How tiny insects survive the rain
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
That book taught me a ton about the different physics that apply "in the micro world" that insects inhabit. The physics of falling and of water tension at that scale are so different than we are used to.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/3...
Didn't know that there was another Crichton book out, thanks for the heads up. Big fan of his.
And of course the classic essay "On Being the Right Size" http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html
Supposedly Crichton got it wrong at the even smaller scale
http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.htm...
(Purcell won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. He also discovered the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen and authored an iconic textbook on electricity & magnetism.)
I like the introduction referring to the original talk: "Some essential hand waving could not be reproduced."
Please share this with someone who is quick with the can of Raid.
Assuming it is fiscally and temporally possible to eliminate the cause of the water damage I am still going to try my hardest to eradicate the carpenter ant infestation.
You can fight the ants all you want, but you'll still get mold, and rot, and eventually have to replace the beams (if the water has been there longer than a few weeks then replacing the beams is almost a given). The ants are the least of your problems.
If you think a few weeks of water damage warrants replacing the beams I am afraid you were ripped off by a contractor. Speaking from personal experience there was a leak in the bathroom when I bought my house that had been there for not a few weeks but many weeks. I ripped down the moldy sheetrock, fixed the pipe and let the joists air out. Sure there is water staining on the joists, but they are 8x2 oak joists (1929 lumber when dimensions were real) and the joists were dry by the time I had taken down all the old plaster and lathe in the dining room. When I buttoned up the ceiling they were dry and stiff enough that they offered significant resistance when I screwed in 2 inch drywall screws.
"Typically, when a person spots a carpenter ant inside the home, they assume the worst. They fear a swarming, thriving ant colony is breeding within the house. This is rarely the case. Carpenter ants live in hollow trees, logs, landscaping timbers, and soil, and will march hundreds of metres from their colony in search of food."
So think about that for a moment. What is a "hollow tree" or a wood frame wall with two sheets of drywall on either side? The Ants may think it is a particularly square hollow tree but hey, its warm, its hollow.
And the 'hundreds of meters in search of food' but they also don't "pass up" food. So for you too see an Ant in your kitchen you know that between where that ant lives, and your kitchen, they didn't find any food yet. That can be explained by a particularly sterile yard, or the home is between your kitchen and the yard. And what else it between your kitchen and the yard, why yes, that warm hollow space known as a wood frame wall.
All of that being said, ants (and many other insects) are machines. Very much like bacterium with all wheel drive capability. They eat, they reproduce, they die. They convert low level sugars into a complex carbohydrates that birds and other vertebrates use to fuel their own growth. And like a machine, they can be running where they aren't needed. So is it some act of bad faith to turn off your car? No it is not. We need look no further than other ant colonies, which, when they detect ants in their home that are not expected to be there, they mercilessly and without delay slaughter them. The machine doesn't care that its elements are processing food other things want, and turning off the machine by neutralizing its agents doesn't incur any 'bad karma.'
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Also: what you hate, you fear.
Easy. Since they lack attributes like mercy, they slaughter without it. That is to say, they slaughter mercilessly.
And, really, In the context of creatures without mercy, such a phrase can alternatively be viewed as a literary device comparing how the ants act to how a human acts. I'm not sure what the term would be... personification? E.g., "The trees wept".
Think about it.