"Supersoldier Ant"?
"Supersoldier Ant"?
Well if they want to sell the rights to a movie producer or a video game company, they are going to have to do a lot better than THAT.
Researchers in Canada have created a new type of supersoldier ant by activating genetic material from long-dead forms of life. The team, led by professor Ehab Abouheif of the Department of Biology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, were studying ants from the genus pheidole. There are nearly 1,200 diferent species …
Eh, Forgive me if I'm missing something (my foot-in-mouth sense is tingling a bit here, I admit), but are these not what we've generally been calling, um, soldier ants? Where does the "super" bit come in? Good ol' churnalistic hyperbole?
Icon because this sounds like the prequel to Phase IV, although it might be worth it if we get aurochs steaks...
was initially proposed by one Trofim Lysenko during the reign of Stalin, if I remember my Soviet history correctly. His work was largely discredited by Western biologists, although anybody who dared to question Lysenko's ideas in the USSR generally earned themselves a one-way ticket to the gulag.
Are we to believe this charlatan was actually right after all?
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Restoring recently destroyed species does not seem like a wholly unreasonable idea to me. Inevitably people like you are going to draw parallels with pulp science fiction without actually considering the whole 'fiction' thing.
Also, they probably weren't hunted for fun, but more because they were made of tasty, tasty meat. Compare and contrast modern pigs with wild boar who are particularly aggressive, but also quite tasty.
The good thing about this type of modification—unless I badly misunderstood—is that the effect should only last one generation. In fact, supersoldier caste ants probably don't reproduce at all. But that detail aside, they're not actually changing the DNA just applying hormones to activate latent characteristics. It's not entirely unlike, how man can take hormones and grow breasts, I suppose.
Please don't develop methods to activate dormant characteristics in humans such as over-sized jaws, long sharp fangs, abnormally sized eyeballs and pointy ears. We all know that Twilight fans, Trekkies, anime cosplayers and various assorted wankers would abuse this science.
That they wouldn't be able to pass these characteristics on to their offspring would be the very least we could then hope for! (then again you may ask, what offspring?)
Now you've gone and done it. There are military brass all over the world that are drooling on their desks (well, more so that usual). How long before we can expect these trials to move to humans (or, have they already)?!?
Dave
P.S. I want the one with the overly sized...err, never mind!