this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023

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Today I Learned

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226

TIL ants that farm aphids influence the aphids’ genes in a similar way that we do with cows. Aphid-farming ants prefer and select for red/green polymorphism. (www.nature.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by LillyPip@lemmy.world to c/til@lemmy.world

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From the article:

Ant-attended aphids are known to excrete high-quality honeydew when ants are present. Ant attendance has a negative effect on the growth and reproduction of the attended aphids. Therefore, trade-offs should occur between the quality of honeydew and the growth and fecundity of aphid individuals. Thus, if attending ants prefer the morph excreting a high-quality honeydew, such trade-offs and resulting competitive interactions are expected between the color morphs in M. yomogicola. The morph excreting high-quality honeydew is known to have a lower reproductive rate than the other morphs[9,10]. This fact implies that if the attending ants prefer one morph, this morph is expected to excrete high-quality honeydew. Note that any such difference between morphs leads to the exclusion of the inferior morphs. Surprisingly, nearly all colonies consist of both green and red morphs in the field.

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[–] magikmw@lemm.ee 16 points 10 months ago (4 children)

How this has 131 votes and nobody seems to be surprised to learn ants FARM aphids. Excuse me, what?

[–] HenryWong327@lemmy.ml 14 points 10 months ago

There are also some ants that farm certain types of fungus! It's really cool.

[–] Microw@lemm.ee 10 points 10 months ago

I learned that in biology class 20 years ago.

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Bonkers

[–] LillyPip@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

TIL some ants farm aphids.

[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 10 months ago

This officially removes ants from the vegans friendly list.

[+] eatthecake@lemmy.world -8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sooooo ants aren't vegan? Do vegans try to free the aphids? I suppose morals aren't applied to insects but humans are animals too. I don't understand why we are separated from the animal kingdom in the eyes of vegans, who, at the same time , claim equal rights for animals.
If you're going to feed your pet carnivore a vegan diet then i think you should be saving the aphids.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Non-human animals aren't moral agents. This is like basic stuff, c'mon.

[–] eatthecake@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6404642/

Are you sure?

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 10 months ago

Literally in the abstract

In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it.

And further in the introduction

He has argued that, while animals probably lack the sorts of concepts and metacognitive capacities necessary to be held morally responsible for their behaviour, this only excludes them from the possibility of counting as moral agents. There are, however, certain moral motivations that, in his view, may be reasonably thought to fall within the reach of (at least some) animal species, namely, moral emotions such as “sympathy and compassion, kindness, tolerance, and patience, and also their negative counterparts such as anger, indignation, malice, and spite”, as well as “a sense of what is fair and what is not” (Rowlands 2012, 32). If animals do indeed behave on the basis of moral emotions, they should, he argues, be considered moral subjects, even if their lack of sophisticated cognitive capacities prevents us from holding them morally responsible.1

But yes, I am fairly certain that no non-human animals has the mental facilities to be true moral agents. Especially because this is something a significant chunk of humans struggle with, and no animal comes close to us in terms of abstract thinking and that kinda stuff.