In my science studies bugs are of particular interest. So anything buggy catches my eye. Having seen how the so called researchers suck at their job, it gives me an opportunity to share a real life story which has an application to numerology. Specifically: Quantities. How can you know what exactly the right number is at times.
This pre-dates my monthly awards since it's from April. I just dismissed it at the time as another lame attempt to promote Pi being equal to 22/7. National Ant Day was on April 17th this year. Using the seldom seen ALW (misnamed) cipher you get 174. Ohhhhh! Pattern recognition! 4/17 -174! You win a cookie! Then, as always happens, anytime Pi comes up it needs to be mentioned. NATIONAL ANT DAY = 227 in reverse. Even though this has nothing to do with ants. I saw Pi! I get a second cookie to feed to my ants! Now let's shoot for a third cookie!
The largest ant farm recorded had 2,270 ants in it. Oh really? How did you know that? I guess that ANTS and PICNIC having the same numerology wasn't good enough. I knew it, but from personal experience know that this record was broken by an antstronomical amount. But let's recap the different ways this could be wrong.
I'm assuming you mean living ants. What if one got squished in the counting process?
What if the count was just wrong? One escaped and missed the counting process?
What if someone with more modesty had more ants in their ant farm? They didn't bother with silly things like records?
Why ant farms? Do the NIPTUCKs care about those more than ants living in the wild?
Bees are taxonomically related to ants (hymenopterans) maybe bee hives should count?
What if a larvae just hatched? Ant farms don't typically have queens, but could. What if an adult is just about to pop out of its casing. I'm assuming only adults count.
I could come up with more, but you get the point.
Now, at the risk of cluing them into another cool coincidence - the real story-
The 2,270 number is an old, old number. This used to be carried in the Guinness Record book. Technically it referred to the children's toy ant farm, Uncle Milton's Ant Farm. Even if it's a teeny sized ant, that's a shitload of ants for the space available. I'm guessing the majority were added just prior to the official count. Compare a test tube used to culture bacteria. Eventually the bacteria eat all the food and/or the bacteria kill themselves off by drowning themselves in bacteria poopy. The same reason you need to change the water in your fish tank; to get rid of ammonia.
When my buddies and I at the Entomology Dept. heard of this record we determined that we were going to destroy it. First step was to contact Guinness about what exactly qualified as an 'ant farm'. After hearing our plans, and obviously having lower standards than they do now, they gave the thumbs up and we started building.
To raise insects for lab experiments, dissections and irradiation in the nuclear reactor (yes, that was cool!) we used metal wash basins. We modified these through the extremely technological method of cutting holes in the sides with a power saw. Some plastic tubing from the hardware store (washing machine hosing-for wash basins, we're not savages and have some scientific standards!) and duct tape and we connected them together in one big ass ant farm. Dirt was....dirt cheap. I.e., free. After the only real work involved we dug up a colony, found a queen ant some starter workers and larvae and transplanted them into our farm, which by this point we named Aunt Mildred's Ant Farm. Yes, I had a lot to do with that name. After some trial and error on what the right size was, quantity of dirt, etc...we had a pretty good balance. Food was no problem. Our ants loved cockroaches, dead or alive. We were also growing their food supply all along.
Escapees were a HUGE problem. For cockroaches a ring of petroleum jelly around the top of the basin was good enough. But these are ants. We admitted defeat and just lived with ants crawling around the lab on a regular basis. Mind you, this was just a vanity project, no grades involved.
We had been in contact with Guinness throughout the months of this undertaking. They assured us that our standards were acceptable. All ants from the same colony. None just dumped into the basins prior to the official count. Aunt Mildred qualified as an ant farm. There was some haggling over the official count, and it was agreed to use even multiples of 100 ahead of time. Adults only.
The final tally:
174,000 ants. In 220 wash basins connected over seven lab rooms. (Not part of the record, but from our project notes.)
It was like year end inventory at a retail store. Only with escaped ants everywhere and lots of alcohol.
But our victory was ephemeral. That's an insect joke. A couple of years later Guinness changed their minds and reverted to the old record of 2,270. A copy of the letter sent to the Entomology Dept. was forwarded to me. Aunt Mildred had been disqualified. Some small satisfaction was gained when Guinness decided a couple of years later to just drop the record altogether, I'm assuming as too frivolous. For now the record shows as largest colony in the wild listed in miles and kilometers, not the count on number of ants. You can find that by Googling. I guess that this commenter had an old Guinness Record book, although given the track history of gematria just making shit up I have doubts.
The story is not quite finished. A comment to the cookie winner's comment suggested that National Aunt And Uncle Day is coming up. That's July 26th. We'll see if they want to stretch this out into another meaningless Pi reference then. For Aunts. Without Uncles. Because that would make all kinds of fucking sense.
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