3140: Biology Department

Biology Department

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Title text: Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created recently. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Insects and other arthropods (informally, "bugs") can have strange life cycles, some of which are truly horrifying. Some examples include

• parasitoid wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars, eggs that then hatch and eat the living caterpillar animal from the inside out (learning this caused a crisis of faith in Charles Darwin)
• carpenter ants get infected by the zombie-ant fungus, causing them to abandon their usual habitat and attach to the underside of a leaf, feeding the fungus until the ant dies
• houseflies vomit on things to start digesting them, then eat the vomit
• honeypot ants, some of which are force-fed until their abdomens swell enormously, and are used as living food storage for the rest of the colony
• exploding ants protect their colony from invaders by exploding their bodies to spray a toxin on their enemies
• praying mantises eat each other while they mate, though mating can continue while the eating is happening.
• Messor ibericus ants rely on cross-species hybrids for their worker caste. In order to produce these hybrids, M. ibericus queens will sometimes give birth to cloned males from another species.

The sign in this comic implies that this biology department discovers such things so often that they have a frequently-updated sign to document it. Signs of this nature, such as this one, are common in industrial workplaces and typically count days since a safety incident occurred.

The title text refers to a notice board from the Linguistics Department. It points out that during the day that the Biology Department's sign displays the number '1', there's an inconsistency with the plural word "days", and describes how long it has been since someone in Linguistics noticed the problem; one would think this is usually one less than the Biology Department's number, since Biology's day 1 is when the inconsistency exists. The Linguistics sign has both a changeable number and a changeable word for the time period. The latter could originally have said "day", to avoid exactly the same error, but it might also have been "minute", "minutes", "hour", or "hours" depending on how quickly the sign was put up after the problem with the Biology sign was noticed. Eventually it might be changed to longer periods such as month(s), year(s), etc.

Transcript

[An institutional building is in the background, surrounded by grass and with sidewalks in the front and leading to a door]

[A sign in front reads:]

Welcome to the Biology Department. It has been [3] days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about bugs that makes you question your whole reality.

[The [3] is a replaceable tag, which can change numbers.]

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Discussion

I agree that the biology dept is probably talking about arthropods, not pathogens, BUT it could conceivably be referencing BOTH. Any microbiologists around here who want to weigh in with horror stories of some of the "bugs" they know about or work with? I also think that we might want to divvy this article up into an explanation first, THEN a list of fun examples. (I recently learned about honeypot ants and added it as an example... it would be creepy stuff if we took their defining behavioral characteristic and applied it to humans. Seems like it would be well at home in a horror movie.) MeZimm (talk) 16:45, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Sign Maintenance Dept: It has been [ ] days since someone forgot where the 0 panel is kept. KelOfTheStars! (talk) 18:33, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Actually, assuming that people are constantly walking past the Biology Department sign and noticing the error, the Linguistics Department sign would need to be reset constantly. It’s been 15 seconds since someone... no, wait, it’s been 1 second since... 2607:FB90:8B2C:4598:8DCE:B5C3:37E:EF2B 20:22, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

This will be a joke, probably related to 363: Reset.BobcatInABox (talk) 20:55, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

My point was that the ‘explanation’ is currently backward from what the sign would need to say. If the second sign was tracking how long it had been since someone first noticed the error in the other sign, it would never reset, and if it was tracking how long it had been since the most recent noticing of the error, it would have to constantly reset as people walked by the first sign. Either way, the ‘explanation’ is wrong. 2607:FB90:8B2C:4598:386F:8BF8:D804:E3E1 02:14, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

First time in each distinct period that it is wrong??? Or the last. Once the Biology sign grammatically agrees (indicating >1 day(s) of this situation), everything happily stays as it is (or, in the case of the Linguistics sign, increments daily; whilstsoever it is "day(s)" being measured). But the next time it displays a new 1 (with or without first there being a period of "0 days", happily in existence), there is a new zero-point of the Linguistical situation at the first/last observation of the Biology "one days". 92.17.62.87 20:25, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

The first panel might be [one day] and and be wide enough to cover up the word days underneath. 46.162.122.132 21:26, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Does the sign really imply that unusual bugs are discovered frequently? Signs like these are usually used in workplaces to encourage safety, since frequent resets to 0 should be shameful (think of the opening sequence of The Simpsons, where an accident happens to the guys updating the sign). The idea is that you hope to get to large numbers to show how safe the place is. It's like the sobriety chips given out in Alcoholics Anonymous. Barmar (talk) 21:49, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

It's not the sign itself that implies it - it's that it's currently only showing '3'. That reflects the common trope of a bad workplace showing a very low number on their workplace accident sign. 82.13.184.33 08:36, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Welcome to the History Department. It has been 5 hours since we last saw evidence for the dictum that those who do not study history are fated to repeat it, and for rejection of Hegel's argument that humans cannot learn from history. Search "Horst Wessel" and be very afraid. It may already be too late. 205.175.118.102 23:30, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty certain that the trigger for this comic was specifically the _Messor ibericus_ example already listed in the explanation. This is a very surprising discovery and has been a major topic over conversation over the last few (~3) days in scientific social media and news (404media, Fediverse, etc.). Cloning males as disposable sexual slaves is just the kind of shocking discovery the comic describes. -- Dhobern (talk) 00:59, 11 September 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Welcome to the explain xkcd center, where there has been 0 days without a multi-day long outage. 《プロキシ》(XKCD中毒者) 14:47, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Strepsiptera are worth a mention 216.66.31.77 (talk) 19:44, 15 September 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
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