As a general rule, don't post comments on your own submission, especially not quotes from the article. Explanatory comments on why you submitted it are sometimes appropriate if the headline is counterintuitive or the submission seems at first to fall outside HN guidelines. Add '(1993)' to the title.

Why? Did the ants die out cuz the chimps got smarter?

Humans generated the sixth mass extinction event of the last half billion years or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

The smart chimps do routinely use horrific chemical weapons to kill the ants en masse.

Yes, but it takes a while and depends on if the "ants" are in the "chimps"'s way.

I don't think we could make ants go extinct even if that was our sole purpose as humans. They're extremely adaptable and good generalists, plus they rival us in both total mass and ubiquity, at least outside of tundras. They survived past extinctions, they'll survive us.

As humans? Well, that’s an arbitrary bar. Are you a speciesist?

No, for obvious reasons.

But a bunch of other species did, including some fairly intelligent ones.

In fact, all the species with intelligence approaching or equal to Homo sapiens were wiped out.

The Mammoth and the Dodo did

You should make it clearer that you are quoting the abstract.

Putting this in quotes might have helped with the downvotes