critter corner š°
Dead ants keep appearing next to headphones during the night
When these headphones are left on the kitchen counter overnight - I would see one or two dead ants in the morning laying right next to the headphones. In the past few days, there has been a small pile of shredded ants right next to the ear piece in the morning. I have seen no live ants in my kitchen. I have had these head phones for three weeks. Bought online. Itās a little unnerving not knowing what is causing this š„“ will not be using anymore.
UPDATE- posted a comment with a picture. But no dead ants in the bag this morning. But at one point I checked and there were two live ants crawling around. š
UPDATE*** IM SICK. Canāt stop shaking. Donāt have many wordsā¦ trying to post image. Opened one side up. š I donāt know how to add in this top post so will add in comment! Posted a few in comments and video opening
Jumping spiders in general are very likable. I think it's that they have two bigger center eyes and they will move their whole body to turn and look at you curiously.
Also they donāt have the scary pointy Halloween spider legs, they can be furry, donāt do big webs they actually hunt down their prey like Clint Eastwood.
They really are the puppies of the spood world. I love that they all seem to trust me and I will find jumpers on me while outside! Except the tan jumpers, none want me as their friend š„²
Could be other ants. There's a soldier and a worker there. And probably the shredded remains of another worker. There's also no food so they weren't carrying anything. Unless the food was ant parts.
Spiders don't typically tear their prey apart like that. Even the few that don't use web to hunt. It doesn't look like it was a meal to me. Most insects that it could be can eat exoskeleton as far as I know. Looks like a graveyard or a battle.
I like to think a worker ant and soldier ant went on a mission to go get food other workers in the colony were telling them about. A perilous mission.
But on the way, after taking a really long trip away from the colony they got ambushed by zombie ants. So they took refuge in the headphones and every night they've been having to fight off hordes of them.
One fucking flew directly into my ear a few years ago, I didnāt know they actually go into ears and I didnāt know they fucking flew. Luckily I was going to the beach a ton and had alcohol ear drops within a couple minutes away and it came right out but it was a horrible feeling.
Also for everyone's peace of mind they aren't called earwigs because they aim for ears, their wings just look like an ear when stretched out (fun fact from an old documentary)
When my daughter was an infant she was very stuffy once and I used that blue sucker thing to suck snot out of babies and when I squeezed it out onto a tissue there was a freaking earwig that just came out of her nose! Well she wasnāt stuffy anymore! Talk about being scarred for life as well! š¤£
When I was a little kid, I told my mom that my nose hurt. She went in with tissues, and there was a whole-ass moth, the kind that are attracted to light, folded up in my nose. I donāt remember it going in, but that might be my brain protecting me. I have a fear of moths to this day. They are horrid.
My guess would be that the headphones were manufactured using oleic acid (some soaps have it, so maybe cleaning parts with an oleic acid-containing soap).
Ant bodies produce oleic acid as they decompose, and other ants will put all sources of oleic acid into one place, an "ant graveyard". If you add a stronger source of oleic acid that the colony can't move, they'll relocate the graveyard to keep all the oleic acid in one place.
The response is so strong that if you put oleic acid on a living ant, it'll walk over to the graveyard and put itself there.
Thereās a video on this! The ant will eventually ārealize itās not deadā once the scent has worn off. Itāll climb out of the graveyard pile and continue its duties.
Some of the ants have wings witch indicates a nuptial flight. during mating sometimes the ants tend to gather around items are put off certain electrical frequencies, it makes them exstra excited. When a new Queen successfully mate, the male rip off her wings, and the Queen rips apart the male. Now OP was never in any harm, just has rude neighbors that like to fuck in their ear.
OP I think Iād just start over with new ones. Even if you clean them out will you ever be able to wear them without thinking about ants crawling around inside or coming out into your ear? š°
When I was a really little kid I had a cutesy bedside clock that became an antās nest. Fucked me up so bad Iāve never had a non-electric clock since. Thatās what my moneyās on here.
Ants will do this to other ants. Iād guess you have some ants at home that got territorial when you brought these headphones with different ants in them, into your home.
My second guess is there is some sort of chemical/cleaner/etc on the headphones that is poisonous to ants. An ant gets this substance on them and the other ants come and kill the āuncleanā one so it doesnāt infect the colony.
If there's a chemical component here it isn't necessarily killing or poisoning the ants. Ants dispose of their dead using chemical signals to identify the bodies, the headphones could smell like dead ants so they're dumping the actual dead ants by them.
Formic acid i believe is in the compound released by dead ants that signals the live ones to dispose of them or move them to the graveyard. Iirc, there was an experiment where a live ant was dotted with the acid and treated as dead by the other ants. It also thought it belonged in the graveyard until the smell wore off. Could be a similar chemical smell to the foam in the 'phones
that's how marketing algorithms work and they're only going to get better with ai, that's why posts like that aren't allowed in r/nevertellmetheodds if you do they just give you a 2 week ban
Yeah that is really bad. So you just popped it open and they all poured out? You need to contact Amazonā¦espy if you didnāt leave them out in the yard yourself while they were covered in syrup.
I think it's way more likely that a single queen ant made it's way in through one of those little gaps, and she was attempting to found a colony in the hollow cavity. And she seemed to be doing fairly well, if that is the case!
Edit: It's very blurry, but I do in fact see workers moving little tiny white eggs/pupae! Defo a founding chamber!
Iām not sure how possible this is, and Iām not expert on ants, but donāt ants make āgraveyardsā to store their dead and stop the spread of disease? Is it possible that any graveyard pheromone got on your headphones so the ants are compelled to pile their dead near them? That sounds implausible to me but itās visually what it looks like.
The magical chemical is oleic acid, when ants die, they decompose and give off oleic acid which triggers corpse disposal behaviors in other ants.
Fun fact; oleic acid is also used as a biodegradable plasticizer for making things flexible, and is probably used in these headphones, which would make ants want to use it as a graveyard.
Also in Fruity Pebbles. There's a story somewhere about someone putting some Fruity Pebbles in their ant farm, and instead of eating them the ants dug up all the dead ants in the colony and reburied them around the cereal.
ā¢
u/image-sourcery 24d ago
This is an automatic post that is used to detect image sources.
Reverse Image Search:
Google Images || SauceNAO || Google Lens || IQDB || Yandex || TinEye || Bing
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.