Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.
The interactions between Ants and Spiders gave me some associations with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith's Brood). Particularly, I loved how both were painting an alternative evolutionary path but 'grafting on' to existing notions and understandings of what we know to be true in species development. I wish there was more of this! I felt Children of Ruin was weaker in this regard, maybe because the conflict for the species was absent. The Spiders vs Ants and then Spiders vs Humans being conflicts which created a fanstatic narrative to explain alternative solutions to prisoner's dilemma (spiders choosing to co-opt their enemies' strengths or in Lilith's brood, Oankali being a hybrid of alien/human). I'd be curious to learn if there's more examples in zoology/ecology of species choosing this route instead of competition every time - and also, what factors might impact this.
The plot: "After a spectacular and mysterious cosmic event, ants of different species undergo rapid evolution, develop a cross-species hive mind, and build seven strange towers with geometrically perfect designs in the Arizona desert."
Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing (https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png) :)
(slight spoilers, FYI)
https://ant.care/https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue the insanity and create personal growth.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a bit. It feels very Children of Time-y and some might enjoy reading bits of it:
Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his process for deciding which aspects of an animal's ecology/behavior to represent in his fiction.
Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game) wrote this article called The Simulation Dream, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for creating a rich and engaging simulation is to "Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate."
I would love to know why Adrian chose to give ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other behaviors out.
Great idea. Leaf-cutter ants have something like five worker castes (soldier, excavator, forager, garbage collector, gardener) so managing that distribution might be a fun part of a game (tending towards Ant Factorio). e.g.
Hey, that's cool. Here's my game- not inspired by Adrian's work (though I contacted him to ask him about a tt-rpg of his own called Bugworld and on which Shadows of the Apt was based). But it's about insects:
Thanks, this has put in perspective my frustrations with RimWorld simulation being a bit skin-deep... also how that frustrating rotting plants issue that you get zero advanced warning for might have made it into RimWorld !
About that Simulation Dream article, one dangerous thing about relying on apophenia is when the player model requires something but the game model can't answer it. It sometimes lead to immersion breaking, like I experience myself in RimWorld. In fact, the dream of super sophisticated game model is likely so that it can answer anything player model come up with.
This is super random but for a brief time I happened to be in a WoW guild with Adrian, did some raiding together. Really should get around to reading Children of Time at some point.
Question for Adrian: All your sentient beings are animal-like: they are discrete animals that move around, or at weirdest are a ruinous sludge that moves around and assumes the form of animals. But might we see mycelium networks as sentient?
Zoubin Ghahramani argues that intelligence is about motion, that the sea squirt digests its own brain as soon as it settles down. But might there be intelligent communities of static individuals that nevertheless form dynamic networks?
I really liked Children of Time and Ruin. I could not get through Children of memory and its very rare for me to abandon a book. It just seemed very different than the prior ones for me. Maybe I will give it another shot. With that said I loved his Final Architecture series and just finished the final book in it.
This is really cool. I read the trilogy, time, ruin, memory in 5-6 sessions and I loved it.
Questions I would ask:
1) Where does he draw his inspiration from?
2) Should we expect to continue seeing Adrian putting together such amazing books so prolifically?
3) Does he believe that the outcome of his trilogy would be the most probable?
4) Besides arthropods do any other species stand a chance against primates?
If you’re interested in ecology in science fiction you should give Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez a read. It’s not about ants specifically, but they play a large roll in a way (I don’t want to spoil too much and it’s been long enough since I read it I can’t remember what’s a spoiler or not). It’s a good read.
Olaf Stapledon has two sci fi works that incorporate many ecological ideas into his vision of a future history of the human species (Last and First Men) and his ideas for possible alien life (Star Maker). They are both incredible works of human imagination
I can't believe this article doesn't mention the slave maker ants. They're fascinating. These ants live in colonies so small they fit inside an acorn. They raid other acorn ant colonies, kill adult ants indiscriminately, and abscond with their pupae. They then raise the pupae in their colony. The enslaved ants feed and care for their captors and their young, and even help their captors on future slave raids. However, the enslaved ants opportunistically kill the queen pupae of the slave maker ants. It's an ongoing evolutionary arms race.
There are other socially parasitic ants in this vein: some will infiltrate a colony, kill only the queen without the colony realizing it, and lay their own eggs which are raised by the slowly replace the entire colony. There are also 'cuckoo' ants which simply sneak into the colony, lay their eggs and leave.
The enslaved ants which grew up in the slave maker ant colony kill the slave maker ant queens (along with other pupae, but they kill the queens at higher rates) in their pupal stage. They're basically in rebellion. Researchers think that this behavior is selected for, as it reduces the effectiveness of the slave maker ants and increases the odds of survival of the enslaved ant species.
If you found this story interesting, you may be interested to know that antkeeping is a rewarding and fairly inexpensive hobby. The Global Ant Nursery (GAN) project run by AntsCanada, a popular YouTube channel, is a great way to obtain new queens responsibly.
Alternatively, it’s fairly easy to find queens on your own. AntsCanada offers a starter guide, and there are many other resources that teach you when and where to find new queens. I keep a few test tubes in my truck year-round, just in case.
Note: I’m not affiliated with AntsCanada in any way.
AntsCanada is a great gateway into antkeeping but I would beware about the GAN.
I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The person said that they already gave away the species I wanted, but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They pushed a species which isn't really known to native to my area, but he insisted he found them locally. They aggressively tried to upsell me on expensive extra supplies they said were critical to the care of this species. When I got my ants, they were shipped from several states away.
I reported this to AntsCanada. I'm not sure what happened, but I recently tried to get a different queen from GAN and I ended up talking to the same person under a different identity.
I'm sure there are some great people on GAN, just beware.
I ended up getting a queen from Atlantic Ants. It did ship across state lines, but the species is one that's ubiquitous in my region.
I’ve also experienced this using GAN. Be wary and use common sense. I never bothered reporting it but I’d be willing to bet we’re talking about the same person. They listed the same advertisement in basically every state with a different Google Voice number so as to appear local.
I was under the impression that we would be meeting because they were local, which is how GAN is intended to operate.?Instead, they shipped the queen to me without any USDA permits. The queen also died within a few weeks of arriving. They started a web store not longer afterwards.
That said, I’ve had plenty of good experiences with GAN. This was one bad actor out of many good ones.
This article seems to be continuing the “genes eye view” of the world. That we are mostly vessels for gene propagation and socialization. Ants are becoming superior gene propagation and socialization vessels and therefor may succeed in reframing the worlds ecosystem to their goals.
Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans could probably roundly poison them into extinction if we wanted.
The problem with that is that humans depends on the ecosystem making them extinct would probably have very long chain of negative effects that would poison us in return if not make us extinct too.
Also, lots of our systems depend on people evaluating incentives locally and picking their behavior based on their interests—humans that all decided to pointlessly try and wipe our ants wouldn’t be engaging in normal human behavior!
Are we going to give the ants supernatural coordination as well?
Our relative intelligence seems insufficient to overcome our default behavior as vessels for the unthinking propagation of memes though, which has resulted in serious harm to the ecosystem of a variety of species, including us!
Disclaimer- shameless plug involved. Humans are one species, a complicated on for sure, Ants are well over 15k species. Of course not all are found together, but many species are. As the article notes the diversity of their social structures is collectively nuts. The combinatorics of all these species interacting with a myriad of micro-habitats and resultant behaviors emerging is crazy. The sheer number of non-ant species that have evolved to look and behave exactly like ants, from being drug-pushers to parasitoids, to meme-ready social influencers says a lot about how long they've been around and how important they are to how natural systems work.
We're happy that AntWeb (https://www.antweb.org/) recently moved their data to TaxonWorks and are now building that site of data curated there. Data for over 250k individuals, with many more coming as we work to aggregate data are there. Check out a wealth of data and images there.
> The sheer number of non-ant species that have evolved to look and behave exactly like ants, from being drug-pushers to parasitoids, to meme-ready social influencers says a lot about how long they've been around and how important they are to how natural systems work.
Fascinating to me, and thank you for calling it out. Ants aren't the only "form" that this happens to in the animal kingdom either.
Homo sapiens used to live alongside other similar species like neanderthals etc, and eventually we crowded them all out. Often we tell ourselves it's because we were superior to them. Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today
> Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today
It would not be great. If you consider the track record human being have of being horrible to those who look very slightly different or have a slightly different culture, how would we treat beings who were far more different?
It would be even worse if they were are mental inferiors. Imagine a world in which scientific racism was proven true rather than debunked. They would be perfect slaves or research subjects.
I am an avid ant hobbyist and use AntWeb regularly to aid in identification and distribution of ant species when hunting for new queens. I’m glad to hear about this change - the site had needed a bit of a refresh for a while!
At present it's just the data being dumped from TaxonWorks and re-integrated into the existing front-end (separation of concerns nicely done). In the future we hope efforts that wrap TaxonWorks APIs and tooling, "companions", will evolve to make things look better. For example it would be trivial to wrap AntWeb in TaxonPages (see Github for everything) to get a new front end there, though that software is focused at the Taxon level. Multiple groups are looking to build out similar efforts at the specimen level (perhaps SpecimenPages).
We've recently has some amazing success with previously "unknown" people contributing to our open-source framework(s). These contributions, and hopefully future ones, will let us deliver additional features in a more timely fashion, for example things like multi-entry and "traditional" taxonomic keys. TLDR - there are opportunities to chip in to the "refresh" efforts on multiple fronts.
How exciting. I'm a huge fan of ants and I didn't know about AntWeb. Insects tend to be harder to find identification resources for than spiders, which is what I spend more time on. However, this site seems to exceed any individual digital resource I know of for spiders.
RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm not associated with any research organizations but maybe I should be.
I would first engage, if you haven't, the spider community at iNaturalist. It is likely that others are thinking along the same lines as you.
We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely interested in facilitating the structuring of communities that link people like you to those doing the science behind the scenes, this is really important for the long term stability of resources like those you're interested in.
it's such an interesting subject matter, presented visually in a really nice way, but his script-writing is so jarring to listen to, and it feels like half the time he doesn't even really comprehend the words that he's reading out. perhaps it's just me though; he's got a lot of subs
I think it's fascinating that, according to Wikipedia, Argentine ant colonies attack one another in their native range because of the increased genetic diversity (which they detect by smell). The mega colonies would only be a consequence of the inbreeding that follows rapid expansion.
There's a somewhat recent post by dang saying that (if I remember correctly) moderators sometimes manually look over rejected posts and give them a second chance if they feel it's worth a shot.
Weird because the app i used for posting this story usually points me to a dupe when there is one, i'm not sure if it's part of the HN API and why this mechanism has not worked as intended.
Readit News
The interactions between Ants and Spiders gave me some associations with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith's Brood). Particularly, I loved how both were painting an alternative evolutionary path but 'grafting on' to existing notions and understandings of what we know to be true in species development. I wish there was more of this! I felt Children of Ruin was weaker in this regard, maybe because the conflict for the species was absent. The Spiders vs Ants and then Spiders vs Humans being conflicts which created a fanstatic narrative to explain alternative solutions to prisoner's dilemma (spiders choosing to co-opt their enemies' strengths or in Lilith's brood, Oankali being a hybrid of alien/human). I'd be curious to learn if there's more examples in zoology/ecology of species choosing this route instead of competition every time - and also, what factors might impact this.
The plot: "After a spectacular and mysterious cosmic event, ants of different species undergo rapid evolution, develop a cross-species hive mind, and build seven strange towers with geometrically perfect designs in the Arizona desert."
(slight spoilers, FYI)
https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue the insanity and create personal growth.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a bit. It feels very Children of Time-y and some might enjoy reading bits of it:
Half-Assed Technical Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nx...
Freeform Creative Writing of Scripted Game Intro:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wET9mWaYae_GMqbm8n37UoNF...
---
Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his process for deciding which aspects of an animal's ecology/behavior to represent in his fiction.
Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game) wrote this article called The Simulation Dream, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for creating a rich and engaging simulation is to "Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate."
I would love to know why Adrian chose to give ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other behaviors out.
https://youtu.be/VLBDVXLiWxQ?t=301
https://github.com/stassa/nests-and-insects
Haven't worked on that for a while though.
Also : https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=57492.msg497822#ms...
Take my money.
Zoubin Ghahramani argues that intelligence is about motion, that the sea squirt digests its own brain as soon as it settles down. But might there be intelligent communities of static individuals that nevertheless form dynamic networks?
This is really cool. I read the trilogy, time, ruin, memory in 5-6 sessions and I loved it.
Questions I would ask: 1) Where does he draw his inspiration from? 2) Should we expect to continue seeing Adrian putting together such amazing books so prolifically? 3) Does he believe that the outcome of his trilogy would be the most probable? 4) Besides arthropods do any other species stand a chance against primates?
Deleted Comment
My question is: how successful do you think that’s been for me as a straight man?
- number of matches ? Probably not. - number of fellow fans ? Probably.
Dead Comment
There are other socially parasitic ants in this vein: some will infiltrate a colony, kill only the queen without the colony realizing it, and lay their own eggs which are raised by the slowly replace the entire colony. There are also 'cuckoo' ants which simply sneak into the colony, lay their eggs and leave.
I'm guessing by this you mean the species of ants that tend to be enslaved, rather than the enslaved ants themselves?
Alternatively, it’s fairly easy to find queens on your own. AntsCanada offers a starter guide, and there are many other resources that teach you when and where to find new queens. I keep a few test tubes in my truck year-round, just in case.
Note: I’m not affiliated with AntsCanada in any way.
I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The person said that they already gave away the species I wanted, but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They pushed a species which isn't really known to native to my area, but he insisted he found them locally. They aggressively tried to upsell me on expensive extra supplies they said were critical to the care of this species. When I got my ants, they were shipped from several states away.
I reported this to AntsCanada. I'm not sure what happened, but I recently tried to get a different queen from GAN and I ended up talking to the same person under a different identity.
I'm sure there are some great people on GAN, just beware.
I ended up getting a queen from Atlantic Ants. It did ship across state lines, but the species is one that's ubiquitous in my region.
I was under the impression that we would be meeting because they were local, which is how GAN is intended to operate.?Instead, they shipped the queen to me without any USDA permits. The queen also died within a few weeks of arriving. They started a web store not longer afterwards.
That said, I’ve had plenty of good experiences with GAN. This was one bad actor out of many good ones.
Deleted Comment
....my apologies, I don't mean to ridicule your hobby, it's just I couldn't imagine wanting more of them in my house on purpose.
Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans could probably roundly poison them into extinction if we wanted.
Are we going to give the ants supernatural coordination as well?
What is that, irony?!
We probably could extinct all the ants in the world if we wanted to, if we were content to extinct all other life on the planet as well.
https://xkcd.com/1217/
We're happy that AntWeb (https://www.antweb.org/) recently moved their data to TaxonWorks and are now building that site of data curated there. Data for over 250k individuals, with many more coming as we work to aggregate data are there. Check out a wealth of data and images there.
Fascinating to me, and thank you for calling it out. Ants aren't the only "form" that this happens to in the animal kingdom either.
Homo sapiens used to live alongside other similar species like neanderthals etc, and eventually we crowded them all out. Often we tell ourselves it's because we were superior to them. Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today
It would not be great. If you consider the track record human being have of being horrible to those who look very slightly different or have a slightly different culture, how would we treat beings who were far more different?
It would be even worse if they were are mental inferiors. Imagine a world in which scientific racism was proven true rather than debunked. They would be perfect slaves or research subjects.
We've recently has some amazing success with previously "unknown" people contributing to our open-source framework(s). These contributions, and hopefully future ones, will let us deliver additional features in a more timely fashion, for example things like multi-entry and "traditional" taxonomic keys. TLDR - there are opportunities to chip in to the "refresh" efforts on multiple fronts.
RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm not associated with any research organizations but maybe I should be.
We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely interested in facilitating the structuring of communities that link people like you to those doing the science behind the scenes, this is really important for the long term stability of resources like those you're interested in.
This is a dupe from 10 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39400770
When I submit something that is a dupe, it gets labeled as dupe and not posted. But this post was dupe and did get posted.
What are the automated rules?
I'll try the app next time, maybe that bypasses some check.
Or better, next time I submit, I'll use website regularly, and if it flags as dupe, I can switch to app and see if it bypasses the check.