MTL - Ninja World: Insect Princess From Konoha-Chapter 3 hyperindividuation

superorganism

Simply put, it is a tight collective.

When you find a herd of deer in the wild, perhaps what you find is not a herd, but a group of individuals who happen to get together.

It will hunt its own food, collect resources, breed offspring, and think for itself, but it will not divide labor in detail and assemble into a social whole.

From this perspective, a superorganism, that is, a true social creature, has these three characteristics.

Division of reproductive labor, overlapping generations, and socialized upbringing.

So, why hyper-individuation and what are the benefits?

The answer is resources, namely sustainable development.

The problem lies in the parasites. The group of parasites you see is not a real insect swarm. They are not social. It can be said that they are forced together under the influence of artificial force.

It can even be said that parasites are not real insects and are not social. This highly specialized species is different from any natural species that Meiji has ever seen.

Their species has no future.

You won't see a single wild parasite anywhere in the wild.

The development of their family is deeply bound to the host. When a host dies, it means the destruction of the insect swarm.

Every child of the Aburame clan will acquire the eggs of parasitic insects when they are young.

The moment a child successfully extracts chakra, it means the rise of a swarm of insects.

Chakra causes the eggs to hatch, and the adult parasites crawl out of them.

This means that this kind of insect becomes an adult immediately after birth.

So, here comes the problem.

Who plays the role of breeding.

Adult parasites?

No, adult parasites will only mate and lay eggs, and what happens next is none of their business. This is the result of high specialization after co-evolution.

The host plays the role of a mother who raises the bug to adulthood, even if the bug has no larvae and develops directly into an adult in the eggs.

But the chakra input is the nourishment for the growth of the larvae.

This also means that once separated from the host, the parasite loses the ability to reproduce, and the only outcome is destruction.

Figuratively speaking, parasitic bugs are a group of professional warriors who are completely out of work. In addition to playing, they usually only eat and mate.

Generally speaking, if you don't work, if you work, you will definitely die.

This species has no future in the wild nature.

This also means that the size of the insect swarm is actually directly proportional to the size of its own chakra.

To maintain it, food, or chakra, is consumed.

This also means that the size of the insect swarm is limited, which extremely limits the strength of the Aburame clan.

If she doesn't solve this problem, Meiji knows that she has no future.

In order to support the huge insect swarm that far exceeds this age group, Mei Ji has ordered the insect swarm to hunt independently.

To offset part of the chakra consumption.

When they really can't withstand the consumption, in order to prevent environmental damage, Meiji will let some of the insect swarms commit suicide on the spot, and the corpses will be collected as the insect swarm's food reserves.

But doing this all the time is not a good idea.

Therefore, resources and sustainable development are a huge issue.

In addition, I got parasitic worms when I was more than four years old. After more than a year of use experience, parasitic worms have also exposed many other problems.

It can be said that the parasitic bug is the laziest beetle that Mei Ji has ever seen. If there is no special instruction, the parasitic bug will dare to lie down and eat Mei Ji's chakra all the time. It is more parasite than a parasite.

Among them, the biggest problem is execution.

There is no doubt that the parasite can faithfully carry out Mei Ji's instructions, although there will be some minor problems in execution.

For example, building a nest.

Too complicated instructions cannot be executed perfectly and can only be carried out in a general direction. Not to mention Mei Ji, this is the case for all insects of the same family.

This is a question of IQ. Compared to her peers, Meiji is advantageous in that she can perform real-time micro-control, controlling the movements of the insect swarm as delicately as her hands and feet.

This allows the insect swarm to complete extremely complex instructions.

And therein lies the problem.

When the crypt was first dug, Mei Ji was not aware of it, and a large group of insects suffocated and died in the excavated crypt due to ventilation problems.

Therefore, once the parasite swarm is allowed to move freely, it will turn from having brains to being brainless.

What we can do is not to rely on God's will, but to lie down.

Once the current task is over, they don't know what to do and fall into a state of confusion. They instinctively lie down on standby. If there is food, they will lie on it. If there is nothing to eat, they will instinctively look for food when they are really hungry.

Not to mention hunting in groups, sometimes whether you can find food depends on God's face.

Even mating and even egg-laying are all carried out under the leadership of the Aburame clan.

To a certain extent, the parasites were perfectly trained by the Aburame clan.

It is an obedient biological weapon.

But if you are too obedient, you will lose your independence, so you have to rely on the Aburame clan for everything, and you have to put your food in front of your mouth. Independent development is nothing but development.

And it is impossible for Mei Ji to keep an eye on these bugs all the time and instruct them how they should divide labor and cooperate, how they should farm and breed, and how they should have children.

And it’s a waste of time to teach them, they have no memory at all.

There are no solutions, and superorganism is one of them.

For example, ants, their behavior is engraved on the expression of genes.

What Mei Ji has to do is to copy this gene from the ants and engrave it into the genes of the parasites.

That is, the transcription of a program or behavioral algorithm.

The algorithm of ants determines that every ant is needed when it is born. It acts according to the algorithm of genes as soon as it is born. It does not need leaders and does not need meetings and discussions. It performs its own work according to the behavioral algorithm and performs its duties.

Each ant will act according to the best behavior algorithm trained by its ancestors after hundreds of millions of years of big data evolution.

Therefore, after extensive observation, Meiji selected a local kind of cool-looking ant.

Named by Meiji as a completely different giant-headed leafcutter ant.

He is the overlord of the ant colony in Konoha.

They are characterized by their large heads. Although they are called leafcutter ants, they do not cut leaves, but they can grow mushrooms. They are not considered army ants themselves. They will use the exit of the nest as a stronghold and march to the surrounding areas.

The size difference between individuals is huge. The largest individual is at least five hundred times larger than the smallest, so it is called completely different, that is, they are all different.

When traveling, the giant ants are riding on small ants, which looks like a team of butans.

The advantage of this is that it saves energy consumption during marching.

Not only is the combat capability outstanding in all aspects.

The most important thing is that this kind of ant is not aggressive. Although it is super strong, it is very cautious.

The previously cultivated honeypot worms can be said to have failed, but not completely.

The original intention is to transform a bug that can independently produce chakra and store it. However, this little bug is not mentally qualified for the synthesis of chakra. However, it can store chakra. Although the amount is small, it can be used as a supplement to chakra. The means are sufficient.

This can be regarded as a solution to the expansion of insect swarms, but the solution to the fundamental problem depends on super-individualization, that is, sustainable development.

At present, a new kind of queen must be cultivated to abandon the low egg-laying efficiency and method of parasitic insects.

Instead, it is fertilized once, used for life, and can produce thousands per day.

What needs to be done is still a long and big project.

This is just the beginning. Genes can be plundered and copied, which means that in this ninja world, the blood inheritance limit is also a harvestable resource for Miji.

Mei Ji took down several experimental bottles, which were all filled with modified insect eggs.

Among them, most of the eggs are dead and died due to gene collapse in the initial stage of genetic recombination.

As the master of the insect swarm, Mei Ji can sense their life, death and health status, which saves Mei Ji a lot of trouble in observation.

And this is not the first batch of experimental subjects, nor is it the last batch.

This result is expected.

Mei Ji did not have the means to independently manipulate genes for gene regulation, and she did not even have equipment such as a microscope. She could only use rough transcription through chakra, and the next thing was left to natural selection.

That is, look at the face.

Therefore, even if the insect eggs survive the initial stage without collapsing, they cannot be said to be successful products. Most of them are deformed, and some of the less deformed ones are far from Meiji's expectations.

There is only one way, continuous cultivation.

Until success.

And once she succeeds a little bit, Mei Ji can record the expression template of this gene and start manufacturing it.

Therefore, we can continue to cultivate and select the best on this basis to achieve the ideal expected value.

It is a very time-consuming project.

"They really look like each one with its own characteristics."

To put it simply, cross-species gene transplantation is carried out first, then gene aggregation molecular breeding is carried out, and then group selection is carried out.

Some eggs did not turn into adults under the catalysis of chakra. Gene recombination caused them to lose their basic ability to parasitize parasites and quickly mature into adults.

And some of the ones that climbed out have their own characteristics.

Some of the deformed children with missing arms and legs were selected and destroyed on the spot. The remaining ones were raised and observed for a period of time before deciding whether to stay or go. At the same time, a batch of new eggs were cultivated.

Meiji continued her work.

After repeating this, throw the selected experimental body into the insect nest ecosystem and let it develop on its own.

Genes drive their actions.