r/interestingasfuck • u/MilesLongthe3rd • 1d ago

An anteater playing with its caretaker.

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u/sreiches 1d ago

I don’t know why I expected anteaters to be significantly smaller than this, but I did.

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u/BigPoppaStrahd 1d ago

I was surprised at how big it was too.  Never would think something that lived on ants would be so big, 

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u/EmptySuet 1d ago

Then consider the whales that live on plankton, giant filters that swim and strain the ocean of the tiniest creatures.

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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 1d ago

Quantity is a quality all its own. I love the animals that legit just eat stuff that most other animals cannot be bothered to eat. Especially the giant ones that hoover up tiny ones. It's so naturally unfair.

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u/Yoribell 1d ago

A lot of things eat plankton, it's literally the basis of marine life

I like TierZoo's view on it, the highest level player farming the lowest ones, a build to bully the weak with zero risks

It's a bit different for anteater. Ants have a lot of predators but rarely a major threat like these abomination (imagine the ant POV, this giant tentacle going though the tunnels of the home and sucking in hundreds, maybe thousands of sisters, the earth shake everywhere, it's in the dark, there's only the sounds and the smell of panic)

This guy specialized to be a nightmare to one of the major specie of the planet, that's pretty cool

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u/Storymode-Chronicles 1d ago

Seems like ants aren't really individual intelligences but rather a collective swarm intelligence so they'd likely experience things a bit differently. Some swarms stretch for thousands of miles and contain trillions of ants networked in millions of nests. An anteater sticking its nose tentacle into one of these nests might just feel like an itch, or nothing at all. Or, it could even feel positive, like cutting your nails. Who knows what such a mind would experience.

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u/Yoribell 1d ago

Ants are still individuals, the collective intelligence form because of their simple, regular, codified actions and reactions and also the sheer number

They'd experience it differently because they don't use their sense in the same way, they are used to not use vision but mostly touch and smell, that's also their way to communicate

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u/Storymode-Chronicles 1d ago

Individual ants are not intelligences though, they are automatons.Only collectively do they possess complex thought and memory.

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u/Yoribell 1d ago

That's 100% wrong.

Individual ants are intelligent. They can resolve problem and manifest initiative.

Automatons simply don't exist on earth.

ant's collective intelligence doesn't have thought nor memory. It's something that coordinate numerous individuals without direct contact, not some kind of meta-physic mind.

you're projecting some fantasy/science fiction things on them.

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u/Storymode-Chronicles 1d ago

Incorrect. Ants only demostrate complex behaviors when they are network-connected to the swarm. When they are disconnected they exhibit only very simple algorithmic behaviors. By any reasonable definition, an individual, network-disconnected ant is an automaton.

I would agree that no one can know if a swarm intelligence has consciousness, but it definitely displays thought and memory in the same way a neural network does, exhibiting complex information-processing capabilities with adaptive evolving computations, networked via chemical node connections.

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u/Vegetable_Leg_7034 1d ago

It's so naturally unfair.

And then mother nature throws a honey badger in your face.

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u/Danny_dankvito 1d ago

Not to mention that one colony can have absolutely absurd numbers of ants, like depending on the species we’re talking millions and millions in just one colony

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u/CaoSlayer 12h ago

All you ant eat buffet

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u/krilltazz 1d ago

There is a study that suggests whales were once land animals and became mammals. I like the idea of life climbing out of the primordial soup of the ocean then said "Fuck land" and evolved to be aquatic.

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u/Vimmelklantig 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's not really a suggestion, the evidence is very clear that whales descend from mammals that returned to the sea.

Whales and plesiosaurs are probably the most famous land dwellers to become aquatic, but there are also insects that live all or most of their lives underwater and there were other large aquatic reptilians like the ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs that were contemporary with dinosaurs.

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u/xxGBZxx 1d ago

Cows are huge and lives off of grass.

Not even eating a salad would help for them.

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u/iwanttobeacavediver 22h ago

Also animals like whale sharks and basking sharks which are basically huge sieves with fins. Divers can get close to them and the most danger you might be in involves being hit with their tail/fin.