Oh, so that’s what it’s good for.

There’s this fantasy book where a badass warrior monk flashes back to when his teacher taught him how to fight:

A master monk is preparing to teach his young students the martial arts so he takes them out to the forest and says there is a war happening all around us. Who can tell me what it is? Finally one of the kids realizes and shouts it’s the trees!

And the monk says yes and explains the resource competition and how all the trees fight to secure their place in the sunlight. Then he says “Today children, I will teach you how to war for space”. And the chapter ends.

Shit was so cash. The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker

Which would make humans the least likely to participate, but here we are.

That is a beautiful lizard. Looks like a cute tiny crossover between a turtle and a dragon.

The implications of Tyranids vs Chaos are kind of wild to think about too,

With their whole hive mind/shadow in the warp thing, 'nids are more-or-less immune to chaos corruption. And even if the forces of chaos somehow managed to enter into some sort of dialogue with the hive mind as a whole, what do they have to offer each other? All the tyranids want is to consume biomass, and they’re doing that just fine on their own, constantly adopting and growing more powerful. Sure, maybe chaos can offer them tools to do it more efficiently, but then what? The 'nids consume all of the sentient races in the universe and chaos has nothing left to corrupt and feed off of for itself?

And the tyranids have no particular interest in the demons and other entities of the warp since they’re not really “real” they’re immaterial, made of the fabric of the warp. There’s no biomass there for them to consume.

Although, since encountering the aeldari and adapting to create zoanthropes and the ability to use psychic abilities beyond just being a hive mind, perhaps they will even further adapt to be able to consume warp entities.

Tyranids are as big of an existential threat to chaos as they are to the rest of the factions in 40k. It will likely never be explored in the lore, but I think it’s likely that some time in the future well beyond the 41st millennium, that if tyranids continue their advance, that things could work out that chaos may need to step into a sort of protective role fighting back the tyranids, because if they succeed in consuming all life in the galaxy, that’s pretty much it for the chaos gods as well.

Scientific study on insect pain
Scientists disagree on whether an ant can feel pain, but studies are opening new doors into understanding. Two scientists from the University of Sydney, Associate Professor Greg Neely and Dr. Thang Khuong, completed research on pain in fruit flies (Family: Drosophilidae). Their eye-opening study proved that insects experience chronic pain after an initial injury has healed.

The researchers damaged a nerve in one leg of a fruit fly and gave it enough time to heal. They determined that the fly’s other legs were now hypersensitive. “After the animal is hurt once badly, they are hypersensitive and try to protect themselves for the rest of their lives,” said Associate Professor Neely. “It’s almost like an anxiety-like state, where once they’ve been injured, they want to make sure nothing else bad happens.”

Neely explained further, “The fly is receiving ‘pain’ messages from its body that then go through sensory neurons to the ventral nerve cord, the fly’s version of our spinal cord.

While their research was not completed on ants, we can compare an ant to a fruit fly. They are both invertebrates and insects. An ant’s brain has 250,000 neurons and a fruit fly has 200,000 brain neurons. As scientists explore the world of insects with new technology, we will have a more detailed answer as to whether they feel pain or just sense a danger to their survival.

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Thx