my space. They seem very obsessed with maintaining their ant highway along that path, so I moved my create few inches to the left.



Not just Aquaponics - Ants, but also 120 things in 20 years.