16) So How ARE Ants Built?

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Well, do ants go about collecting worn out parts and building each other out of them? remember we found lots of subtle parts inside our insects! not even sure what makes a DISCRETE part in an insect, and how are they put together? we didn't find nuts and bolts!

Ants don't do it this way AT ALL. we know how ants do it. Ants come from EGGS. We can find some ant eggs and dissect them under a microscope. We would NOT find any parts! but if we wait a few days or weeks, and dissected that egg we would see parts! WERE on earth did they come from? then of course we wait longer and the egg turns into a grub. doesn't look like an ant at all, but it does have parts. at this point the other ants feed the grub. but they don't feed it ant parts! they feed it nectar, and chewed up insects. are there parts in the chewed up insects? sort of, but mangled...

very mysterious.

let's try to take a closer look: show stop motion photos of development: cells! A developing ant is a little confusing, so perhaps start off with C. elegans or some such so we can see the distinct cells. what we find is that it all seems to be made of CELLS. the cells are the basic reproducing building blocks, and they move around and respond to each other. They create each other and lay down systems of fibers and pull each other around into shapes and induce each other into becoming different cell types and communicate with each other...

All the while the cells are SOMEHOW absorbing food from the yolk of the egg to make all themselves and the fibers... but there are NO cells in the yolk, no parts that we can see! How do they do it? what kind of mysterious creatures are these cells? Maybe they are the ultimate robots that we must learn to build?