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622Y

For the curious:

Speaking to MailOnline, Willot confirmed this ‘was indeed a tricky procedure. They are very reactive and won’t stop struggling once caught, preventing any shaving attempt if not anaesthetised.’

This was done by exposing the ants for a few seconds to carbon dioxide, then strapping them down firmly.

Hairs were removed using a high-power binocular telescope and a very sharp blade.

‘It’s the same as shaving your own chin: the scalpel blade has to move in the opposite direction of the hair’s growth. It has to be a delicate and gentle motion,’ said Willot.

After practising on large soldier ants, he found that a smaller worker ant could be entirely shaved in an hour of delicate work.

He estimates around 40 ants were shaved altogether to produce seven good examples for the experiments.

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LemmyLefty
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62Y

anaesthetised

*Antaesthetised.

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12Y

get that holier-than-thou extra-useless-letters british spelling outta here

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2Y

Ant aestheticized

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332Y

The world is a really interesting place. I would have never guessed that there are people out there that shave ants.

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162Y

people who get paid to shave ants, no less

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202Y

It’s probably just the one guy. He probably only spent a total of 100 hours doing it so he’s not even an expert.

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112Y

He’s probably the world’s subject-matter expert on shaving ants.

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72Y

No, you need 10,000 hours of experience to be an expert. He’s just an ant-shaving hobbyist at best.

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22Y

A hobbyist in a field no-one else has explored is a leading expert.

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22Y

It’s a joke, you ant-shaver.

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52Y

We’ve finally gotten to gatekeeping shaving ants 💪💪

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2Y

The average person has shaved one ant, but only because Dr. Ant-Shaver Willot has shaved 7 Billion ants and therefore he should be dismissed as a statistical outlier.

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12Y

“average person shaves 3 ants per year” factoid actualy just statistical error, average person shaves 0 ants per year. Ants Georg, who lives in cave & shaves 10,000 per day is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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creator
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12Y

I think I did pretty well reciting it from memory and swapping out the details.

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112Y

I don’t know why I needed to know, but I did indeed need to know. Thanks.

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92Y

Do they really mean that maybe they removed the hair instead of actually shaved?

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12Y

Nope, read above comments

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