Out for Blood

[kevin_standlee]

As part of my diabetes monitoring, I take a blood sugar reading twice a day using a finger-sticking device that pokes a tiny hole in my finger for the blood sample. The necessary clean-up for these readings has led to an odd discovery.

As a consequence of the finger-sticking, I generate tissues with tiny blood spots on them where I've blotted the blood after I've taken the reading. These I throw in the trash, naturally. This morning, I noticed that ants had invaded the bathroom trash can and were swarming over a blood-spotted tissue therin.

The thought of swarming ants out for my blood is a little creepy.

Comments

[kshandra]

In light of this news item, this concerns me greatly....

[ashi.livejournal.com]

I've heard of ants that go after another type of leftover blood as well. Could be the same species.

What do the ants want?

[(Anonymous)]

Are the ants there for the protein in the blood? Or is there so much sugar in the blood that they want that?

In ancient times, they noticed ants gathered to diabetic urine...

Sorry about the anonymous comment. I'm just a passer-by.

[robot-grrl.livejournal.com]

I guess the questions should be: Are the ants large or small? Are the ants black, brown or red?

Having moved from the Chicago area to the San Diego area there have been some changes in how to handle surgical tissues after they have been processed. After our tissue samples have been fixed in formalin (formaldehyde dissolved in water), dehydrated in alcohols, and further processed in xylene and hot paraffin with other additives, we still need to seal the paraffin blocks after we're done cutting our slides. Why? Because there are bugs that will get into storage and eat the tissue right out of the blocks.

This I guess is a problem where it's warm most of the year. Yeah, bleah.