It’s no secret to anyone with an email inbox that the real internet is shadowed by a fake internet. The fake internet is full of fake blogs, fake web sites, fake discussion forums, and fake emails. All full of real links to real companies who pay someone money to increase their visibility by gaming the Google rankings using vast and vacuous link farms.
Anyway. I usually ignore this parallel universe, but this morning I found something entertaining and ant-related. Repeated instances of what looks like a bad student essay were splashed across dozens of sites in the spamoverse, each with minor word changes. I won’t do the spammers any favors by linking, but for your amusement here’s one of them:
Ants are highly long-living insects capable of thriving even in the most inhospitable of environments in the world. An ant colony ordinarily consists of several hundred thousands to over a million worker ants, thousands of soldier ant, and a solitary queen. Outdoors, ants are valued as indicators of environmental change. However, the ants are viewed as pests once they encroach upon human habitations.
Ants are one of the most common creatures in the world & are of different types. In spite of their small They are small but terrible; they could pose a threat to animals and even humans.
Ant behavior may be different according to their class. The size of ants range from two to 25 millimeters & their color may vary from red to brown or black.
Army ants and driver ants are highly evolved ants. Army ants can be seen in South America and driver ants can be found in Africa. Unlike other species, they do not have permanent nests. These colonies reproduce by two ways – nuptial flights or fission.
Ants that build their nests in trees by putting leaves together are known as weaver ants. These creatures first force the leaves together with a bridge of workers and then they sew the leaves by pressing silk producing larvae on the leaves.
Honeypot ants generally have enlarged bellies. They usually live in hot, dry places such as Australia, Africa, North America & they can be found in deserts as well. Some places considered them as a great delicacy.
Leaf cutter ants live only within their colony & feed exclusively on fungus. These ants come in various sized classes to carry out several duties that are to be performed in the colony.
Another unique type of ant is the fire ant. These ants have a sac of poison that is filled with piperidine alkaloids.
Finally, one of the biggest & most primitive types of ants are the Australian bulldog ants. Being of a primitive variety, they have only one chromosome.
That last paragraph made me laugh. It’s like they custom-tailored it to push all my buttons.
Sheesh! I feel for you, man.
But wait, maybe not all — I note a couple of unpushed buttons :
– no idiosyncratic, baseless phylogeny
– no unsupported interpretations of the superorganism concept
So, maybe it could have been worse?!?!
*head explodes*
Crap. How did you get a copy of my Masters thesis?
Gah, any idiot would know that even nucleomorph genomes seem to be unable to shrink beyond 3 chromosomes, duh!
So the author would agree with my proposal to name ciliates as the “Higher Eukaryotes” (twitch), considering their macronuclei have thousands upon thousands of chromosomes? Sweet!
And why the hell would someone send that around as spam? o_O