h a l f b a k e r yPoint of hors d'oevre
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Not the building's main tenants, these ants live only in specially designed terrariums in the basement much like their own underground sugar caves.
At night they are released to follow synthetic chemical trails that E.O. Wilson discovered control their automatous behaviour. As they exit and enter
their vast terrariums one by one they are counted by a miniature turnstile.
They follow the main chemical trails that are exuded by hidden infrastructure throughout the building to various sites that have been sprayed manually with telling chemicals.
If you are a non-insect occupant of a building with Building Maintain Ants and you drop your doughnut, for example, don't bother cleaning it up. Simply take up the spray bottle marked "clean" and spray the object. The ants will later consume the toroid with sharp mandibles.
all the ant puns you could wish for
http://www.amazon.c...atson/dp/B000X8W6QA
can be found in this book. Just so we don't waste too much time re-doing them here. [pertinax, Aug 07 2011]
Mine
Ants
[Voice, Aug 08 2011]
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How are they rewarded for their efforts ? Do they issue a Pro Formica invoice to the recipients of their services ? |
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What about the aspects of building maintenance which don't involve eating? |
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You mean drinking tea? That's the main activity of builders and workmen round here. |
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I like this a lot.... what religion are they?- Protest-ants [+] |
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sort of done, one guesthouse on the Khao San road (before refurbishments) go sit on bed with sandal in hand, turn off light, wait a minute or two, turn on light, beat to death all cockroaches, turn off light, go to sleep. Wake up in morning, no debris as the ants have eaten them all. Very organic. |
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//You mean drinking tea?// |
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No, I mean, for example, replacing a fluorescent tube. Give enough ants enough time and I daresay they'd be physically capable of it (there'd be intermediate stages involving temporary ramps) - but, would you be able to encode the necessary algorithm in smells? |
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The potential for flocking rubbertree plants is huge. |
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In a sense, the ants are the main tenants because
they are likely to outnumber the human occupants of
the building, or indeed the city. |
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Rat 1 to Rat 2: “Apparently, you’re never more than 10 meters from a human, and they eat 75% of the food” |
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I envisage a luddite tendency leading to ant
assassinations. Let's face it, this is really a scheme to
restore ants. |
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The whole place would end up being made of anty matter! |
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Being in the process of dealing with an ant infestation (tiny swarming variety), and taking this idea way to seriously, ant waste would become a serious problem. |
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Visual of a miniature turnstile = +. |
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I've found that the main ten ants do the most work. |
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Why restrict this to cleaning? Surely we could genetically engineer termites to construct a adobe style housing complex, for the rapidly developing world. A suitable moldy food dump could be deposited along with carefully laid out genetically modified ants/termites, and voila suburbia. Buildings safety regulators would need to pop in to check that they are habitable, before they are sold. |
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