Aug 21, 2008

Printer Ants

Booge sent this video along. For any of you who've had ant problems (and most of you have), you'll enjoy it. I myself have had to wage a ceaseless, Balkan-style war against these pests.

There are upwards of 14,000 species of ants on the planet, whose colonies range from under one hundred individuals to millions. Unlike with bees, most ants are sterile female workers (I envision a fantastic sci-fi book that pits talking ants against talking bees as an exploration of gender relations, amidst a lot of explosions and carnage). Scientists estimate that ants make up 15-20% of the animal terrestrial biomass. That's a whole lot o' ants people. Be thankful that you only have to contend with a small portion of them. I still wonder why they haven't bothered to take over the world.

Thanks for the video, booge.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

AHHHHH!!!! That's weird how they just amassed in the scanner part. And in a printer?! Every summer my parents have little black ants in their kitchen (which is understandable) but a printer?!

*boggle*

Unknown said...

I've heard of computers having bugs, but this is a first for printers....

Anonymous said...

Could they be crazy raspberry ants? I've heard they are attracted to electronics.

Anonymous said...

Since they're carrying larvae around, that means there's a queen in there. She was probably looking for a good place to start a colony, and crawled into the machine. I wouldn't be surprised if it was nice and warm in there, and dark when she found it.

Throwing the whole thing away sounds like a good move to me!

Anonymous said...

OMG I jumped...