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Comment by emporas | Hacker News Reader

Stunning!

They are also the only other animal on the planet to manipulate it's environment to grow food, apart from humans, by protecting aphids. Sometimes they even wage war to neighboring nests, and kidnap larvae which subsequently grow as workers. Ottomans were very fond of this practice.

Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence.

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They don't just protect them as a food source. Some wood ants will literally farm them. If a they expand or a tree isn't producing enough sap, they will move aphids to new trees putting them on a new sap source so that they can "milk" them for honeydew (aphid excreted sugar which is a major food source for wood ants).

I forgot to mention that woods ants also create their own medicine. Wood ants will combine resin from evergreen trees with formic acid (from themselves) to create a substance that is anti-microbial and the rub it all over themselves. [Source: I've been doing a lot of reading for background for a board game I'm designing.]

Quite interested in this board game. Do you have some more information on this?

It will be called Formica but I have a lot of work yet to do on it. It is set to be quite heavy and complicated, 2+ hour playing time. If you are interested, you can follow all my board game design stuff via @RoscoSchock on Twitter.

Yes, i have seen with my own eyes, ants protecting aphids in certain varieties of lentils. Aphids are called in Greek something akin to honeydew, "μελίγκρα" which translates roughly to "honeygra".

I didn't know they were actively moving them around, i thought ants were just protecting them.

Leaf cutter ants bring back leaves which are used to cultivate a fungus that is eventually to be consumed by the ants.

> manipulate it's environment to grow food, apart from humans, by protecting aphids

And of course the ones that literally garden fungus.

> Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence.

What? I can't tell if I'm missing something, or is this some meme.

I am talking about this photo [1], even though it's not after all taken by an electron microscope. Pretty scary, but intelligent face, is it not?

[1] https://factcheck.afp.com/macro-photograph-ant-taken-stacked...

Is "looks a bit like a human from this angle" what we classify as "having intelligence"?

One can't determine the intelligence of a being by looking at its face.

It sure would make interviews easy though.

Haha is that real? I will definitely kill every ant I see from now on, they are clearly evil.

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