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Portrait by Mark Wallheiser
This is pretty freaking amazing, and gives new meaning to the term "sacrifical casting." Retiree Walter R. Tschinkel is an entomologist and former professor of Biological Science at Florida State University. He recognizes ants as "some of nature's grand architects" and, curious to understand their self-created habitats, devised a clever (if cruel) way to do it: By pouring molten aluminum down into the hole.
Unsurprisingly, the ants die in the process. But after the aluminum cools and Tschinkel has completed a meticulous excavation, he unearths these wondrous, chandelier-esque shapes revealing the alien architectures of the colony.
Tschinkel has discovered that colonies can be up to twelve feet deep and house between 9,000 and 10,000 workers.
If you're wondering how he can tell how many ants were in there, he started doing this in the '80s by making plaster casts, which did not vaporize the ants. By breaking apart the plaster, he could count the little buggers. (BONUS: Watch the Video of the Process after the jump)
So why the switch from plaster to aluminum? For the same reason manufacturers will make car parts out of one but not the other. "The disadvantage of plaster casts is that they break easily so after you dig them up, you have to glue the pieces back together again," Tschinkel said in a 2008 interview. The aluminum has proven more robust.
In addition to aluminum, he also uses zinc "for its low melting point," and harvests both materials from old objects.
I get the zinc free from old anodes at marine shipyards. Zinc corrodes and steel doesn't, so they attach zinc bars to the hull of the ship, and replace them when they are about half corroded away. Sometimes I use aluminum from old aluminum scuba tanks. We place charcoal in an insulated garbage can, and put the aluminum in the bottom half of a steel scuba tank to melt metal [placed in a smaller container within the tank and then pour the molten metal down the nest opening].
Here's a video showing the process:
via doobybrain
Comments
Geez, these look amazing. Obviously it is kind of sad that he is destroying complete colonies in the process, but I'd like to think that ants would pour molten aluminum on humans if they could.
Really cool and alien. I wonder if the ship/pyramid designers in Prometheus took inspiration from these structures.
great looking 150 million years old design
Here's a video by J Scott Turner (http://www.esf.edu/efb/turner/index.html) of work with casting, dissecting and modeling an African termite mound:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0qdJh0YEAI&list=UUpIGFcvUqnoUALWXqmQ6YnA
This is the most detailed model of such a mound ever made. Turner also has some clear ideas about how termites control the temperature and humidity in their mounds, knowledge that can help make buildings more comfortable and energy efficient.
It is pretty disgusting that this man is killing a life form for no reason whatsoever other than to satiate his curiosity. He does not NEED to know what an ant home looks like. This is a total disregard for life and the reason why the earth is in the state it is in right now.
@Puckles you are a knucklehead. IT'S ANTS!! And like a previous poster said, if ants could they would pour molten aluminum on US.
"It's been said that the boys have great sport killing frogs; but that the frogs don't die in sport, but in earnest." We make a lot out of monsters, demons, vampires, etc. But to the other inhabitants of this planet, HUMANS are the monsters.
True, maybe a better way might be some sort of underground sonar mapping, or giving the ants some harmless barely radioactive material that they take underground, and could then be read by sensors and mapped on a computer. But this is more homegrown than that, and it will do absolutely nothing to the worldwide ant population. There are more ants in a single acre than people in the average city. We are talking like 10,000,000,000,000,000 ants. The weight of all of the ants put together is equal to all of the humans....seriously.
That would be completely unfeasible, as radiation is shielded by dirt. Even if you dusted the ants with a powdered Uranium core from a nuclear powerplant, the amount of radiation which would reach the surface in from the bottom of a 12-foot-deep colony would be 1/(1.25x10^12) of the original (assuming it's dry dirt, wet dirt would shield even more), and that would be directly from above, which would give no resolution in your mapping scheme. In order to get the type of resolution you're thinking of, you'd have to excavate the entire colony first (a task for which you'd have to first know the dimensions of the colony, which you don't) , use your radioactive dust, and then get incredibly low-resolution scans of the completely collapsed ant colony containing those thousands of dead, irradiated ants. Then you'd have to explain to the EPA why they have to pay thousands of dollars to bury your dangerously radioactive dirt under 36 feet of concrete in New Mexico.