Savage ant casually throws another ant off a table
The animal kingdom is a brutal unforgiving place. A barbaric place where, at any given moment, a scene from 300 can break out, and it's no big deal.
This is exactly what Twitter user Mike Sanchez found out the other day when filming some ants on Snapchat.
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Dear god. That is called "Mufasa-ing" and it's one of mother nature's most cold-blooded maneuvers.
The internet was quick to react, as always, offering their own Savage Ant™️ videos and some very on point comparisons.
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Only '90s kids will remember spending hours of your time dropping this baby penguin off the cliff to its death.
Of course there is a perfectly scientific reason behind this behavior in ants.
According to National Geographic:
Housekeeping can be a matter of life and death—at least for social animals like ants, a new paper suggests.
According to a study published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters, common red ants (Myrmica rubra) that were prevented from removing their nestmates' corpses died more frequently than those allowed to bring out their dead.
Many insects habitually remove dead nestmates from their colony. Scientists have long assumed that this behavior is based on a need to keep the rest of the colony healthy.
So there you have it. They discard their dead so that they themselves don't die. Which is still pretty savage.
I think Bill Nye says it best:
