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Fun facts in U.S history.
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mo-oneandmore
19-Feb-24, 11:25

Fun facts in U.S history.
George Armstrong Custer married and/or had a relationship with an Indian squaw.
en.wikipedia.org

I have yet to find any information about sired children.
mo-oneandmore
19-Feb-24, 11:36

Custer's near-last stand
Although Custer is believed to have been sterile due to gonnorea, etc, there is a possible birth by Mo-nah-se-tah in January 1869.
Cheyenne oral history also alleges that Mo-nah-se-tah later bore a second child, fathered by Custer, in late 1869.
mo-oneandmore
19-Feb-24, 11:52

Indians don't lie
From wikipedia

Account by White Cow Bull (Lakota)

In 1938, Joseph White Cow Bull, an Oglala Lakota veteran of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, went with David Humphreys Miller to the Little Bighorn battlefield and recounted to him his recollections of the battle. Among his recollections:

While we were together in this village [on the Little Bighorn River], I spent most of my time with the Shahiyela [Cheyenne] since I knew their tongue and their ways almost as well as my own. In all those years I had never taken a wife, although I had had many women. One woman I wanted was a pretty young Shahiyela named Monahseetah, or Meotxi as I called her. She was in her middle twenties but had never married any man of her tribe. Some of my Shahiyela friends said she was from the southern branch of their tribe, just visiting up north, and they said no Shahiyela could marry her because she had a seven-year-old son born out of wedlock and that tribal law forbade her getting married. They said the boy’s father had been a white soldier chief named Long Hair; he had killed her father, Chief Black Kettle [sic], in a battle in the south [Battle of the Washita] eight winters before, they said, and captured her. He had told her he wanted to make her his second wife, and so he had her. But after a while his first wife, a white woman, found her out and made him let her go.[9]

Miller asked White Cow Bull, "Was this boy still with her here?" and White Cow Bull answered:

Yes, I saw him often around the Shahiyela camp. He was named Yellow Bird and he had light streaks in his hair. He was always with his mother in the daytime, so I would have to wait until night to try to talk to her alone. She knew I wanted to walk with her under a courting blanket and make her my wife. But she would only talk with me through the tepee cover and never came outside.
mo-oneandmore
08-Dec-24, 07:27

Australia
The sum weight of the termites in the Australian deserts is more than the sum weight of all the kangaroos and that's a lot of termites, right Bob?
www.google.com


zorroloco
08-Dec-24, 07:31

Are all the ants as heavy as all the humans?
22 September 2014

An ant on a leaf

"If we were to weigh all the ants in the world, they would weigh as much as all of the people," said wildlife presenter Chris Packham recently in BBC Four's The Wonder Of Animals: Ants. But is this statement true?

This claim was originally made by Harvard University professor Edward O Wilson, and the German biologist Bert Hoelldobler, in their 1994 book Journey To The Ants.

They based their estimate on an earlier one by British entomologist C B Williams, who once calculated that the number or insects alive on earth at a given moment was one million trillion.

"If, to take a conservative figure, one percent of this host is ants, their total population is ten thousand trillion," wrote Wilson and Hoelldobler. "Individual workers weigh on average between 1 to 5 mg, according to the species. When combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings."

Wilson and Hoelldobler's calculation is based on the idea that the average human weighs a million times more than the average ant. So how well does that stand up to scrutiny? The average adult human weighs 62kg, so that would make the average ant about 60mg.

"There are ants that weigh 60mg, but they're really the big ants," says Francis Ratnieks, Professor of Apiculture at the University of Sussex.

"The common ants which live in British gardens weigh about 1mg or 2mg."

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How do you weigh an ant?


Ants in a dish
Getty Images
"It's very easy to weigh an ant. You buy a small electronic balance, and you place the ant on the balance," says Ratnieks. But he advises you refrigerate it first. "That way it doesn't run away."

Another option is to weigh them in a group, says Mike Fox from BWARS: "I would simply take a suitable container such as a specimen tube and weigh it empty, then put in a counted number of ants, say 100. Weigh again. Deduct the weight of the empty tube and divide it by the number of ants."

Discover more about the structured social system of ants

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With around 13,000 species worldwide, ranging in length from less than 1mm to 30mm, it's probable their weights vary greatly - though most experts seem to agree the average weight of an ant is less than 10mg.

But no-one knows how many ants there are in the world. The BBC Four documentary claims they number not 10,000 trillion but 100 trillion, though it still suggests the total weight of ants equals the total weight of humans.

Experts from the Natural History Museum, Bristol University's Ant Lab, and BWARS (Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society), among others, say there is no realistic estimate.

Even by Wilson and Hoelldobler's own figures, their calculation is wrong. There are 7.2 billion humans on the planet today - if we take everyone over the age of 15, they weigh a combined total of about 332bn kg. If we imagine there are 10,000 trillion ants in the world, weighing an average of 4mg, their total weight comes to just 40bn kg.

If we allow for the smaller human population at the time they wrote their book, and a slightly lower average weight, they are still a long way out.

But Ratnieks believes Wilson and Hoelldobler's claim - though untrue in relation to today's world population - would have once been accurate.

"I think if we went back 2,000 years, certainly the ants would've outweighed the humans... but at roughly the time that America became independent [1776], or a little bit before that, that's when we humans became more impressive in our weight than the ants," he says.

"We must also remember that humans are getting fatter all the time. We're not just increasing in population, we're increasing in fatness, so I think we've left the ants behind."
zorroloco
08-Dec-24, 08:19

Oops
Sorry One

You got me off topic.

Did you know that last month the US elected a multiply convicted felon, a fat sleezeball who assaulted many women, as President?

Maga



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