by me, Kerry Burgess, 04/08/2024 12:27 PM
Made the mistake of turning on the tv just before the solar-eclipse began over the middle of the USA. I was expecting the local live-tv news broadcast. A predicted 27% coverage here in the northwest and I didn't notice anything but wasn't examining it very closely
Instead, I had to listen to that ditzy bubblehead Norah and some even ditzier bubblehead guy from the CBS national morning news that I never watch
They must have him on there because he seems pervy
Their broadcast target audience is mostly women, I guess, so those pervy guys aren't threatening to that audience ("housewife" , polluter , breeder , poop-scoopers) of other bubbleheads
I had to mute it when I realized they would broadcast through noon. Only way that could have been worse is if it had been Katie Couric.
Then actor William Shatner and recent Jeff Bezos Wastefulnaut appears on the screen. Blathering something about the "miracle of nature".
Ridiculous.
Natural variability.
You're life is so pathetic that you are desperate to find anything that makes you think you're special. Get over yourself.
Emergence. Not your ridiculous "miracle"
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
3X11 - THE EYE OF JUPITER (1)
Original Airdate (SciFi): 15-DEC-2006
Chief senses something and looks up at the summit
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
3X11 - THE EYE OF JUPITER (1)
Original Airdate (SciFi): 15-DEC-2006
(from internet transcript)
Sharon: Previously on Battlestar Galactica...
New Caprica: Mid-Exodus
Chip Six: It's Hera. The first of God's new generation.
Basestar
Baltar: Have you seen the faces of the other five Cylons? The ones that no one has seen?
Three: Why do you want to know about them?
Baltar: I could be a Cylon.
Galactica: Pilot’s Bunkers
Racetrack: I thought our food supply was inexhaustible.
Apollo: The food manufacturing system's been contaminated. If we just hold on until Athena gets back, this algae can keep us alive indefinitely.
Galactica: Sit Room
Sharon: There's a way through the star cluster. And I found the planet. There's huge swathes of algae, just like we thought.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
3X11 - THE EYE OF JUPITER (1)
Original Airdate (SciFi): 15-DEC-2006
(from internet transcript)
Chief: Need a hand?
Anders: Oh, yeah.
Chief: Couple more days, we can wrap this up. Get away from this stench. It stinks as bad up here as it does down there.
Anders: At least it tastes as good as it smells.
Chief: Well, it's breakfast, lunch, and dinner until someone finds a hot fudge planet.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
3X11 - THE EYE OF JUPITER (1)
Original Airdate (SciFi): 15-DEC-2006
(from internet transcript)
Outside
Cally: Should we start emptying the tents?
Chief: Uh, yeah. Get this cleared up first. And then get to the tents.
Cally: Okay. Here. Ready?
(He gets distracted again.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant
Carpenter ant
Food
Carpenter ants are considered both predators and scavengers. These ants are foragers that typically eat parts of other dead insects or substances derived from other insects. Common foods for them include insect parts, "honeydew" produced by aphids, and extrafloral nectar from plants. They are also known for eating other sugary liquids such as honey, syrup, or juices. Carpenter ants can increase the survivability of aphids when they tend them.
Most species of carpenter ants forage at night. When foraging, they usually collect and consume dead insects. Some species less commonly collect live insects. When they discover a dead insect, workers surround it and extract its body fluids to be carried back to the nest. The remaining chitin-based shell is left behind. Occasionally, the ants bring the chitinous head of the insect back to the nest, where they also extract its inner tissue. The ants can forage individually or in small or large groups, though they often opt to do so individually. Different colonies in close proximity may have overlapping foraging regions, although they typically do not assist each other in foraging.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant
Carpenter ant
Symbionts
All ants in this genus, and some related genera, possess an obligate bacterial endosymbiont called Blochmannia. This bacterium has a small genome, and retains genes to biosynthesize essential amino acids and other nutrients. This suggests the bacterium plays a role in ant nutrition. Many Camponotus species are also infected with Wolbachia, another endosymbiont that is widespread across insect groups. Wolbachia is associated with the nurse cells in the queen's ovaries in the species Camponotus textor, which results in the worker larva being infected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiont
Endosymbiont
From Wikipedia
An endosymbiont or endobiont is any organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism most often, though not always, in a mutualistic relationship. This phenomenon is known as endosymbiosis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia
Wolbachia
From Wikipedia
Wolbachia is a genus of gram-negative bacteria that can either infect many species of arthropod as an intracellular parasite, or act as a mutualistic microbe in filarial nematodes. It is one of the most common parasitic microbes of arthropods, and is possibly the most common reproductive parasite in the biosphere. Its interactions with its hosts are often complex. Some host species cannot reproduce, or even survive, without Wolbachia colonisation. One study concluded that more than 16% of neotropical insect species carry bacteria of this genus, and as many as 25 to 70% of all insect species are estimated to be potential hosts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant
Carpenter ant
When conditions are warm and humid, winged males and females participate in a nuptial flight. They emerge from their satellite nests and females mate with a number of males while in flight. The males die after mating. These newly fertilized queens discard their wings and search for new areas to establish primary nests. The queens build new nests and deposit around 20 eggs, nurturing them as they grow until worker ants emerge. The worker ants eventually assist her in caring for the brood as she lays more eggs. After a few years, reproductive winged ants are born, allowing for the making of new colonies. Again, satellite nests will be established and the process will repeat itself.
From 1/8/1823 ( Alfred Russel Wallace ) To 4/4/1905 ( biographical - Constantin Meunier dead ) is 30036 days
30036 = 15018 + 15018
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/15/2006 ( ) is 15018 days
From 5/20/1984 ( premiere USA TV series "The First Olympics: Athens 1896" ) To 12/15/2006 ( ) is 8244 days
8244 = 4122 + 4122
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 2/14/1977 ( from Princeton Weekly Bulletin publication, Princeton University: New Book By Jaynes On Origin Of Consciousness Is Sure To Spark Controversy ) is 4122 days
From 9/15/1953 ( premiere USA TV series episode "The Secret Files of Captain Video"::"Revolt of the Machines" ) To 10/28/1994 ( premiere USA film "Stargate" ) is 15018 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/15/2006 ( ) is 15018 days
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887221/
IMDb
Battlestar Galactica
S3.E11
The Eye of Jupiter
Episode aired Dec 15, 2006
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
From Wikipedia
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, commonly known as zombie-ant fungus, is an insect-pathogenic fungus, discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and currently found predominantly in tropical forest ecosystems. O. unilateralis infects ants of the tribe Camponotini, with the full pathogenesis being characterized by alteration of the behavioral patterns of the infected ant. Infected hosts leave their canopy nests and foraging trails for the forest floor, an area with a temperature and humidity suitable for fungal growth; they then use their mandibles to attach themselves to a major vein on the underside of a leaf, where the host remains after its eventual death. The process, leading up to mortality, takes 4–10 days, and includes a reproductive stage where fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head, rupturing to release the fungus's spores. O. unilateralis is, in turn, also susceptible to fungal infection itself, an occurrence that can limit its impact on ant populations, which has otherwise been known to devastate ant colonies.
https://www.wired.com/2014/08/zombie-ant-fungus-in-the-us/
But back to why she was making ant-brain-fungus soup in the first place: de Bekker found that the fungus releases different chemicals depending on the species of ant. The hosts that it is capable of mind-controlling are inundated with entirely different compounds than those it isn’t capable of controlling. It's as if the fungus knows whether it's next to its target species or not, and then reacts accordingly, she says.
And that’s pretty damn impressive for an organism without a brain. Which raises the question: Could it be that Ophiocordyceps fungi regularly invade species they aren’t capable of mind-controlling? Probably not, said de Bekker, because they didn’t evolve one of the animal kingdom’s most insanely complex acts of zombification just to be jerks to ants. They need it to survive.
Here’s Ophiocordyceps’ life cycle in full: A fungus spore lands on the cuticle of an ant, fusing to its body and building up an incredible amount pressure (equal to that in the tire of a 747 jet) to blow itself through the exoskeleton. Infiltrating the ant’s brain, it directs the host out of the colony, where workers would surely notice their comrade’s weird behavior and drag it into a graveyard well away from home base. Directing the ant up onto the underside of a leaf at a specific height and always facing a specific direction, the fungus orders the ant to bite down on the vein. At this point it kills the ant and erupts as a stalk out of the back of its head, raining spores onto its comrades below.
The fungus goes through all of this trouble to best position itself to infect more ants and further its own species. Simply killing its host, like it did to the two other ant species in de Bekker’s lab, doesn’t get it anywhere, because ants are obsessive about dragging their dead and dying into their aforementioned graveyards, where the spores have little chance of spreading.
Interestingly, this North American species of Ophiocordyceps controls its victims a bit differently than its South American counterparts. “What is different about the temperate system is that these ants don't bite the leaves, they bite twigs,” said de Bekker. “Which is actually very interesting, because of course in a temperate system the trees lose their leaves over the winter, and sometimes dead ants have to overwinter into the next season for the fungus to completely grow out and make the spores and finish its life cycle.”
There is still much to be learned here, though. While in this experiment de Bekker isolated two different compounds---GBA and sphingosine in case you were interested---that seem to play a part in zombification (and perhaps tellingly also play a part in human neurological disorders), these are still just candidates. “What we do see is that there's a whole array of compounds that seem to be working together,” she said. “And this is probably also why it is so difficult to figure out what are the key compounds because it is likely that we need a mixture of different chemicals working in concert to get something as complex as this.”
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 1:12 PM Pacific-time USA Monday 04/08/2024
