PENTAX Optio WP
ƒ/3.3
6.3 mm
1/80
50
a Mobius duet… caught in a pheromone do-loop…
13 responses to “ritual”
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It just gets weirder…
From today’s EDGE:
"Another example that we’ve been investigating are huge swarms of Mormon crickets. If you look at these swarms, all of the individuals are marching in the same direction, and it looks like cooperative behavior. Perhaps they have come to a collective decision to move from one place to another. We investigated this collective decision, and what really makes this system work in the case of the Mormon cricket is cannibalism.
You think of these as vegetarian insects—they’re crop pests—but each individual tries to eat the other individuals when they run short of protein or salt, and they’re very deprived of these in the natural environment. As soon as they become short of these essential nutrients, they start trying to bite the other individuals, and they have evolved to have really big aggressive jaws and armor plating over themselves, but the one area you can’t defend is the rear end of the individual—it has to defecate, there has to be a hole there—and so they tend to specifically bite the rear end of individuals. It is the sight of others approaching and this biting behavior that causes individuals to move away from those coming towards them. This need to eat other individuals means you are attracted to individuals moving away from you, and so this simple algorithm essentially means the whole swarm starts moving as a collective."
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