this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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For the curious:
Speaking to MailOnline, Willot confirmed this 'was indeed a tricky procedure. They are very reactive and won't stop struggling once caught, preventing any shaving attempt if not anaesthetised.'
This was done by exposing the ants for a few seconds to carbon dioxide, then strapping them down firmly.
Hairs were removed using a high-power binocular telescope and a very sharp blade.
'It's the same as shaving your own chin: the scalpel blade has to move in the opposite direction of the hair's growth. It has to be a delicate and gentle motion,' said Willot.
After practising on large soldier ants, he found that a smaller worker ant could be entirely shaved in an hour of delicate work.
He estimates around 40 ants were shaved altogether to produce seven good examples for the experiments.
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The world is a really interesting place. I would have never guessed that there are people out there that shave ants.
It's probably just the one guy. He probably only spent a total of 100 hours doing it so he's not even an expert.
He's probably the world's subject-matter expert on shaving ants.
No, you need 10,000 hours of experience to be an expert. He's just an ant-shaving hobbyist at best.
We've finally gotten to gatekeeping shaving ants 💪💪
A hobbyist in a field no-one else has explored is a leading expert.
It's a joke, you ant-shaver.
The average person has shaved one ant, but only because Dr. Ant-Shaver Willot has shaved 7 Billion ants and therefore he should be dismissed as a statistical outlier.
"average person shaves 3 ants per year" factoid actualy just statistical error, average person shaves 0 ants per year. Ants Georg, who lives in cave & shaves 10,000 per day is an outlier adn should not have been counted
I think I did pretty well reciting it from memory and swapping out the details.
people who get paid to shave ants, no less
I don't know why I needed to know, but I did indeed need to know. Thanks.
*Antaesthetised.
Ant aestheticized
get that holier-than-thou extra-useless-letters british spelling outta here