5/24/2006: Ant tunnels

[Undertoad]

Picked up by Boing Boing, suggested by multiple users, posted by glatt, and "nominated" for IotD in another Cellar thread.

How can you tell what ants are doing, when they build their nest? An ant farm shows it to you... as if the ants only had a little rectangle to build in, and if they only had to build it in two dimensions. Don't limit your ants!

This clever method of "excavating" ant tunnels is described thusly:

In the second method, the nest void was filled with a thin slurry of orthodontal plaster poured into the nest entrance (Williams and Lofgren 1988). This produced a (usually) perfect three-dimensional rendering of the nest's voids. The hardened cast was excavated and then reassembled to produce the finished cast. For reassembly, chambers were supported with steel rods driven into holes in a backboard. Because the shafts of P. badius are large in diameter, the thin slurry often completely filled a 3 m-deep nest in a single pour. The sandy soils of the Florida coastal plains allow the plaster slurry to displace the air within the chambers, filling them completely. Heavy clay soils often produce incomplete casts and voids within the plaster because of trapped air. Although a few images of the nest casts of several ant species have been published (Tschinkel 2003), the details of the nest architecture of P.+badius are presented here for the first time.

Good idea, and the result is as the above... an amazing 3D view of what the ants are really digging when they head underground.

Many more images are available at the gallery at the link above.