The relationship between ants and aphids or other sap- feeding insects is pretty widely known, but these ants (probably Lasiusclaviger) rear their root aphids inside their nest, farming them for both honeydew and meat. The ants are pale yellow because they almost never go aboveground, and considering that they’ve been known to eat the “excess” nymphs of their massive aphid herds, they probably don’t have much reason to leave their nest at all.
Root aphids like these aren’t normally found outside Lasius nests, and unlike freeliving aphids they have a special organ for holding honeydew until it’s ready to be milked by an ant.
I found this scene under a sheet of scrap metal, with the aphids left in loose piles with few or no roots available to drink sap from. I’m guessing that the ants moved them under the sun- warmed metal to heat them up and speed their growth and digestion between meals, a trick many ants practice on their larvae.
I was in a group interview for a petsmart once, and this girl who had bullied me at our past job was there. We were all told to go around the circle and say why we wanted to work there. All of us sensible folks answered with generic interview stuff like “I love animals” and “I admire the help this company gives to shelters” and all that… then the bully spoke up.
I think of my life as having occurred in four parts. The first part closed with the revelation that songs on the radio are in fact pre recorded and the artists are not being summoned to the station with dark magic every time someone requests their song. The second divider was the first time I tasted custard pie. And the event that launched me here, into the most surreal and disjointed phase of my life, was this girl’s answer to the fateful question “why do you want to work at petsmart?”
And the answer
I shit you not…
“I have a reptile fetish.”
The silence after that statement… the hopelessness, the confusion, the despair in that silence, it fundamentally changed me as a human being. I witnessed cosmic justice at its darkest and its coldest. The universe is powerful, the universe is vengeful, and the universe is merciless.
when I was being interviewed for my first job, I was 18 and pessemistic, mostly just putting on an act to get my dad off my back about finding a job. The manager got to the question “why should we hire you?” and without any filter, i gave the absolute sassiest response. “youre understaffed and I have a GPS” The manager got a chuckle and i ended up starting my first day a week later
