Things That Explode I »

I was watching a show with my mom called Inside the Body of Henry VIII and at the very end of the show, after having detailed the king’s ailments and maladies and described him as a “28 stone man-mountain,” the narrator says, “There was yet one final indignity for Henry VIII. There are contemporary accounts which say that his bloated 28 stone corpse exploded inside his coffin” (or something to that effect). 

Of course, I had to internet search this idea of exploding kings, which eventually lead me to some very interesting wikipedia articles, which I will list in this tumblr in a series I am calling Things That Explode. 

The first one that I came across was the humble carpenter ant. I always thought of them as do nothing, chewers of wood pulp, but they’re in fact much more exciting! When they find themselves embroiled in an ant battle, and the tide seems to be turning against them, they can initiate an ant self-destruct sequence:

Its defensive behaviors include self-destruction by autothysis. Two oversized, poison-filled mandibular glands run the entire length of the ant’s body. When combat takes a turn for the worse, the ant violently contracts its abdominal muscles to rupture its body and spray poison or glue in all directions.^[4][5] The ant has an enormously enlarged mandibular (abdomen) gland, many times the size of a normal ant, which produces the glue. The glue bursts out and entangles and immobilizes all nearby victims.

They’re like little miniature predators