Antarctica

myrmecophilous

If you’re described as ‘myrmecophilous’, then you’re associated with, benefited by or fond of (hopefully not in a weird way) ants. It’s a scientific term that describes the positive relationships ants have with other species like butterflies, crickets, beetles and mites, all of which help them be good at staying alive (that’s the science). For example, butterflies belonging to the family Lycaenidae (which is almost 6,000 species worldwide), are myrmecophiles. In return for protection from predators, some caterpillars have developed dew patches, small button-like spots on their backs, that ooze a thick sugary fluid that the ants go nuts for, while others have a nectar gland that pumps out the same sweet goodness (sounds gross, I know). So the ants get their fix, and the caterpillars get bodyguards (even if they are all hopped up on sugar).

The word myrmecophilous has Greek roots. ‘Myrmec’ means ‘ant’, while the ‘phile’ ending comes from ‘philos’, which means to love. Like extremophile, galanthophile and lots of other nasty words we won’t mention here.

Okay, ant facts.

  • There are over 12,000 ant species worldwide.

  • The bullet ant is said to have the most painful sting in the world – it feels like being hit by a hammer. Just kidding, it feels like a bullet, obviously.

  • A single ant can carry 50 times its own bodyweight. And they even work together to move stuff they can’t manage on their own.

  • Ants can be found on every single continent except Antarctica, which is mental considering it’s the only continent that literally starts with ‘ant’.

  • The biggest ants’ nest ever found is over 3,700 miles wide. Yep, you did read that right. Called the ‘Argentine Ant Supercolony’ (good name for a band), it goes from northern Italy through the south of France, and out to the western coast of Spain. Many ant experts think it’s actually much much bigger than this and stretches across the globe – that’s because Argentine ants from opposite sides of the world recognise each other (which I think basically means they don’t try to kill each other), leading them to think they all live in one utterly ginormous colony. Here’s hoping they don’t rise up and take over the world… actually maybe that would be better.

  • I ate a stir-fry in a restaurant in Cambodia that had ants in it (as an ingredient – it wasn’t a really dirty restaurant) – although I didn’t realise until I was about halfway through. I thought they were saffron or something like that. It was very nice, but once I did realise, I couldn’t finish it.

astrobleme

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash.

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash.

An astrobleme is the name given to a site that’s been hit by a meteorite. Or, to put it in more science-y terms, an ‘impact structure’. This isn’t to be confused with an ‘impact crater’ which is, well, just the hole-y bit – the impact structure includes all the deformed bedrock and sediment that’s underneath the hole (assuming I’ve understood Wikipedia correctly of course).

I like the word ‘astrobleme’ because it’s super literal. Its etymology translates as ‘star wound’ – ‘astron’ is Greek for star, and ‘bleme’ (also Greek) means ‘throw of a missile; wound caused by a missile’. It was coined by an American geologist called Robert S Dietz (1914–1995). His most notable feat was identifying the Sudbury Basin (Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, not the one in Suffolk which is just up the road from where I type this) as an ancient astrobleme – the second (or third, depending on which website you look at) biggest in the world.

But what’s the biggest, I hear you cry? Well, that honour belongs to the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It’s just over 300km (186.4 miles in old money) across. That means that the meteor that hit it was over 15km (9.3 miles) in diameter. Don’t panic though – it happened a VERY long time ago in the Paleoproterozoic Era which was between 2,500 and 1,600 million years ago.

The Vrefort crater has competition for the top spot from the Wilkes Land crater, which is underneath the ice caps in Antarctica and is as yet unverified. If it is an astrobleme then it’s a massive 480 km (300 miles) across. That means that the meteorite that caused it was at least 55km (34.5 miles) in diameter, which is four or five times wider than the Chicxulub impactor (good name for a band) AKA the one that killed all the dinosaurs, and also three-quarters of all the plant and animal species on Earth. Fuck.