Ant Farm Teaches Children About Toil, Death

The fungi in question are of the genus Cordyceps. For instance, Cordyceps lloydi and Cordyceps myrmecophilia can infect carpenter ants.

I think the mechanism of infection is the ingestion of spores or pre-sporulating mycelium. Cordyceps lloydi is rather neat, in that it apparently gives ants the “irresistible impulse to climb to the top of the jungle canopy and lock its mandible into a leaf.” A mushroom then sprouts from the carcass, spreading spores across a wide area.

Humans who think that athlete’s foot (often caused by Trichophyton rubrum is a bad fungal affliction should consider themselves lucky.

For instance, once ants notice an infected ant acting weird they drag them away from the nest because they’ll kill all the other ants if left be.

I learned about this on youtube.

Julia – survivor fat! How could I have forgotten that conversation??

Hella Stella – everything’s always better with pancakes, even falling out of a boat.

Tiana – next time!

Gabriel – in that case, I’ve heard your blog name said out loud WAY more than you have. I hope next time we can talk more – you and I were geographically at the outer limits of being able to have a conversation. We need a round table next time.

It’s actually two hours and ten minutes on the bus, and it’s a really nice trip. The bus takes the Quebec side so there’s the river on one side and the mountains on the other and lots of hamlets and villages where, when I was eighteen, I used to go to drink myself stupid. I didn’t nap on this trip because there wasn’t enough room as all the chairs seemed to be stuck in a lean-back position.

I was disappointed Robin wasn’t there, but I did RSVP initially so I could say hi to Zoom… and get to Chapters. It was a lot of fun, I wasn’t sure how meeting everyone was going to work, and I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to meet everyone. I’m glad I met the people I did though — Urban Panther, Milan, Hella Stella, Robert-The-Human, XUP, Woodsy and of course, Zoom. Hopefully I can properly meet Megan and David and everyone else at the next one.

The photos thing… photos you don’t want others to use in a forum you don’t know about left on the Web should have some kind of identifier on them. Or, if you’re running a Gallery Blog like Robin it’s always a good idea to keep the photos at a low resolution (dpi). None of the photos on any of my blogs are more than 20-30dpi. A magazine or newspaper needs 250-300.

I’m sorry I missed out on the bra conversation… it would have given me a chance to talk about my ideas on incorporating velcro into the design.