Juggernaut: Rise of the Zerg

Chapter 15 Fruits and Planting

However, ants also have their own solutions to this.

Generally speaking, they will not completely hollow out the entire space, but consciously leave "pillars" as load-bearing columns during construction to support the gravity above, making the building structure more stable.

Of course, this is for another day.In order not to affect the predation plan of the ant colony, Ling Zhi embezzled these [-] ants, and did not plan to increase troops here.

This project wants to speed up the progress, which will be after winter, when a large number of ant colony labor is released from searching for food.

The ant colony that has stopped expanding is nothing to write home about. The busy ant colony keeps accumulating food, and time passes by quietly.

A month later, the worker ants in the northern nest reported that they had found the first fruit that fell to the ground.

This is a kind of fruit that can't be named. It is spherical in appearance and about the size of a walnut. When it fell to the ground, it was obviously ripe. The cracked pulp and the juice flowing out of the ground exude a sweet smell to the outside world .

Sugar is the ant colony's favorite, and soon, even without zero command, the ants who went out to forage gathered in large numbers, skillfully began to cut and carry.

And the juice flowing on the grass was not wasted, and the worker ants naturally sucked it into their stomachs.

The abdomen of worker ants has a special space for transporting and storing liquid. The worker ants are slender and can hardly swallow solid food. These liquids containing a lot of sugar are their best food.

As more and more ants gathered, the fruit was devoured very quickly, and there was not even a trace of flesh left, leaving only a dark, hard, smooth core.

Obviously, the ants judged that the hard core could not be used as food, so they simply ignored it.

But zero is different, the reason why He continues to pay attention to this fruit tree is not because of the few fruits, but because of this fruit core.

He wants to plant it. If it can germinate, maybe after a few years, the ants will have a piece of fruit land for themselves!
After the first fruit fell to the ground, within a few days, all the fruits on the small tree fell one after another, a total of 23, all of which were collected by the ant colony.

Of course, Zero also harvested 23 stones.

He ordered the ant colony to disperse these fruit cores, transport them around the ant nest, randomly find a small pit, throw them into it, and bury them as much as possible-this process actually took a lot of time and labor resources, and this This kind of simple planting may not be successful, but Zero is still willing to do it, and he can feel the sense of accomplishment from conquering nature.

Generally speaking, after the fruit falls, it will rot slowly and naturally without external interference. The rich organic matter in it will greatly fertilize the surrounding land and provide enough nutrition for the seed to germinate in the future.

But now that all the pulp has entered the ant's stomach, it is obviously impossible to provide any energy for the core.

But it doesn't matter, a small amount of earthworms are raised in the ant nest, and [-] worker ants are still conscientiously working on the construction.

Although the idea of ​​zero domestication has not really started, but in the past six months, in the caves where the ant nests are used to pile up waste, the excrement of earthworms has filled several enlarged caves.

Under Zero's instruction, the excrement was not discarded by the ant colony, but was properly preserved.

The waste excreted by earthworms is rich in organic matter, which is a good organic fertilizer, even better than industrial chemical fertilizers.It should be feasible to use these things to replace the role of pulp.

This is just an idle move, maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, it doesn’t really matter, the ant colony will not be unable to survive without these fruit trees, nor will it be able to live comfortably just because of these fruit trees, even if they will, it will be for an unknown number of years after that.

However, this is Zero's attempt to use the ant colony to change the environment. At the same time, he can get some sugar fruits at the cost of some worker ants' labor. He wants to do it, so he does it.

…………

Time passed day by day, autumn has gradually come to an end.The food in the ant nest granary is piled up like a mountain, which can fully meet the needs of the ant colony for the winter.

Foods that are easily decomposed by microorganisms, such as insect corpses and plant pulp, are stored on the outermost side, and they will be the first resources consumed by ant colonies in winter.

Foods that are easy to preserve, such as plant seeds, are stored inside to supplement the ant's food.

The underground passages leading from each branch nest to the mother nest have all been completed. During this period, Zero did not find a new place suitable as a breeding room, which made him a little regretful.

As the weather turns colder day by day, the time for the ant colonies to go out is getting shorter and shorter, and the food that can be found outside is also decreasing sharply. In the end, the food found is no longer as good as the daily consumption of the worker ants.

Zero decisively withdrew all the worker ants that went out to forage, closed the redundant entrances and exits of many ant nests, leaving only the vents still open, and completely began to enter the journey of surviving the long cold winter.

The withdrawn worker ants did not sit idle, and a small number of them poured into the earthworm domestication field originally built by [-] worker ants, which greatly accelerated the construction speed.

Due to the excellent heat preservation ability of the ant nest, the earthworms in the breeding room did not show signs of hibernation, and they still maintained the frequency of activities in autumn, and even produced a batch of eggs again just a few days ago.

Because the ant nest cannot hold so many earthworms, after this batch of earthworm eggs hatch, the newborn larvae will all become the rations of the ant colony.

This is also helpless.Although Zero tried his best to make the ant colony self-sufficient, get rid of the dependence on the external environment, and minimize the uncertainty of food quantity, but at present, there is no good solution.

The current way of relying on ant colonies to find breeding places by themselves is too inefficient, and it is very dependent on luck. For so long, there are only seven, and tentative domestication farms are still being developed. It may take years to calculate the success of domestication. time.

Relying on earthworms to achieve self-sufficiency in ant colonies currently seems to be a long way to go in the short term if there are no other breakthroughs.

"It seems that while trying to domesticate earthworms, we need to find other stable food sources!" Ling Xin thought.

But now it's winter, and the vegetation outside is withered, not to mention food, and even living things are very rare.

"We can only talk about it next year..." Zero sighed.

"Perhaps, I can also search deeper underground?"

This may also be a way.

　Ask for collection! ! !

　　
　
(End of this chapter)