You rate ants higher than Dolphins?
Ants..
- Thread starter Mandana
- Start date
You rate ants higher than Dolphins?
Ants have legs, dolphins don't.
If ants have legs they can wear stockings.
Ergo ants are sexier than dolphins.
Win!
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
If ants were the size of elephants they would be dead.
Curious fact.
Elephants aren't fat.
Their huge belly is mainly occupied by a huge intestine, for digesting the almost indigestible food they eat.
Therefore, Elephants are better than anty ants.
They should definitely be on the top five list.
Elephants aren't fat.
Their huge belly is mainly occupied by a huge intestine, for digesting the almost indigestible food they eat.
Therefore, Elephants are better than anty ants.
They should definitely be on the top five list.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Actually, while this is an exaggeration, the basic premise is true. The vast majority of our food crop acreage relies on bees for pollination. If bees died off, we would indeed begin to experience a food shortage of cataclysmic proportions. The human population would shrink rapidly by starvation. But probably no more than 80%, which would still leave a billion of us to survive on food that doesn't need bees. This is hardly "extinction." The oceanic ecosystem provides a lot of our food and bees are not a part of it.
This is why the current shrinking of the world's bee population deserves considerably more attention than it's getting--especially for those of you who have children.
This is also not exactly correct. We've spent twelve thousand years breeding Canis lupus familiaris to be our companions and this has resulted in characteristics that that the ancestral subspecies Canis lupus lupus does not share. They are quite adept at reading our feelings from our tone of voice, which is a significant portion of the speech bandwidth in non-tonal languages like English. (They have a more difficult task with Chinese speakers, perhaps this is why dogs are not as beloved in China: they're not as able to establish the bond.) They can also read our body language.
In addition, the short-muzzled breeds have a concentration of vision receptors in the center of their retina, giving them a smaller but more detailed field of view than the long-muzzled breeds whose receptors are arranged less densely in a horizontal line that allows them to track their prey. As a result, these dogs can see and learn to read and react to our facial expressions, which is why we tend to regard these breeds as the more "charming" companions.
No. It's the classic endotherm-versus-exotherm scenario. A warm-blooded oxygen-breathing metabolism generates significantly more energy than a cold-blooded gill-breather. A dolphin can pound the crap out of a shark of comparable size. Even alligators, which are air-breathers but still cold-blooded, are no match for an equivalent size dolphin. I've seen video of a dolphin playing "bounce the ball" with an alligator of similar size.
You've neglected to attend to your math here. The mass of an animal is proportional to the cube of its linear dimension, since its body is three-dimensional. But its strength is measured by the cross section of its muscles, which are only proportional to the square of its linear dimension.
Therefore, if you triple the length of an animal, its mass will be twenty-seven times as great, but its strength will be only nine times as great.
The linear dimensions of an elephant are at least one thousand times those of an ant--sorry, I haven't got a tape measure handy and my elephant keeps stepping on the ant anyway. Which means that its mass is one billion times as large, but its strength is only one million times as large. So in relative terms, the ant is one thousand times stronger.
The practical implication of this is that the exoskeleton architecture of insects (and all terrestrial arthropods including arachnids, myriapods and the few non-aquatic crustaceans) cannot be expanded without limit. The largest insect's body is only a few inches long (~10cm). Beyond that, the exoskeleton and its internal musculature cannot handle the load. A non-aquatic animal whose mass is measured in kilos rather than grams has to have an endoskeleton to survive.
I poop out bacteria, lots of it in fact. Am I the most powerful now?
In the ocean the Orca rules (big, mean, fast, and smart), or the blue whale (biggest, I believe we are the only predator after they are babies), or the sperm whale (which I believe is the biggest predator in the ocean if I'm not mistaken).
eyeswideshut
Registered Senior Member
Ants rules big time.
Empire Of The Desert Ants
http://documentarystorm.com/empire-of-the-desert-ants/
Empire Of The Desert Ants
http://documentarystorm.com/empire-of-the-desert-ants/
LOL....No, you're just a manufacturer of food for bacteria.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
The baleen whales are predators according to a strict definition, since they hunt and eat krill, which are live animals (tiny crustaceans). However, their method of hunting is so similar to grazing (they just fill their mouth with water, then strain it back out through the baleen, and eat whatever's left), and the size ratio between the hunter and the prey is so enormous (krill are typically a couple of centimeters long), that many people refer to them as grazers.
This dismissal of the large whales with an asterisk does, indeed, leave the sperm whale (the only toothed whale that is not a dolphin) as not just the biggest predator in the ocean, but the biggest on the planet.