Category: General Interest

When a crow feels unwell, irritated, or burdened by parasites, it doesn’t panic. It doesn’t flee. And it doesn’t rely on chance.

Instead, it seeks out an ant colony.

This behavior, strange at first glance, is one of the most elegant examples of natural intelligence in the animal world. Rather than hunting the ants, the crow deliberately allows them to crawl across its body. What looks like surrender is actually strategy.

The crow spreads its wings, lowers itself to the ground, and positions its feathers carefully. It remains mostly still, shifting only slightly, as ants swarm over its body. This is not accidental. The crow knows exactly what it is doing.

As the ants move through the feathers, they release formic acid, a chemical they naturally produce as a defense mechanism. For the crow, this substance acts as a powerful, natural disinfectant. Formic acid helps kill bacteria, fungi, mites, lice, and other parasites that can weaken birds over time. It also reduces irritation and may soothe inflamed skin beneath the feathers.

Scientists call this behavior anting, and it has been observed in over 200 bird species, including crows, jays, starlings, and sparrows. There are two main forms. The first, known as passive anting, is when the bird simply lies down and allows ants to crawl freely through its feathers. The second, active anting, is even more remarkable.

In active anting, the crow picks up individual ants in its beak and deliberately rubs them onto specific areas of its body, especially under the wings and along hard-to-reach feather lines. Before doing so, the bird often squeezes the ant gently, triggering the release of formic acid before application. The motion closely resembles how humans apply topical medicine.

This is not instinctive chaos. It is targeted treatment.

Researchers believe anting serves multiple purposes. It helps control parasites, may inhibit the growth of harmful microorganisms, and could even help condition feathers by neutralizing substances that interfere with preening oils. Some studies also suggest it may provide relief during molting, when new feathers cause discomfort and itchiness.

What makes this behavior extraordinary is that the crow is not born knowing chemistry. Yet through observation, evolution, and learning, it has mastered a biological partnership that functions like a living pharmacy. The ants defend themselves. The crow heals itself. Neither species invents the system, yet both benefit from its existence.

This knowledge is not written anywhere. It is passed down silently, generation to generation, through behavior rather than language.

In a world that often underestimates animals, anting is a quiet reminder that intelligence does not always look like problem-solving puzzles or tool use. Sometimes it looks like knowing exactly where to go when your body is failing you.

The crow does not call it medicine.

But it works.

A speck of dust is usually harmless. It settles on a bookshelf or floats in a sunbeam, unnoticed. But in 1960, a single speck of dust was a weapon. It could destroy a missile guidance system or ruin a gyroscope.

The American military and manufacturing industries were facing a crisis. They were trying to build smaller, more precise electronics, but they kept failing. The culprit was always the air.

Microscopic particles were landing on sensitive parts during assembly. If a piece of metal the size of a bacteria landed on a circuit, the whole device was trash.

Willis Whitfield sat in his office at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, watching this failure happen over and over. He was a physicist, a quiet man known for finding practical answers to hard questions.

The industry solution at the time was simple: clean harder.

Factories built “clean rooms” where workers wore tight plastic suits. They vacuumed the floors constantly. They scrubbed the walls. They pumped air in and sucked it out, creating strong winds to blow the dust away.

It never worked.

Whitfield realized why. By blowing air violently around the room, the ventilation systems were actually stirring up the dirt. The turbulent air scrubbed the floors and then deposited that dirt right onto the delicate parts. The solution was the problem.

He had a different idea. He did not want to mix the air. He wanted to rinse the room.

The established engineering world had a strict set of rules for ventilation. Standard practice dictated that air must be turbulent to be effective. The leading experts believed that trying to move air in a straight, steady line across an entire room was impossible. The friction from people and tables would disrupt the flow. The text books said it couldn’t be done.

This rule works—until it meets a person who refuses to read the book.

Whitfield ignored the experts. He designed a room lined with filters. Instead of blowing air around, he pushed a steady, solid wall of air from the ceiling to the floor.

He called it “laminar flow.” The air moved like a piston. It pushed every particle down to the floor and out through grates. It didn’t stir the dust; it evicted it.

He built a small model to test his theory. He turned on the fans. He turned on the particle counter, a machine designed to count the dust in the air.

The moment he switched it on, the counter went silent.

Whitfield looked at the numbers. Zero.

The other scientists in the room did not clap. They did not cheer. They looked at the machine, then at Whitfield, and shook their heads.

“The counter is broken,” one colleague said.

They were certain the reading was an error. In the history of their work, no room had ever measured zero dust particles. It was physically impossible. They forced Whitfield to reset the machine.

He did. It read zero again.

The discomfort in the room was palpable. It is difficult to accept a miracle when it makes all your previous hard work look foolish.

Whitfield invited skeptical competitors to try to break the system. They came to the lab with smoke pipes and devices to generate dust. They puffed smoke into the air, expecting it to linger.

The smoke vanished instantly. It didn’t swirl. It was pressed straight down into the floor and disappeared. The air in the room remained perfectly clear.

Within months, the disbelief turned into a scramble. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) heard about the room and sent engineers to investigate. They were struggling to build reliable television tubes.

When they saw the dust count, they called their headquarters immediately. They began building Whitfield’s rooms that same year.

This quiet invention changed the structure of the modern world.

Before Whitfield, the manufacturing of microchips was nearly impossible. The failure rate was too high. Because of his “laminar flow” rooms, companies like Intel could manufacture complex processors.

Hospitals adopted the technology for operating rooms to stop infections. Pharmaceutical companies used it to keep drugs pure.

Whitfield did not patent the idea for himself. He was a government employee, and he gave the invention to the world. He didn’t become a billionaire. He simply solved the problem.

Today, every smartphone, every modern car, and every advanced medical device exists because one man decided that the experts were cleaning the room the wrong way.

Sources:

Sandia National Laboratories Archives; The National Inventors Hall of Fame (Willis Whitfield).

Topher Field commented:
The battle for freedom of speech is the great battle of our generation. Our ancestors fought for freedom against foreign governments, we must fight for freedom against our own.

It’s devastating to see the environmental destruction we’ve once again faced. Homes lost. Burnt or swallowed. Lives changed. Wildlife and livestock decimated.

I was reading a post from a volunteer who’d been on the land for decades, talking about what’s changed and why it now feels so out of control.

Back then:

• farmers burned firebreaks

• locals cleared fuel

• volunteers mobilised

• no one waited for permission

Then the government stepped in with regulatory creep, bans, restrictions, competing environmental directives, endless “stakeholder considerations” and bureaucratic paralysis. Suddenly burning a roadside or clearing fuel loads required more paperwork than running a company. The volunteer summed it up simply: “We didn’t get stupider – we got forbidden.”

Now we’re going to spend billions trying to keep people afloat after entire communities get smashed and let me be clear, that’s not the issue. That’s an Australian value. We look after our own. We do that without hesitation and without whining. Good. Mateship.

What’s fucked is that we already know that cheque is coming every damn year… yet we refuse to spend smart money on the front end to stop the destruction in the first place. It’s insanity. It makes me fucking wild.

We know fire season is coming.

We know what burns.

We know flood season will do the opposite but end the same – homes swallowed, lives upended, communities knocked flat.

It isn’t random. It’s patterned.

The Productivity Commission has been saying it for years: we spend many times more on disaster recovery than on mitigation. Royal commissions after Black Saturday and the 2019–20 fires have said the same thing: reduce fuel loads, maintain firebreaks, invest in volunteers, update infrastructure. Governments nod, pose for photos… then quietly move on.

Meanwhile, watch parliament for five minutes and you’ll see why nothing gets done. Ask a straight question and they don’t answer it, they fucking argue about the words surrounding the question. They twist language, redefine terms, hide behind procedural bullshit and burn half the sitting day pretending that “debating” is the same as governing. It’s bureaucratic cardio: lots of movement, no progress. Maximum energy, minimum output.

This is what happens when optics replace competence.

And it’s not just fires and floods.

We have a housing crisis. We have too many people slipping through the cracks. Not a vibe crisis. Not a discourse crisis.

A structural, material, immediate crisis.

Caused by a stack of real-world policy failures:

• land banking

• overseas investment distortions

• infrastructure lag

• regulatory paralysis

• no planning alignment between federal, state and local

• and yes – immigration policy

Criticising immigration policy isn’t the same as criticising migrants. That’s the childish frame the political class pushes so adults can’t have adult conversations. The issue is scale, sequencing, velocity and carrying capacity. You cannot pour more people into a pipeline that is already bursting and call it compassion.

And if your instinct here is to pick that apart, answer me one question:

How does increasing demand on an already strangled housing stock help the people currently sleeping in cars?

Next time you’re at the shops, actually look at the cars in the car park. Blankets. Storage tubs. Clothes. People are quietly living out of vehicles at a rate nobody in Canberra wants to talk about.

Where is the energy for defending our own?

We don’t lack capacity. We put rockets in space and land them on floating platforms. We can fix this country. It’s a resource allocation problem. Every “complex” problem in Australia is just a resource allocation problem. And our resources are hijacked for political optics, not national wellbeing.

Leadership should be judged on outcomes, not vibes.

Climate obviously changes. We can argue human contribution until the cows come home, but it’s irrelevant to the immediate point, we spend all our energy on the uncontrollables and zero on the controllables. We lecture the weather while neglecting the country.

Australia doesn’t burn every year because the climate fairy got angry. It burns because the people in charge would rather manage narratives than manage the land.

And while they’re busy spinning narratives, they somehow have endless time and money to:

• police social media posts

• write new speech laws

• cry about AI-generated pictures of politicians as if the country will collapse if someone gets memed (put your best albo in a bikini meme in the comments).

All that energy for performative outrage. Almost none for clearing fuel, fixing drainage, aligning planning, or building enough houses for the people already here.

They get away with this because we, as a collective, spend all our energy on each other. Left vs right. City vs country. Native-born vs migrant. Climate vs denial. While we’re busy tearing strips off each other, the basics quietly rot.

At some point we need to hit pause and admit: there’s only so much we can do about the rest of the world right now. We need to reinvest in ourselves for a moment. Clean house. Patch the framework. Take care of our own country.

Because until we stop being domesticated spectators and start demanding competence, this pattern will repeat.

The destruction is not accidental. It is predictable.

And predictability without prevention isn’t bad luck.

It’s policy by negligence.

I appreciate you reading my thoughts.