Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Plaster Casting Ants


What is this, you ask? That is the nest of the Florida Harvester Ant. Scientists poured a type of plaster into the nests, creating a mold of the entire structure. "Cool" you say, and right you are. Click on the picture for the entire story, and for lots more pictures.

6 comments:

JS said...

very cool... and sad... because now I know that even though I dig a 2 foot whole, fill it with oil and burn it, there is still another 5 feet of ant colony below all that, and the queen is no doubt at the bottom all like "Oh, it is so nice being way down in this cool earth" and her subject are all like "But your majesty! The colony is dying by the hundreds!" and she is all "thats okay, have sex with me and I will produce 10,000 more!"

X-orter said...

They were talking about prairie dogs on a show about air conditioning. It seems that the little guys know how to build their tunnels in such a way that there is a vacuum effect that takes out the hot, stuffy air and replaces it with cooler air. They said that if you put your hand over certain holes that you could feel air coming up out of the tunnels below. Isn't God's creation amazing? I mean, let the atheist explain why the prairie dog needed to evolve the ability to air condition their burrows.

Unknown said...

I wonder if ants were in the garden of Eden?

mullinz8 said...

I would think there had to be ants in Eden, maybe they weren't as pesty then. I mean if lions and other wild creatures weren't killing each other. I don't know if anything else would bother someone.

gotta run

Mat Brewster said...

It's a crazy, wonderful, amazing world alright. I saw a documentary on ants the other night and those guys are awesome. This one group, when they go hunting, travel by the thousands, and form these sort of tunnels with their bodies to guide the others and bring protection.

Over crevices they use their bodies as bridges, etc. Fantastic stuff.

JS said...

i also saw once in the jungle that they join together to create rafts so workers can float over water...

amazing... but i still hate them in my yard.