The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
—Henry Ford
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Ask not what your next President can do, Ask what you can do for your tribe
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
TOD:Europe
- UK - Stansted Airport expansion gets go-ahead
- RAMseS: a new agricultural paradigm
- RAMseS: a new agricultural paradigm
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Ah, good link Chris. Yes, I meant leaf-cutter ants but typed carpenter ants. One of the hazards of posting with too little sleep. I had been unaware of the complexity of the process involving specialized ant-poo enzymes though. There's no reason that evolution would select for simplicity per se, and moreover if it were simple to digest cellulose and produce net energy you'd expect a lot more organisms to have the ability as a fallback metabolic adjunct. Anything we find going on in ant and termite guts is likely to be complex or we'd see that it had evolved multiple times in different species. (Idle ponder - why is this only significantly seen in social insects - foraging efficiency and marginal EROEI?)
That seems like a good question. How far can we get with the idea that what in social insects is called cultivation, is called parasitism in the loners? Some wasps are evolved to lay eggs in caterpillers. If they were more social they might raise the caterpillers? Perhaps it is just a matter of needing to devote constant attention so the social structure is required?
Chris