Uplifting Ants

[Ozymandias]

Inspired by books like African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey, Sandkings by GRRM and Hunger Games.

I thought about the following experiment:

2 or more ant colonies are connected to a "battlefield chamber". The ant colonies are "starved" and food is placed into battlefield chamber and the ants have to battle for survival.

"War" has always been fantasized by various people like Robert Ardrey to be a keystone in the transformation from apes to humans. That is debatable but it has definitely proven to be a factor in technological progress in the 20th century.

Alpha decaying low radioactive minerals could also be placed into the colonies to increase mutations. Another idea is to provide the colonies with little ant swords or other kind of weapons. What kind of change will happen to the ants after a couple generations? Nothing or will this smart species who is able to build "cities" with the division of labour be able to build a real civilization?

Only time can tell.

Any input?

[Nathan McCorkle]

I look forward to your results.

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[James Clement]

You might reach out to Prof. Mike Rose at UCI. https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5261  He's the evolutionary biologist who raised the Methuselah Flies for a dozen years or more, repeatedly selecting for the oldest. He might have thoughts on how to drive their genetics.

You might also be interested in Adrian Tchaikovski's Children of Time, which depicts the human-orchestrated uplifting of spiders and ants on a distant planet, and their later encounters with their human gods. https://smile.amazon.com/Children-of-Time/dp/B06ZXTHNSJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1545062319&sr=8-1&keywords=Adrian+Tchaikovsky

Cheers,
James

[Jonathan Cline]

Evolve ant colonies to collect and/or digest plastic pollution and you have a world-saving and trillion-dollar award winning project.

-- 

## Jonathan Cline

## jcl...@ieee.org

## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223

########################

On Sunday, December 16, 2018 at 2:55:15 AM UTC-8, Ozymandias wrote:

 

I thought about the following experiment:

2 or more ant colonies

  

Any input?

[Raza]

RE:OP: That's pretty cool and potentially rather evil. Ants probably don't have consciousness but at this point it's not a certainty.

RE: Mutant plastic-eating ant colonies. Yeah, there's no way that could go horribly wrong, with how insects tend to wander into human-inhabited territories at random at delve out new niches for themselves. Probably worth it?

[Dakota Hamill]

I want to see Braveheart reinacted by ants. 

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[Jonathan Cline]

Evolution and/or genetic engineering has been a successful strategy in
vector control for decades. Ask Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation
which has put hundreds of millions of dollars into using it as a
solution for various world wide catastrophes like malaria, zika,
dengue.


On 12/24/18, Raza <etcw...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, there's no way* that* could

> go horribly wrong, with how insects tend to wander into human-inhabited
> territories at random at delve out new niches for themselves. Probably
> worth it?
>
> On Saturday, December 22, 2018 at 8:39:34 PM UTC, Jonathan Cline wrote:
>>
>> Evolve ant colonies to collect and/or digest plastic pollution and you
>> have a world-saving and trillion-dollar award winning project.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ## Jonathan Cline

>> ## jcl...@ieee.org <javascript:>

[David Murphy]

I vaguely remember a paper claiming that individual ants can pass the mirror test. Though it may have been in a predatory journal and unreplicated. 

I have doubts you'd get far with mere war. Ants have been waging endless war on each other for millions of years. 

They've had agriculture since before the ancestors of humans were little ratlike things hiding in burrows. 

As for mutation: you have to think of each hive as a single organism that lives for a year or so with the Queen as the reproductive organs. Mutating individual workers does you no good. 

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[Jonathan Cline]

If going all gung ho on mutating organisms into little armies then why
choose ants. What the poster wants are Tardigrades (*). They will be
a nearly invincible army(**), impossible to environmentally kill, and
they will also be immediately ready to join Space Force(***) since
they are impervious to vacuum.

(* still, engineer them to eat plastic so that the Earth is not
destroyed in ecological disaster, before the Tardigrades head into
space)

(** viewers insist that Tardigrades are amazingly cute, so therefore
they will be a nearly invincible cute army.)

(*** n.b. the reference to Space Force is a joke since that
organization is a ridiculously dumb idea, just to be totally clear on
that reference.)

On 12/25/18, David Murphy <murphy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have doubts you'd get far with mere war. Ants have been waging endless
> war on each other for millions of years.

>

[A some body again]

I don't believe anyone volunteered a trillion dollars towards a solution.

You might as well create a black hole for an exclusively plastic and other waste product diet. 

Or route out planned obsolescence.

[A some body again]

Pick up a topic as simple as animal behavior and find out why the rudimentary nervous system serves small animals as well as it does. Only then you will find out why this thread is a sci-fi topic, or for now a waste of time. 

[Jonathan Cline]

It might not be as sci fi as imagined. Some ants collect bioproducts
from their environment such as leaves, carry these back to their
habitat into specific areas of their tunnels, and live off the fungus
which grows on the biowaste. Meanwhile other species such as small
marine organisms have been recently shown to actively seek out
microplastics to eat (for reasons unknown, possibly 'smell' or color),
even if this results in their own starvation since eating plastics is
harmful and non-nutritious. Therefore small organisms do actively
forage for microplastics even at their own irrational expense of
energy. The missing aspect is some biomechanism to degrade the
micro-waste after collection.

It's a far better idea than the original post by any measure.

Impact of microplastics on the global economy has been estimated in
the trillions (over the next century) as a conservative number when
considering the collapse of species across food chains due to
environmental pollution. Therefore a working solution to even part of
this problem is 'worth' trillions.

On 1/26/19, A some body again <yuriy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't believe anyone volunteered a trillion dollars towards a solution.
>
> You might as well create a black hole for an exclusively plastic and other
> waste product diet.
>
> Or route out planned obsolescence.
>
> On Saturday, December 22, 2018 at 3:39:34 PM UTC-5, Jonathan Cline wrote:
>>
>> Evolve ant colonies to collect and/or digest plastic pollution and you
>> have a world-saving and trillion-dollar award winning project.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ## Jonathan Cline

>> ## jcl...@ieee.org <javascript:>

[A some body again]

So basically you are supposed to engineer a fungus or bacteria that will entice the ant with chemotaxants akin to those leaves (or something other and more potent) to bring our trash to its colony. It seems like a bitter trade with all of the biotoxins that could evolve out of this sinister plot. Even with specific tunnels the leachate will find its way in the water table. All of a sudden you'd be facing a colony collapse while seeing an en environmental disaster with bioaccumulation of whatever and however plastics break down. 

"Meanwhile other species such as small marine organisms have been recently shown to actively seek out microplastics to eat (for reasons unknown, possibly 'smell' or color), even if this results in their own starvation since eating plastics is harmful and non-nutritious. Therefore small organisms do actively forage for microplastics even at their own irrational expense of energy. The missing aspect is some biomechanism to degrade the micro-waste after collection."  

Had you referenced what you meant I wouldn't have to look for a publication on the topic. They don't actively seek-out/forage for microplastics as anything small from 0.2 to 1000 micrometers and buoyant (in other words, unspoiled by biofilm at 5 m) will do. The coral funnels in anything of that size that comes its way. They did raise the coral in controlled settings. What surprised me is that they didn't sequence its gut microbiome.

The coral polyps can close off the microplastics but what use is it locked up in its underchambers? 

"... a working solution to even part of this problem is 'worth' trillions." Which again due to its worth no one is ready to pay or even put a price tag on it. Reach out to UN. Have them put a price. Make it an international challenge. See if anyone shows up for it. Keep the license to demand the award back if the BS artist claims it.

In my view, the best you can do to plastics is find a way to bring it down to its monomer components or leave as much of it as you can for nature to evolve a solution, while not looking for recipes for new types of the polymers. Stick to utmost environmentally friendly ones.

[Jonathan Cline]

Ants are interesting here because they carry N-times their body weight
so they function as excellent collectors. In contrast, engineering
something like kelp flies or fruit flies would imply insects directly
digest waste plastics which is less likely. Plastics can be recycled
with heat or cold plasma, both are high energy mechanisms. However
biology is nanotechnology which can bypass high energy expenditure.
Sure, a symbiotic relationship between ants instinctively collecting
plastic in their environment, and a fungus which digests the plastic
to then feed the ants is hypothetically possible.

There have been hundreds of kickstarter-style funded projects aimed at
eliminating environmental plastics, some claiming to reuse the
plastics for new products. These projects have raised tens of
thousands and beyond millions based on individual internet pledges
alone, not by industry or government grant. The project aimed at
collecting plastic with a net attached to a floating tube (a design
derided by many) raised over $2 million as a simple kickstarter, the
project was recently launched into the Pacific and was all over the
news (and v1.0 broke down). https://www.theoceancleanup.com

The microbead waters act was signed into federal law in 2015 and takes
full effect in 2019 and may include funding for waste reduction. The
California Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 2018 and includes an
amount of funding to eliminate microplastics. The funding is out
there for those who can experiment or prototype new solutions. Pure
research projects as proposed in this thread never work immediately
out of the box but lead in better directions with technology over a
few decades.

The fact is that plastics are entering every level of the food chain
with likely horrible results.

https://rochmanlab.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/rohman-et-al-2015-sci-rep.pdf

A significant percentage of plastic waste collects at the shoreline
therefore a solution can be land-based as well as sea based.

On 1/27/19, A some body again <yuriy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So basically you are supposed to engineer a fungus or bacteria that will
> entice the ant with chemotaxants akin to those leaves (or something other
> and more potent) to bring our trash to its colony. It seems like a bitter
> trade with all of the biotoxins that could evolve out of this sinister
> plot. Even with specific tunnels the leachate will find its way in the
> water table. All of a sudden you'd be facing a colony collapse while seeing
>
> an en environmental disaster with bioaccumulation of whatever and however
> plastics break down.
>

> *"Meanwhile other species such as small marine organisms have been recently

>
> shown to actively seek out microplastics to eat (for reasons
> unknown, possibly 'smell' or color), even if this results in their own
> starvation since eating plastics is harmful and non-nutritious. Therefore
> small organisms do actively forage for microplastics even at their own
> irrational expense of energy. The missing aspect is some biomechanism to

> degrade the micro-waste after collection."*

> Had you referenced what you meant I wouldn't have to look for a publication
>

> on the topic <http://sci-hub.tw/10.1007%2Fs00227-015-2619-7>. They don't