Myrmecology

Hi, Aaron here from the Leiningen plantation in southern Brazil. We are witnessing, first hand, the world’s largest army attempt to take on 400+ men armed with farm supplies and tools, ANTS! Every few years, an ant colony will expand outside its normal exploring territory and move all the way across South America. This colony arises other colonies along the way and builds their army of mass destruction. This swarm can grow up to 2 miles wide, and 10 miles long. That’s 20 square miles!! This means that roughly 80.3 BILLION ants make up this swarm! Hello all. It has been 24 hours since my last report. This is day 2 of the Man vs. Nature war. So far, the ants have not gotten inside the compound, the housing buildings atop a hill, only past the water moats in the far edges of the plantation. And they got across on leaves! We can actually see the barren lands behind the swarm. Apparently, these ants are so powerful, they will eat everything of an organic compound, including trees and full grown animals such as cattle and horses. Mr. Leiningen has now started to fill the upper ditch around the compound with his 400 gallon oil reserve. His theory is that the ants will make it all of the way up to the compound and try to take it down as well, even though it has a concrete wall around the perimeter. His plan is to ignite the oil-laden ditch with a flare once the ants get closer, only because his flammable materials are on a tad bit of a shortage. Good morning from Southern Brazil!…

One – Consilience One of the most pertinent and seminal works written on the relationship between the fields of science and literature within the modern age is irrefutably that of E.O Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Whilst being a biologist, with a speciality in myrmecology, his discussion of methods to unite the sciences, social sciences, and humanities – to describe the synthesis of knowledge across all fields has been hugely influential in literary criticism and theory. Wilson…