Wednesday and stuff
My pulpit chats and my blogposts, I emit more than my share of nonsense into creation, but it seems to have become my way of dealing with Life As It Is, life as it increasingly confronts me in advancing extreme old age.
By the way, it was useful to come across that categorization, that beyond Middle Age and Old Age there are those of us who survive into Extreme Old Age, and I'm well and truly into it. How is it? Well, there are several facets to it: how I feel inside, how I am physically, how I am mentally and emotionally, how I look in the mirror when shaving mornings, and, bad, worse, worst, how the camera depicts me. Wait till you get here (wishing you long years, as Harry Golden said it to ward off the Evil Eye), and you will experience what I mean.
What about me has not changed over the years? The despair that when I die, I will leave behind oysters, mullet, and liver pate that I didn't get around to eating.
Speaking of which, between the CHF and too much salt, no traveling on today's calendar, it's a FuroForty day. With Malinda at Bonifay now, instead of a couple hours each afternoon to visit while she has supper, it's a whole day invested and ending in exhaustion, and we're having to make Time to step back and let life be, including days at home to sacrifice to Father Nature, nomesane?
++++++++
What? Early morning reading, from Forbes magazine online, an essay about warring ants (copy and pasted, scroll way down), which is a favorite metaphor for the ways of humans, who are so alphabet small-minded stupid as to wage wars of hatred with each other over territory, over ideologies, over religion - - when there's a universe out there, of which I feel confident ours is only one of an uncountable, incalculable, incomprehensible number, to explore and get to know. That we war with each other instead of trying to rise to the godly image in which we were created to BE, and as shown and told by Jesus whom Gospel John calls Λόγος Logos the Word, is surely a disappointment to אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה yeh-hi I AM (Exodus 3:14). Once Earth's Time is absorbed into the Greater Light, and finally when our Universe ceases to explode and expand into its Being, slows, stops, goes cold unto absolute zero and withers to nothing, it will not matter, will it. Thomas Hardy gets the picture with his poetry in which he visualizes God straining to remember us, and then when he finally does, dimly recall, lamenting that we never tried to live up to his dream for us and so he moved on. You can look up Hardy yourself if you are curious enough.
++++++
Image: from JWST, light finally arriving at Earth from twenty million of so light years ago, showing an early galaxy developing and forming stars.
+++++++
Oh, s-word. Linda just came out and reminded me, I have a dentist appointment at eight o'clock. If I'd remembered, I surely would not have taken the furosemide pills. Time to wrap it up.
RSF&PTL
T
+++++++
The Largest Animal War In History Is Happening Right Beneath Our Feet
(Photo: ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images)
Do animals fight wars and if so what was the largest war? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Suzanne Sadedin, Evolutionary Biologist, on Quora:
The largest war in animal history (in fact, by numbers the largest war in history) is going on right now.
Once upon a time there was a tiny brown ant who lived by a swamp at the end of the Paraná River in Argentina. Her name, Linepithema humile, it literally means “humble” or “weak.” Some time during the late 1800s, an adventurous L. humile crept away from the swamp where giant river otter played and capybaras cavorted.
She stowed away on a boat that sailed to New Orleans. And she went to war.
At home in the Paraná delta, L. humile nests would ferociously defend themselves from other nests, both of their own species and other kinds of ant. It was a life of never-ending territorial skirmishes, where nobody could really get ahead. When two L. humile met, they would flick their antennae over each others’ bodies, tasting the combination of hydrocarbons on their skin. This flavor would tell them whether the stranger belonged to the same nest. If she tasted familiar, she would be recognized as a sister. She would be gently stroked, offered food and welcomed into the nest. But if the flavor were not recognized, the ants would try to kill each other.
In New Orleans, something changed. L. humile, invading the United States, spread like wildfire. Instead of forming discrete, competing colonies, they behaved as a united army. They would brutally attack ants of other species, but welcome every L. humile as a long-lost sister in arms. Like L. humile in Argentina, other species of ants in the US must defend their territories against their own species. This gives the cooperative L. humile a huge strategic advantage; they waste neither lives nor energy on fighting with their own kind, but focus ruthlessly upon species-level conquest. Though individually tiny, they can swarm over native ants many times their size.
The supercolony grew to cover most of the United States. Then it spread to England, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. L. humile is now abundant on every continent except Antarctica, and wherever she goes, she slaughters native ant species.
How did she do this? Did inbreeding reduce the diversity of hydrocarbons on the ants’ skin, such that they no longer saw one another as enemies, but as sisters? Did natural selection tone down L. humile’s territorial instincts to suit their environment, so they would react aggressively only to the strong stimulus of another species? It seems likely both mechanisms were involved.
Things have not been perfect. Near San Diego, a schism formed, and a separate supercolony was created. The battlefront extends for miles; some 30 million ants die there every year. Another super-colony has formed in Catalonia. Perhaps as L. humile eliminates her competitors, her alliance will fracture entirely into squabbling tribes. But for now, from Europe to the United States, all the way to New Zealand, a global megacolony still persists, consisting of around 1 trillion individuals: a humble brown ant united in war against every other ant alive.
People talk about the meek inheriting the earth. In L. humile’s case, it’s clearly working.