Do they give the food to the larvae by trophalaxis?
Or do they put the larvae next to the meal just like Myrmecia do?
Do Messor have a social stomach?
At min 01:00 you can see the gaster full of water+sugar
At min 01:45 you can see a closeup view of a larvae (moving)
At min 03:00 you can see trophallaxis between nurses
Here is a macro-video, the queen is super beautiful <3 https://streamable.com/fr9az
Trophallaxis
It starts with this sweet heavy warmth pooling around your genitals, moving opium-sluggish through your velvet diaphragm and into your heavy, heavy, heavier lungs. A pleasant drowning in the deep, viscous waters, syrupy and thick and claustrophobically comforting like the reassuring embrace of a mother. Oh, how you are absorbed; your body a moon, a planet, a universe insular yet all-encompassing, evenly distributed across the tender spiral arms of a soul you forgot you lost. Your hands stretch and stretch and stretch until you can hold all that ever was. You hear them singing, great hymns of splendor and promise, and it is you who was singing all along, a choir of one and of many. Your heart is a sphere and the pulsing is now gentle pink drips stipple-rippling through the pale yellows of all creation and you forget you never even were.
It ends instantly, and you crash back through a thousand-thousand panes of glass into an uncomfortable body. You’ll stare at your hands for a moment, confused at the notion of being forcefully compressed into the harsh physics of your flesh. You are convinced you knew it all, that you held everything but it slips away like so many grains of sand through your numb, awkward fingers, a fading dream you struggle in vain to grasp and cherish and hold close. Identity courses back through your veins, defining you, confining you into this “person”. This will pass in a few moments, though, leaving you with nothing more than the vague ideation of now being a fragment shorn off something much greater.
There is more though, if you want it. They will always give you more if you want it, and of course you want it. You want to be there with them, with you, with all. They will welcome you home.
Our lab had always been small. We were a microcosm of the agriculture department: daring to research conservation ecology at a university renowned for producing the latest and greatest pest control techniques. The other labs amiably ribbed us for being bleeding hearts, hippies, do-gooders. Always a friendly rivalry, though we never could compete with the massive funding the other labs secured. Finally, last year, we had our first big break: a $250,000 grant from the government to research endemism in the sky islands of New Mexico-- little isolated mountaintops, left alone to marinade in the forces of evolution for millennia. Every species there was unique and found nowhere else, and not a single one described
... keep reading on reddit ➡
