Posted by allisonm on August 2, 2002, at 8:01:01
In reply to Re: How are those Texas ANTS doing?, posted by Phil on August 2, 2002, at 6:06:54
Ugh! I have a biology test today that includes ants (arthropods, which are bilateral coelomate protostomes). Ants have chitin exoskeletons, which is what makes them go crunch when you step on them.
Last night (early this morning) while I was trying to sleep, I had a horrible dream aboout a giant worm two friends lived with in a house. They were going out and I had to watch the apartment upstairs where they lived. This giant worm lived downstairs somewhere and if not avoided/contained would kill/eat its human prey (humans are placental mammals from the vertebrata subphylum of the chordata phylum, which are bilateral coelamate deuterostomes, which means that our anuses formed before our mouths did. People don't like to know that in evolutionary history their anuses formed first.) Anyway, I was supposed to stay and watch the place while they went out, and they were giving me tips on how not to get killed. The giant worm (Kinda like the worms in Dune, as I remember) was outside the door(s) of the apartment writhing around knocking into everything and making loud, hollow screaming noises sort of like an elephant but kinda blood-curdling. It was a little disconcerting.
I would guess that they were from the phylum platyhelmethes, class cestoda (tapeworms), or else they were annelids like from the oligochaetae class (earthworms) but if so they were mean and tough carnivorous bastards and I don't think of earthworms that way. They were probably nematodes (roundworms, parasites), which are bilateral and pseudocoelamate, meaning that their body cavities are not enclosed by mesoderm. My roommate, who is from Kenya, was telling me about the large tapeworm that came out of one of her little brothers years ago when he was defecating in a small hole he'd dug near the house (before their father built a latrine). The story gets worse, but I'll leave it at that.
If humans had rather have had their mouths form first, they should have become protostomes instead. Protostomes include the arthropods (arachnids, crustaceans, chilopoda - centipedes, diplopoda - millipedes, and the insects like the ants. I had to get the ants back in here somewhere), the annelids (soil and marine worms and the leeches), bracheopods (lampshells), or the molluscs (bivalve clams and oysters, gastropod snails and slugs or cephalopod octupi or squid. I keep a large snail (apple snail) as a pet with three tetras (osteichthyes/vertebrata/chordata/deuterastome/coelamate/bilateria/eumetazoa/animalia) and sometimes think if I had a home like I have given it, I might not mind being a snail. Too bad that protostomes don't know or care their mouths formed before their anuses. The information is wasted on them. They don't even care. Sponges (porifera/parazoa/animalia) care even less because they don't even have mouths or anuses let alone nervous systems. So if a person says s/he is a sponge (ie, likes to absorb information - something I am having trouble with at the moment), they wouldn't even have a brain (much less a notochord) with which to process it all.
Oh gawd, 3.5 more hours to go.
poster:allisonm
thread:27702
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020728/msgs/27825.html