STOP FUCKING POSTING CENSORED SHIT
Yeah, right? As if they were censoring only the victims’ personal info
Does everyone agree that ladybugs smell terrible??!
Not all of them do. I always thought of them as “good” and “bad” ladybugs. The bad ones stink. I have a feeling it correlates with lighter color. More orange than red. But this is purely anecdotal 😋
This reminds me of when I chatted with someone who had synesthesia.
If you live in the US, the orange ones may be Asian lady beetles, an invasive species. They don’t smell great.
The ones that come into your home in the winter are probably Asian lady beetles, as true ladybugs overwinter outside.
Yes, beetles in general don’t smell great to me. They leave a fecal-like scent on my fingers when I hold them (Which I’ve always assumed is some sort of musk and not actual feces). I can smell ants too, but it’s only when they’re scared: They seem to release a chemical that smells to me like Windex the moment they realize they’re possibly in danger. I didn’t know that made me special, but I do know that others might not be able to smell it as I’ve had conversations about this with people who didn’t know wtf I was talking about. I’ve heard that it might be formic acid? Not sure.
Funny because I don’t normally have a very sensitive nose. And I’m not a super-taster, cilantro tastes like cilantro to me (Fresh and herbally).
Yes! I’m not super sensitive to them, but one time in school I had one land on me and curiosity got the better of me. Never again!
That’s the most useless censoring of the word “Fuck” I have ever seen 😅
Why did you censor a small mushroom?
That mushroom is average-sized my good sir.
What’cha got there, m8?
It looked like it was originally meant to censore word much smalller
What is this, censoring for ants!?
i can smell fruit flies and i wish i couldnt
Are we talking formic acid from crushed ants or just there is an ant around and they can smell it?
Not just crushed ants, I smell it when they’re scared and running, but undamaged, as well. Calm ants though, they don’t smell to me. I always assumed it was a warning chemical to other ants, or a deterrent for predators with more sensitive sniffers than I.
Exactly, ants literally spray formic acid at anything that threatens them
I smell it either way but it’s stronger when they’re crushed.
Sometimes science do be cruel like that
That’s true of most animals
Whatever, keep your ant-smelling superpower, I’m not jealous. At least cilantro doesn’t taste like soap to me! :P
We need a study on if that’s the divide. If you can smell ants you also think cilantro tastes like soap
Cilantro: tastes like soap
Can smell ants: no
Sorry, I’m a counterpoint. I got the worst of both.
But do ants taste like soap or cilantro
They taste kind of almost vinegarey
I’m with you. Can’t smell ants, but cilantro is soapy.
There are lots of little genetic quirks out there. I experience Arnold’s Reflex, that is, I cough when I stick a cotton swab in my left ear canal. (Only my left. My right doesn’t react.) There’s also the Photic Sneeze Reflex, which is where you sneeze when looking at light. I don’t have that, but around 35% of the population does.
I’m sure there are countless more little things like this that people just haven’t talked about/gathered enough data on yet.
Every single time I walk outside, 3 sneezes sometimes more because of the sun. Although I’ve never met somebody else who does the same
I learned about the Photic Sneeze Reflex when discussing the frustration of cancelled sneezes (you know, when you feel one coming on, but then it just doesn’t happen and it leaves you feeling weird.) He told me, “When that happens, I just look at a light.” I had no idea what he meant. Meanwhile, he thought it was normal for everyone. We both learned something that day.
An entry for ACHOO syndrome in the National Library of Medicine, by a Laura Dean (I think?) from 2012 claims 1 in 4 people will be pushed over the edge to a sneeze when they already have one on the edge, but “pure” photic sneezing is “far less common” although there is no number given, so I have no idea how rare or common it is to just straight up sneeze from light without already having to sneeze
My mom does that, but I believe it may be a sign of a tick, or at least that’s what my father once told me. Worth checking out in any case.
Either I’ve had a tick for the past 19 years, or its unrelated in my case
I didn’t know about the cough reflex. I’ll have to check if it’s both sides. Can you taste iodine? It’s present in hot pink food dye, making things like pink peeps taste worse than yellow or blue for me
I can smell ants (but they aren’t disgusting just sour) and cilantro is delicious.
Can smell ants, love cilantro, can’t smell stinkbugs.
Stinkbugs only smell bad if you scare them. They never smell bad to me, either, but I also try not to scare insects.
Idk if scooping them up and putting them outside is scary to them, but I’m told people can smell them just from being in the same room with them, or crushing them, and I’ve done (or been near) all of the above yet never smelled one. And they’re constantly sneaking in my house so I should have by now I think.
It’s smarter to release them back outside because crushing them releases a pharamone that attract more stink bugs. Ants and bees do the same too.
When the ant wars come you’ll be the first to go.
Eh we survived the last one in '54, we’ll survive this one. We even made a Doc about it called “Them!”
Maybe it’s you who has bo and just can’t smell it. Everyone else has been hinting.
Do stink bugs smell like BO?
Though when I do, I do smell it, and I shower regularly, and it only comes up when talking about stinkbugs, so I’m doubting your hypothesis regardless.
I can’t smell ants, and cilantro tastes soapy. However, I do have dry earwax and my armpits don’t smell. (Which is just spurious information to your hypothesis.)
but can you roll your tongue? <insert more asenine genetic things here>
I cannot!
I can smell ants strongly and have an aversion to them, and cilantro tastes wonderful to me.
this is your thread! Go nuts!
Exactly! Cilantro tastes like soap to me, but my kids love it. That is so weird. Ant smell and probably snake smell are the same I bet. I have heard old people say they can smell a snake around.
I am afraid that cilantro does taste like soap to me but that people around me have been telling me long enough that it’s tasty that I started to like it.
Tldr: I now like the taste of soap.
i’ve had a similar experience, at first it was incredibly soapy to me. now i genuinely like it and i don’t taste the soap anymore. how could that work though if it’s a genetic trait? could this be stronger in some variants of cilantro? or even on the culantro/cilantro divide?
I guess we are partly nature, partly nurture?
Same experience here.
I can kind of… plug my sinuses if I’m eating something unappealing? Maybe that’s something you’ve unconsciously started doing when you eat cilantro now?
I’m slightly in this. I love cilantro, but when I heard it tastes like soap to some I just thought “I guess a little bit it does taste that way… but the rest of it tastes better.”
Haha. Exactly.
I’m tired of microblog screenshots that self-censor 😕
Also that’s cool. I’m pretty sure I cannot smell ants. But it’s also possible there are ants everywhere I go, so I can’t discern what part of the background smells are the ants.
No smell has ever elevated when I near an ant colony, and I see wild ant colonies all the time. So I’m pretty sure I can’t.
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
My Jewish Jesus appreciates your dedication to the cause.
I was watching “deep dives” on Youtube yesterday and was getting confused by all the censoring. Even the word “sex” was censored, and like… what? Not just SA (which I understand censoring), but sex itself? In a video ostensibly designed for an adult (or at least teenage) audience?
It’s hard to follow a story when words get censored that you don’t expect to get censored. In my mind I think something much worse is being said, and have to pause and rewind to ensure I understood correctly. The best part is, the creator wasn’t even from the US, land of the Puritans. I expect Europeans not to be afraid of sex, but I guess this is what Youtube is doing to the world?
That degree of censorship usually implies the content is dual posted to TikTok in my experience
That’s weird, because the videos I watch are 1-2 hours long (or longer.) Informational deep dives are practically the opposite of Tik Tok.
I mean it’s my general experience, not a hard rule. Just because the TikTok algorithm actively promotes content with high interaction without any requirement for accuracy doesn’t mean there’s no educational information on the platform.
Alternatives:
- condensed clips are crossposted to tiktok
- self censorship to the strictest level to minimize risk of demonetization
- self censorship to avoid a mature rating, so viewers don’t have to log in to watch
- self censorship to the strictest degree based on all popular platforms’ requirements because that is “the internet”
People have always doe weird censorship things as both users and admin. Forums used to **** everything. Then things were free. The big companies started facing public pressure for beings the hosts of content and locked down again.
People complaining about the censorship is significantly more annoying than the actual tiny little blur on one single letter in one single word.
Still not as annoying as the people who complain about the complaints.
Homo Orycteropus.
I think I can hear ants. People probably think I’m crazy. Like if you bend down and get your face really close to their trail. It’s like a buzzing sound. Like static on an old TV. Creepy as fuck.
Could it just be the reflections of ambient noise you also get when you hold your ear close to any surface? The old “If you hold a seashell to your ear, you can hear the ocean” kind of thing.
I usually can’t but when hiking in fall we came to a big anthill and you could hear the leaves rustling below their little legs.
I was so exited as I had never heard that before.
Ants definitely produce sound when they walk. And why wouldn’t they?
You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say you can hear buzzing sound of ants. I don’t doubt you, because why would you lie about something like that, but I would like to hear more people agree they can hear this and I want to read a scientific study.
That person is a liar!! I listen to ants all the time and the only sound they make is smooth jazz.
He said ants, not aunts.
Oh my bad, I’m hard of hearing. Been listening to too many aunts.
All the ones on my block sound like Aphex Twin.
I’m also terrified of having insects inside of the house. So it’s possible this is some kind of psychological reaction (?) rather than actually hearing them? But to me it “sounds” as I describe in the above post. Maybe someone can find something more scientific, like a study, I too would be curious.
I never knew about this. Is this the same gene which makes people like/dislike bitter foods?
Years ago at a place I worked at, food manufacturers, the R&D team did a taste workshop. 5 cups of flavours, salt, bitter, water, umami, sweet. The bitter one just tasted of water to me. They called it “bitter blind”
Probably makes you easier to poison. I will keep that in mind.
There’s a couple different chemical compounds that can activate your bitter receptors (caffeine for instance) but there are a few bitter chemicals like Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) or N-Propylthiouracil (PROP) that have been linked to variations in a specific gene (TAS2R38). Where I used to work we used PROP strips you’d just put on your tongue to categorize participants into tasters, non-tasters, and potential super-tasters. If it tasted like nothing, you didn’t have the genetic variant. If it tasted like bitterness, it could either be not that bad or, for example in my experience, it’s really really terrible and takes some effort to remove from the tongue.
I can smell ants and it’s a pretty weird smell, but I don’t get any of the bitter food problems that some people have with certain vegetables.
With the exception of mushrooms. For some reason mushrooms spark that same sensitivity to ant scents, it’s a similar sickly scent and makes me think of decay and loamy undergrowth and is very unappetizing so I’ve never enjoyed mushrooms.
decay and loamy undergrowth
That’s about the closest descriptor I can think of as well. Ants are more metallic to my scent than mushies but that’s it.
I tried truffles once and that came closer to tasting the way ants smell than regular mushrooms. As you said, more metallic, sharper and more “alien.” People seem to like truffle a lot, I guess I will save money in my life by not having that indulgence.
I haven’t tried truffles.
Funnily enough I like mushrooms. The smell of ants never used to bother me that much either; finding out it’s selective is intriguing.
Some people can smell ants. Some people can smell Parkinson’s disease.
I don’t think I can smell either of those but I can smell B.O.
I had no idea it was a genetic thing that not everyone has. It’s pretty awesome that after fifty years slogging through life, I still run across cool new shit like this
Your part of the ten thousand…
Wow that’s really weird because i thought ants were supposed to be everywhere - at least in summertime when you go outside. If they smell that bad then it must be unbearable just walking around places in the city.
I can only smell them if I sniff a crushed one up close. It’s been a long time - I don’t step on bugs on purpose.
I don’t think they’re talking about the dead/distressed ant smell. To the best of my knowledge, everyone can smell that. They’re talking about a general smell of ants
Wait, everyone can smell dead ants? Pretty sure I can’t
They smell like paint thinner
they smell funky, a bit like a salty battery doused with acid, if it makes sense?
I can’t smell them, but I can hear them
It could be the same smell, maybe just a different concentration of formic acid.
And no, I can’t smell anything from dead or distressed ants. I’ve never smelled anything from an ant, either dead or alive. It’s definitely not an “everyone can smell that” thing.
Edit: I just read this comment which says it’s not formic acid. Though they don’t cite any sources (yet), so I don’t really know.
Same, never smelled ants.
And I’ve watched ants a lot when I was a kid. I still do sometimes.
I used to even bring pieces of food from the pantry to give to the ants.
I’m pretty sure that’s the smell they’re talking about, they make more of it when disturbed or crushed but it’s always a tiny bit there. But pretty sure that’s the smell they’re speaking of.
The reason I doubt that is because I can’t smell ants “all the time”. And I can definitely smell them when they’re disturbed. But most people who talk about smelling ants describe the smell as “damp” or “mouldy” or “earthy”, and I have never smelled an ant that smells like that.
The only smell I’ve ever smelled from them is acrid and acidic, and that only happens when they’re disturbed or dead.
Is it the formic acid?
Has to be, it’s got that same “bite” that other acids have, only a little more earthy
I cant smell ants but I can “smell” formic acid. Even diluted formic acid is so much more pungent and terrible then vinegar, so I doubt its that…
I went and read up on it, was going to edit in , but I’ll just do it here.
Apparently it isn’t the formic acid, it’s other chemicals, and not all ants produce them. I have smelled what they’re talking about, or at least three descriptions of one kind of ant smelling like funky cheese is something I have run into.
So you’re totally right, and my assumption was wrong.
But damn, formic acid, even dilute, really is pungent. Nose wrinkling, sneeze inducing for me.
Edit: after a nap, I read more, and apparently, being able to smell formic acid is a genetic thing. But wading through llm generated bullshit to find more reliable info buried the real lede. As an aside, that’s the original word for the phrase; it wasn’t lead, it was a newspaper jargon thing, even though lead works just as well as lede.
Care to share what you read? I’m curious, too.
It was about ants having different smells, caused when either threatened or injured for the most part.
Specifically, as an example I remembered because I’ve smelled it, the most common upper of ant you’ll find in houses (here in the US anyway) smells cheesy. It’s even called the odorous house ant. That’s because of a type of chemical called methyl ketones. Ketones are basically really volatile organic compounds; acetone is a ketone.
Now, regarding what some people can’t smell vs those that can, reports were mixed. But, it does seem that formic acid can’t be smelled by everyone, and some ketones can’t be smelled by everyone. You either have the right genes active or you don’t. But, apparently, tiktok has yet again caused problems with inaccurate info spread, so people think that you either smell ants, or you don’t, which isn’t the case, it comes down to the chemicals they produce, and those vary.
That being said, there is still the possibility that the reason any given individual hasn’t smelled ants is because they’ve never gotten close enough, or run across large numbers of the little ladies in one place. Most people aren’t going to get close to a bunch of crushed ants, and if ants are alive chances are you aren’t getting close enough to take a sniff unless you’re a real weirdo.
And yes, I’m one of those weirdos that has gotten up close to both living and dead ants. Not to sniff them, but out of curiosity. Hence why I have smelled them in small numbers as well as larger groups. Some ants are really unconcerned about something the size of a human, particularly when it moves slowly enough not to seem like an insectivore coming in for a meal. So you can, if you’re careful, get up close enough to use a magnifying glass to get better looks at them doing their thing (and don’t burn them, it’s not at all okay).
When you get that close, even though there’s no alarm pheromones, every ant type I ever got close to had that pungent, acrid smell of formic acid. It’s similar to vinegar or other acids that you might use around the house, but definitely not the same. Like I said elsewhere, it’s earthier and more pungent.
My area has some red ants, and if enough of those die, they smell like pepper. As in standard table pepper.
Fascinating! I’ve seen massive groups of ants before, and I’ve watched them because it’s just so cool to see. I never got down and tried to smell them, though.
Now your comment has me thinking of my dad. He has an uncanny sense of smell far beyond what I have. There are some flowers I can’t smell unless I bend close to them, but which he can smell from across a field. I’ll have to check with him and see if he can smell ants.
Yeah so i paid a team of experts to do my job
Wise choice!
Yeah
Depends. With North American formica ants, it’s formic acid, but with Canadian odorous house ants, it’s a methyl ketone that smells a lot like blue cheese.
smells a lot like blue cheese
Oh, so stinky feet smell?
Kinda? I’d almost describe it as halfway between stinky feet and the smell that stink bugs give off.
I’ll bet you CAN taste ants though
I know what ants taste like. I don’t want to know, but I do.
I used to eat them as a kid to freak out my friends. I don’t remember them tasting like much of anything. Maybe a bit like dirt or something.
