Still pretty under the weather (though not nearly as bad as yesterday), but I thought I'd throw a couple of videos I found a bit back on here.
Many smaller snakes are insectivores, but some larger insects are carnivores.
And before you try to claim that it couldn't really have eaten that snake, despite the narration...
...you'd be wrong.
-Signing off.
Showing posts with label bugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bugs. Show all posts
Friday, March 18, 2011
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Other Invertebrate Intelligence
I won't beat around the bush in getting to what I think the second-likeliest candidate (as mentioned and discussed on Friday) for developing something resembling what we call "intelligence" is. It's spiders, hands down.
Yes, spiders, darnit.
More specifically, a large, diverse, and above all clever group called jumping spiders. Even more particularly, a genus called Portia.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
Assuming that cephalopods are incapable of prolonged life on land, and that life on land is necessary to develop civilization (those are some major assumptions), we must turn to the rest of the invertebrate families.
The other molluscs? No, they're far too soft-bodied to ever achieve the kind of size they'd need for a decent brain, and far too slow-moving (mostly) to ever have the kind of lifestyle that would lead to the necessary type of brain. (The kinds that have proven able to live on land, anyway, and we're a little more concerned with them, aren't we? Nudibranchs are always surprisingly active and clever, though, compared to any mollusc but a cephalopod.) The various worms, echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, etc.), and jellies all are rather unlikely to prove able to reach large sizes on land or to develop even a brain at all, much less a big effective one.
That leaves arthropods, who sadly have all the brains of kiwi fruit. Or do they?
The first mark in the arthropod's favor is that it's a highly mobile and active creature, as anyone who's ever had to deal with any will know. Certainly, plenty have lower-energy lifestyles, but they can easily adapt to all walks of life. And this speaks favorably for arthropods possibly developing that ephemeral trait we call intelligence.
Speaking even better for them are those most industrious and active little beasts, ants. Ants do a lot of the things we do-delegate tasks, specialize parts of their workforce (indeed, their methods of doing so are lightyears ahead of ours in terms of efficiency-they're born for their jobs), build huge mass dwellings, and more. Everything that's true of ants is also true to a lesser degree of termites (except dwellings, which they are a match for ants in the building of), and most of these are true of bees and some wasps.
But it's not really intelligence. Even if you came up with a really clever method of trying to, you could never find an ant, or even an ant colony, that could communicate with you. On an individual basis, ants are among the dumbest brained critters on Earth, and their capacity for organization is entirely on an instinctual level. (This doesn't mean that ants couldn't eventually, even following their current course, develop something frighteningly comparable to civilization that would compete with civilization of other species. I could see that happening.)
Since ants are the "smartest" insects, that doesn't leave many options. In the ocean, there's the mantis shrimp, which strikes me as being more like a housecat or a dog than possibly any other aquatic animal, if for no other reason than the ones you see in videos like the ones I've linked seem to indicate that they have a capacity for boredom, hence the sheer savagery they can exhibit in attacking their aquarium-mates. But mantis shrimps are still marine animals, and show no particular inclination towards changing that. So they're out.
But what about other crustaceans? Many live on land in various moist places. Unfortunately, they've never developed quite the same capacity for dry living as insects, so they'd always have limited ranges.
There's still the group I posited as my candidates, of course: spiders.
Why spiders?
Well, spiders (with some extrapolation from their closest relatives, scorpions) have proven to be a long-lived and versatile group. There are wandering spiders and the ever clever and tricky web builders. Web builders have poor eyesight and their lifestyles are not terribly mobile or active, mostly consisting of repeated instinctual behaviors, so despite their apparent cleverness, they do not seem to be top candidates. Wandering spiders have roving, active lifestyles, which puts them higher.
Of these, some achieve considerable sizes, such as everyone's favorite, the tarantula. While the tarantula itself does not exhibit exceptional intelligence for an arthropod, its size (and that of a scorpion from the distant past who could reach a whopping three feet in length) suggest that the size necessary for intelligence is perhaps not hopelessly distant.
Ironically, the group who shows the greatest potential in my mind are one that is invariably small-the jumping spiders. Jumpers (for whom the green jumping spider of Australia is a large variety at a whopping 12 mm) are highly mobile, have very good eyesight (only an order of magnitude less sophisticated than that of vertebrates, and better than that of dragonflies, who have the best vision of any insects), and, as their name suggests, the ability to jump.
They're the cats of the insect world. (Here, I use "insect world" in a sense that it's the world of fast, highly mobile arthropods primarily but not exclusively made up of insects. Spiders in general, by the way, are a little like the Carnivora of the insect world in my mind, although such a comparison demeans the diversity and ancient history of the spider families.) And as the insect world has no monkeys, ravens, elephants, or other similar creatures, I rate cats high.
And highest of the jumping spiders would seem to be the Portia spider. These spiders, despite brains that fit in animals that could live in houses the size of a stegosaur's infamously inadequate thought-box, show a capacity for actual learning. And not simple stimulus/response learning, either.
Portias strategize.
While many clever behaviors exhibited by these spiders are instinctual-they don't attack the spitting spider (one of the top natural enemies of jumping spiders in general) head on, for instance-many of their behaviors are devised or adapted. They are "relatively slow" learners, but map out their tactics through trial and error.
They pluck at the webs of other spiders in various ways in order to attract the spiders' attention-they may draw the spider towards what seems to be a struggling, helpless fly, only to attack the other viciously when it incautiously draws near. Or they might, in some instances, tailor their lures very narrowly: A species of Nephila spider, for instance, has a prey-sized male member. The male lives in the female's web for protection, because the female is sometimes big enough to eat small birds, and obviously is out of the prey range for even the wiliest, most vicious Portia spider that ever lived. So the Portia imitates a very small prey creature that the lady Nephila wouldn't be interested in, and the male comes running. Alone.
Somewhere, I have a National Geographic with tons of pictures and examples, but sadly all my favorite issues mysteriously disappear. Hmm...
I'll also note that the need of group behavior is no barrier to spiders either-some species build huge communal webs and swarms, and can cooperatively kill their prey and rear young.
Basically, the only relative shortcoming of spiders as potential candidates, once you get past the fact that the smartest ones are the smallest (and the general weakness of arthropods being possibly too small for good brains), is that they don't have real hands, but since they have so many other clever tools, maybe they can make up for that.
Who knows?
-Signing off.
Yes, spiders, darnit.
More specifically, a large, diverse, and above all clever group called jumping spiders. Even more particularly, a genus called Portia.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
Assuming that cephalopods are incapable of prolonged life on land, and that life on land is necessary to develop civilization (those are some major assumptions), we must turn to the rest of the invertebrate families.
The other molluscs? No, they're far too soft-bodied to ever achieve the kind of size they'd need for a decent brain, and far too slow-moving (mostly) to ever have the kind of lifestyle that would lead to the necessary type of brain. (The kinds that have proven able to live on land, anyway, and we're a little more concerned with them, aren't we? Nudibranchs are always surprisingly active and clever, though, compared to any mollusc but a cephalopod.) The various worms, echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, etc.), and jellies all are rather unlikely to prove able to reach large sizes on land or to develop even a brain at all, much less a big effective one.
That leaves arthropods, who sadly have all the brains of kiwi fruit. Or do they?
The first mark in the arthropod's favor is that it's a highly mobile and active creature, as anyone who's ever had to deal with any will know. Certainly, plenty have lower-energy lifestyles, but they can easily adapt to all walks of life. And this speaks favorably for arthropods possibly developing that ephemeral trait we call intelligence.
Speaking even better for them are those most industrious and active little beasts, ants. Ants do a lot of the things we do-delegate tasks, specialize parts of their workforce (indeed, their methods of doing so are lightyears ahead of ours in terms of efficiency-they're born for their jobs), build huge mass dwellings, and more. Everything that's true of ants is also true to a lesser degree of termites (except dwellings, which they are a match for ants in the building of), and most of these are true of bees and some wasps.
But it's not really intelligence. Even if you came up with a really clever method of trying to, you could never find an ant, or even an ant colony, that could communicate with you. On an individual basis, ants are among the dumbest brained critters on Earth, and their capacity for organization is entirely on an instinctual level. (This doesn't mean that ants couldn't eventually, even following their current course, develop something frighteningly comparable to civilization that would compete with civilization of other species. I could see that happening.)
Since ants are the "smartest" insects, that doesn't leave many options. In the ocean, there's the mantis shrimp, which strikes me as being more like a housecat or a dog than possibly any other aquatic animal, if for no other reason than the ones you see in videos like the ones I've linked seem to indicate that they have a capacity for boredom, hence the sheer savagery they can exhibit in attacking their aquarium-mates. But mantis shrimps are still marine animals, and show no particular inclination towards changing that. So they're out.
But what about other crustaceans? Many live on land in various moist places. Unfortunately, they've never developed quite the same capacity for dry living as insects, so they'd always have limited ranges.
There's still the group I posited as my candidates, of course: spiders.
Why spiders?
Well, spiders (with some extrapolation from their closest relatives, scorpions) have proven to be a long-lived and versatile group. There are wandering spiders and the ever clever and tricky web builders. Web builders have poor eyesight and their lifestyles are not terribly mobile or active, mostly consisting of repeated instinctual behaviors, so despite their apparent cleverness, they do not seem to be top candidates. Wandering spiders have roving, active lifestyles, which puts them higher.
Of these, some achieve considerable sizes, such as everyone's favorite, the tarantula. While the tarantula itself does not exhibit exceptional intelligence for an arthropod, its size (and that of a scorpion from the distant past who could reach a whopping three feet in length) suggest that the size necessary for intelligence is perhaps not hopelessly distant.
Ironically, the group who shows the greatest potential in my mind are one that is invariably small-the jumping spiders. Jumpers (for whom the green jumping spider of Australia is a large variety at a whopping 12 mm) are highly mobile, have very good eyesight (only an order of magnitude less sophisticated than that of vertebrates, and better than that of dragonflies, who have the best vision of any insects), and, as their name suggests, the ability to jump.
They're the cats of the insect world. (Here, I use "insect world" in a sense that it's the world of fast, highly mobile arthropods primarily but not exclusively made up of insects. Spiders in general, by the way, are a little like the Carnivora of the insect world in my mind, although such a comparison demeans the diversity and ancient history of the spider families.) And as the insect world has no monkeys, ravens, elephants, or other similar creatures, I rate cats high.
And highest of the jumping spiders would seem to be the Portia spider. These spiders, despite brains that fit in animals that could live in houses the size of a stegosaur's infamously inadequate thought-box, show a capacity for actual learning. And not simple stimulus/response learning, either.
Portias strategize.
While many clever behaviors exhibited by these spiders are instinctual-they don't attack the spitting spider (one of the top natural enemies of jumping spiders in general) head on, for instance-many of their behaviors are devised or adapted. They are "relatively slow" learners, but map out their tactics through trial and error.
They pluck at the webs of other spiders in various ways in order to attract the spiders' attention-they may draw the spider towards what seems to be a struggling, helpless fly, only to attack the other viciously when it incautiously draws near. Or they might, in some instances, tailor their lures very narrowly: A species of Nephila spider, for instance, has a prey-sized male member. The male lives in the female's web for protection, because the female is sometimes big enough to eat small birds, and obviously is out of the prey range for even the wiliest, most vicious Portia spider that ever lived. So the Portia imitates a very small prey creature that the lady Nephila wouldn't be interested in, and the male comes running. Alone.
Somewhere, I have a National Geographic with tons of pictures and examples, but sadly all my favorite issues mysteriously disappear. Hmm...
I'll also note that the need of group behavior is no barrier to spiders either-some species build huge communal webs and swarms, and can cooperatively kill their prey and rear young.
Basically, the only relative shortcoming of spiders as potential candidates, once you get past the fact that the smartest ones are the smallest (and the general weakness of arthropods being possibly too small for good brains), is that they don't have real hands, but since they have so many other clever tools, maybe they can make up for that.
Who knows?
-Signing off.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Game Profile: Swarm Assault
So, if you like real time strategy games, but aren't great at them (like me) and don't have a lot of money to blow on them, where do you look for them?
Well, you could buy Swarm Assault, which can be had for $13 or thereabouts (according to the website I checked). It's a little hard to find, and it is no longer supported or even acknowledged by the studio that apparently created it, but if you like RTS games, there are worse ways you could blow less than twenty bucks and six or twelve hours.
It's no Total Annihilation, but it is fun.
The game is much simpler than the typical modern high-budget RTS. There are five "species," for lack of a better term, of "insect" that you can control (each produced by its own kind of "colony"), and four "factions" which each get a bonus in production for one type of "insect." There are only four tilesets, which run rampant with "wild" neutral enemies of three varieties who will likely cause you a fair bit of trouble.
The thing I haven't mentioned yet? The "insects" have guns, missile launchers, and bombs.
Each kind of colony has a unique defense gun. (My favorite is the Ant colony's powerful machine guns, which can stop the typical mob rush in its tracks; the worst is definitely the Beetle colony's inaccurate, short-ranged, slow-firing and outright cruddy cannon.) Each also produces three types of unit of its own "species," meaning that the game features fifteen controllable units.
In broad strokes, each type of unit is suited by its weapon and armor for a specific role. Melee units (such as the Bull Ant and the Savage Scorpion) are useless against colonies; if used, they're better suited for defense, killing artillery units that are out of range of the base guns. Artillery units (Cannon Beetles, Missile Spiders, Spear Scorpions) are ideal for killing colonies, as they outrange most colony guns. Then there are units that are a tad more versatile, such as the Sniper Spider and the Ninja Scorpion. (See why I like the game?) The Sniper Spider's considerable range and excellent accuracy make it highly capable at picking off enemy artillery or doing light artillery work, while the Ninja Scorpion's homing ninja stars (!) despite being short-ranged will kill just about anything they can reach because of its high firing rate. (The Ninja Scorpion is kind of expensive, but it's probably the most powerful unit in the game because it can fill nearly any role.)
The oddest "species" are probably the Wasps, as their cheapest unit, the Assault Wasp (which isn't that cheap) is probably their best "artillery" because of its range, while its longest-ranged unit is a base defender instead (it launches "knockout" projectiles that don't affect colonies), and its heaviest unit, the Sonic Wasp is a mixed-role thing whose range is too short to work against many colonies. (The whole species probably has this oddity and disadvantage because they're the only species that can cross water, which is the only advantage flight gives them. Also, weirdly, nothing in the game can shoot while moving, and the Wasps can't stop while over water, which makes beachheads nearly impossible.)
I speak of costs, but the only cost in the game is time. Each unit takes a set amount of time to be built, and if you play as the color/faction that matches the species, they build 25% faster. The true resources of the game are the colonies. Each colony can never be destroyed, only "knocked out" and then captured. (Comically, when a colony "dies," it erupts and releases some slimy stuff I can only refer to as "goop," which the various insects in the area will seek out in preference to fighting. Whoever gathers the most goop wins the colony, which is "reborn" without any health, and if there are mixed forces in the area, it will almost certainly die again and need to be recaptured, since the enemy bugs will immediately start shooting it.) Colonies can regenerate if they aren't building, and there is a certain strategic element to turning production on and off.
The biggest flaw of the game, although it also lends an air of uniqueness, is the fact that, at the end of the day, your bug soldiers are still bugs, and they pretty much are impossible to control except in the most general ways. You can't give them standing orders to stay put or patrol an area; once they aren't actively doing anything, they start just aimlessly wandering around, following whatever catches their eye. (A piece of advice various parties have given concerning the game is to send your Wasps flying over the enemy's colonies; this causes all nearby units on defensive duty to forget what they're doing, if anything, and chase and shoot at the Wasps. This often severely damages the colonies, as the defenders are freaking morons and will shoot at anything. Even worse is when a neutral flyer causes your units to do this.)
The neutral units in the game come in four flavors to match the tilesets; in what I think of as the "normal" tileset, there are dragonfly bombers and flowers that shoot heat-seeking pollen; in the "nighttime" tileset, there are moth bombers (probably the least threatening bombers) and the uber-annoying popcorn plants, which are not tough but exist in huge numbers, and can make capturing colonies nearly impossible; in the desert tileset, spiked plants shoot thorns and flies drop crow's feet bombs which bounce and multiply across the landscape; and then there's the candyland tileset, which is pretty trippy, as it features a "bomber" that resembles a helicopter made from popsicle sticks and piloted by a neutral Grenadier Ant (its gobstopper bombs are similar to those of the desert fly except more musical and colorful). There are also neutral Ants which emerge randomly from burrows in many environments.
The game comes with one hundred "missions," and I have doubts as to whether they were all play-tested, as some of them were freaking impossible and I don't see how any amount of preparation or planning could change that. (For instance, one map modelled after Spain and the Americas features you trying to overwhelm the huge "American continents," crammed full of a single allegiance of colonies, with a single Wasp colony in "Spain." [Talk about cultural insensitivity.] As I mentioned, Wasps can't shoot while hovering over water, and the computer AI seeks out the nearest enemy and sends all of its units on a... well, a bee-line for it, which means that they all crowd over on the eastern shores and start shooting at anything that comes in range. There's no way to get around that, even if you had more colonies than the other guy, which you don't.)
Swarm Assault has no multiplayer that I know of; it's just as well, since two to four people trying to manage a bunch of bugs with guns couldn't end well.
Swarm Assault isn't a "deep" game with numerous facets; it's a hideously simple one. Sometimes that's all you need to have fun.
-Signing off.
Well, you could buy Swarm Assault, which can be had for $13 or thereabouts (according to the website I checked). It's a little hard to find, and it is no longer supported or even acknowledged by the studio that apparently created it, but if you like RTS games, there are worse ways you could blow less than twenty bucks and six or twelve hours.
It's no Total Annihilation, but it is fun.
The game is much simpler than the typical modern high-budget RTS. There are five "species," for lack of a better term, of "insect" that you can control (each produced by its own kind of "colony"), and four "factions" which each get a bonus in production for one type of "insect." There are only four tilesets, which run rampant with "wild" neutral enemies of three varieties who will likely cause you a fair bit of trouble.
The thing I haven't mentioned yet? The "insects" have guns, missile launchers, and bombs.
Each kind of colony has a unique defense gun. (My favorite is the Ant colony's powerful machine guns, which can stop the typical mob rush in its tracks; the worst is definitely the Beetle colony's inaccurate, short-ranged, slow-firing and outright cruddy cannon.) Each also produces three types of unit of its own "species," meaning that the game features fifteen controllable units.
In broad strokes, each type of unit is suited by its weapon and armor for a specific role. Melee units (such as the Bull Ant and the Savage Scorpion) are useless against colonies; if used, they're better suited for defense, killing artillery units that are out of range of the base guns. Artillery units (Cannon Beetles, Missile Spiders, Spear Scorpions) are ideal for killing colonies, as they outrange most colony guns. Then there are units that are a tad more versatile, such as the Sniper Spider and the Ninja Scorpion. (See why I like the game?) The Sniper Spider's considerable range and excellent accuracy make it highly capable at picking off enemy artillery or doing light artillery work, while the Ninja Scorpion's homing ninja stars (!) despite being short-ranged will kill just about anything they can reach because of its high firing rate. (The Ninja Scorpion is kind of expensive, but it's probably the most powerful unit in the game because it can fill nearly any role.)
The oddest "species" are probably the Wasps, as their cheapest unit, the Assault Wasp (which isn't that cheap) is probably their best "artillery" because of its range, while its longest-ranged unit is a base defender instead (it launches "knockout" projectiles that don't affect colonies), and its heaviest unit, the Sonic Wasp is a mixed-role thing whose range is too short to work against many colonies. (The whole species probably has this oddity and disadvantage because they're the only species that can cross water, which is the only advantage flight gives them. Also, weirdly, nothing in the game can shoot while moving, and the Wasps can't stop while over water, which makes beachheads nearly impossible.)
I speak of costs, but the only cost in the game is time. Each unit takes a set amount of time to be built, and if you play as the color/faction that matches the species, they build 25% faster. The true resources of the game are the colonies. Each colony can never be destroyed, only "knocked out" and then captured. (Comically, when a colony "dies," it erupts and releases some slimy stuff I can only refer to as "goop," which the various insects in the area will seek out in preference to fighting. Whoever gathers the most goop wins the colony, which is "reborn" without any health, and if there are mixed forces in the area, it will almost certainly die again and need to be recaptured, since the enemy bugs will immediately start shooting it.) Colonies can regenerate if they aren't building, and there is a certain strategic element to turning production on and off.
The biggest flaw of the game, although it also lends an air of uniqueness, is the fact that, at the end of the day, your bug soldiers are still bugs, and they pretty much are impossible to control except in the most general ways. You can't give them standing orders to stay put or patrol an area; once they aren't actively doing anything, they start just aimlessly wandering around, following whatever catches their eye. (A piece of advice various parties have given concerning the game is to send your Wasps flying over the enemy's colonies; this causes all nearby units on defensive duty to forget what they're doing, if anything, and chase and shoot at the Wasps. This often severely damages the colonies, as the defenders are freaking morons and will shoot at anything. Even worse is when a neutral flyer causes your units to do this.)
The neutral units in the game come in four flavors to match the tilesets; in what I think of as the "normal" tileset, there are dragonfly bombers and flowers that shoot heat-seeking pollen; in the "nighttime" tileset, there are moth bombers (probably the least threatening bombers) and the uber-annoying popcorn plants, which are not tough but exist in huge numbers, and can make capturing colonies nearly impossible; in the desert tileset, spiked plants shoot thorns and flies drop crow's feet bombs which bounce and multiply across the landscape; and then there's the candyland tileset, which is pretty trippy, as it features a "bomber" that resembles a helicopter made from popsicle sticks and piloted by a neutral Grenadier Ant (its gobstopper bombs are similar to those of the desert fly except more musical and colorful). There are also neutral Ants which emerge randomly from burrows in many environments.
The game comes with one hundred "missions," and I have doubts as to whether they were all play-tested, as some of them were freaking impossible and I don't see how any amount of preparation or planning could change that. (For instance, one map modelled after Spain and the Americas features you trying to overwhelm the huge "American continents," crammed full of a single allegiance of colonies, with a single Wasp colony in "Spain." [Talk about cultural insensitivity.] As I mentioned, Wasps can't shoot while hovering over water, and the computer AI seeks out the nearest enemy and sends all of its units on a... well, a bee-line for it, which means that they all crowd over on the eastern shores and start shooting at anything that comes in range. There's no way to get around that, even if you had more colonies than the other guy, which you don't.)
Swarm Assault has no multiplayer that I know of; it's just as well, since two to four people trying to manage a bunch of bugs with guns couldn't end well.
Swarm Assault isn't a "deep" game with numerous facets; it's a hideously simple one. Sometimes that's all you need to have fun.
-Signing off.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Nature Is Awesome
Although this particular picture is rather lacking in the awesome department.
The other day, I noticed this scene above a bedroom door. Since there's no way in heck you can tell what's actually happening, I'll explain: The little speck is a spider. The bigger speck with all the junk around it is a daddy longlegs. The spider, despite being smaller than the daddy longlegs (even ignoring the giant legs of the longlegs), has totally killed that daddy longlegs, and has sucked out a significant proportion of his bodily fluids.
I'm glad spiders are such little suckers. There's no way we could take 'em in a fight if they weren't.
In a mostly unrelated story, a couple of days after I took this picture (yesterday, actually), I was cleaning off our front porch, which has a mere eighteen square feet or so of surface, and saw somewhere between thirty and fifty spiders of numerous varieties crawling about, scattering as I used a broom to sweep away their webs. Thankfully, none of them were even half an inch long, and even as I watched, one of the cats who hangs out around our house because we feed them ate one.
Spiders are scary, but they're good eats, too.
The other day, I noticed this scene above a bedroom door. Since there's no way in heck you can tell what's actually happening, I'll explain: The little speck is a spider. The bigger speck with all the junk around it is a daddy longlegs. The spider, despite being smaller than the daddy longlegs (even ignoring the giant legs of the longlegs), has totally killed that daddy longlegs, and has sucked out a significant proportion of his bodily fluids.
I'm glad spiders are such little suckers. There's no way we could take 'em in a fight if they weren't.
In a mostly unrelated story, a couple of days after I took this picture (yesterday, actually), I was cleaning off our front porch, which has a mere eighteen square feet or so of surface, and saw somewhere between thirty and fifty spiders of numerous varieties crawling about, scattering as I used a broom to sweep away their webs. Thankfully, none of them were even half an inch long, and even as I watched, one of the cats who hangs out around our house because we feed them ate one.
Spiders are scary, but they're good eats, too.
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