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Walter Tschinkel's Aluminum Casts of Ant Colonies Reveals Insect Architecture

By Rain Noe - October 9, 2012

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

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Walter Tschinkel's Aluminum Casts of Ant Colonies Reveals Insect Architecture

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dwarkesh Indus

4 years ago

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Many international manufacturing companies order the Aluminium Castings in India because it's cost effective to buy from India. The Aluminium Casting Process in India is very inexpensive compared to that in Middle East Nations, Asian Countries and European countries. Dwarkesh Industries Aluminium Casting in India www.dwarkeshindustries.in

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Mackinal

6 years ago

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I like this premise: Don't destroy what you're not capable of re-doing your self afterwards, ( and I'm not thinking about the ant's dwelling ) I'm thinking about the ants, if you can not make an ant don't kill it.unless you're doing it to help preserving a bigger form of life. As simple as that. Is not about sins,religions,cheap drama, you name it, is just a simple principle that helps more than hurts.beautiful final product the " chandeliers" but...........like more simple principles with deep meanings if we know how to "read" into them.
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Wesley

6 years ago

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If a lot of you came to the deep south and inadvertently stood on a fire ant mound for a minute, I think you might not have quite so much sympathy. I can personally think of no more fitting end for the little buggers.
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mark pilato

6 years ago

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great argument and this alone makes it a great work of art, bringing up the questions we are talking about. if there is a way to get the ants out, should this be considered? i think so, the ants are the artists as well, they are the ones who have shaped the works we are seeing. i think they should be given every opportunity for life. How cool would these works be if this artist was able to find away not to kill the ants, showing us his process of relocating them. i feel then the work would speak on many levels and showing our humanity towards all life big or small, taking the steps toward greater understandings. I dont think this guy is a bad person and i bet he is an amazing guy in his life, i just think he could be doing this a better way and not killing ants in the process. http://voices.yahoo.com/natural-ways-rid-ants-without-killing-them-8888327.html

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Ermine

6 years ago

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To everyone complaining that "He shouldn't KEEP doing it, we know what ant colonies look like after the first one!" - I'm sorry, you people are idiots. I suspect that nearly every species of ants digs differently-shaped colonies, and you might even be able to identify the species by the look of the nests. How will we learn if that's true? By making castings of LOTS and LOTS of different nests, as many different species as one could find, in as many different places as possible.

He's not being "cruel" to repeat this with different colonies, he's doing good science - and he's working with a creature that has almost no brain whatsoever. He's certainly not doing anything to bring down the vast number of ants that surround us at all times, nor is he 'torturing' anything. I think being surrounded by molten aluminum is probably about the quickest death I could think of for a critter that size - poison would take far, far longer, and would probably cause far more distress, whatever 'distress' an ant can feel as it begins to fail.
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Terence

6 years ago

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I agree with the comments about cruelty. While I understand the need to do this for science, how many casts do we need? We already know what ant colonies look like, and I've seen many of these casts done before. I think it's important to gather scientific information, but after it's been done so many times, I think there comes a point when you just need to stop being so cruel for the sake of curiosity.
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Frank

6 years ago

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To all the whiners here complaining about "killing living things".

Did you wash your hands this morning and kill billions of bacteria? Brush your teeth and kill billions of bacteria? Cut the grass and got the blood of innocents staining your shoes?

Did you not sever the ovaries of plants and throw them in a blender so you could make a healthy fruit smoothie? Didn't tear off the limbs of plants for your salad? How many bugs died in the plants you consumed?

Oh, what's that? Bacteria and plants and pests don't count as life forms because they're not cuddly, cute, or curious and it would contradict your twisted personal worldview which you judge the world by (a world which runs on established law and not your worldview)? Keep telling yourself that so you can pretend to be better than other people.

Mother nature doesn't care about you. Mother nature hates your guts. Mother nature will kill you every chance it gets with everything it has. There is no crueler force than mother nature, killing off trillions of living things and wiping phylums and classes and orders and families and genus and species off the face of the planet for billions of years.
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- Lisa Nelson
  
  5 years ago
  
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  Thank you Frank, after hearing all the intense discussion about the preservation of 'all' life, (and veganism) you have expressed my thoughts perfectly.
  
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This is NOT science

6 years ago

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We did know how ant colony looks like, this is unnecessary and cruel no matter how many ants are there in world.
One of the most idiotic comment here - "Ants don't feel pain"
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HypocritesShouldShutUp

6 years ago

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This "sick" person has probably already contributed more to science and society in general than his critics possibly ever will in their entire lifetimes.
Cruel? Yes. But hey, eating meat is cruel too, but the entire world does it and it's universally accepted. I don't see people slamming pest-busters either.
Science has to be done. Without it, most of us would probably not even be alive to debate about retarded things like whether this guy is "sick". (cus most of our ancestors would have died from famines)
Then again, this world might be better off without science cus we'd be too busy running away from lions to have retarded debates about inconsequential things. In particular, I'd thoroughly enjoy the sight of his critics running away from lions. You can label me as "sick", but at least I'm not a hypocrite.
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MrBurrows

7 years ago

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1. Ants don't feel pain. Asking how we would feel if the tables were reversed is foolish, as to truly reverse them, we wouldn't "feel".
2. Seriously, if you want to complain about killing ants, go protest raid.
3. Just stop trolling, you're making yourself look retarded.
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Dahlia Blair

7 years ago

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What happened to the video?
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rick

7 years ago

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Doing this barbarous experiment a few times to discover more about ant hills could be accepted as science. This ass has been repeating this since 1980 according to the article. What has been learned that wasn't already known by the first hundred casts? What possible question could he still be trying to answer that is important enough to justify burning to death an entire ant society of up to 10,000 ants? This is no longer science but just sick vanity. No ethics board would OK such research when the answer is already known (as is the interior form of anthills). As others have noted, this guy is just sick.
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Artemis

7 years ago

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Everyone who doesn't like the fact that this guy is killing ants:

Are you vegan, or at least vegetarian? Do you wear leather shoes or have leather in your car? Do you spay and neuter your pets to reduce the number of unwanted and euthanized cats and dogs?

He's doing this FOR SCIENCE. Ant behavior, etc. Just because you don't know anything about it doesn't mean someone else doesn't want to, or that it's not worth knowing anything about.
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Derp

7 years ago

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I'm not sure if sclarke is trolling with the GPS tracker comment, or really that uneducated? A GPS tracker needs a receiver as well as a transmitter, and also a power source. I'd love to know how you're going to make that small enough to attach to even a carpenter ant.

Then there's the problem of receiving/transmitting the GPS signal. Have you ever tried using your cellphone inside a tunnel? No signal? GPS works the same way, except you need to be able to receive a signal from SPACE. That might get through the first inch of dirt, and that's about it.

I've probably killed more any colonies in my backyard than this guy has in the name of science.
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Willy G

7 years ago

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Would they be poor ants if they were in your house
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Webjundub

7 years ago

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Imagine aliens coming to earth and vaporizing us so that they could study our architecture...not so cool when the roles are switched. I get that there are LOTS of ants, that doesn't change the reality of each individual act of destruction.
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Lowonprozac

7 years ago

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You dirty ant lovers! Ants ate my mother!
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wimpstophe

7 years ago

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I saw a Nova special on this guy well over 5 years ago. He actually scouts out antholes that are dead or otherwise uninhabited. He makes it a point to do that if he is using the zinc or aluminum casting method.
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cyclux

7 years ago

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..GPS.. for ants!?...hope you are kidding!
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RP

7 years ago

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When children torture and kill animals we call that having "serial killer tendencies". When a grown man tortores and kills ants over and over again for questionable additional gain each time, we call him a scientist? This weirdo needs help, not praise. Killing any living thing just out of curiosity is evil, plain and simple.
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Card

7 years ago

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Sclarke, you have to be kidding me. A GPS tracker? Even with our miniaturization processes that would hardly fit in an anthill, let alone on the back of an ant.
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sclarke

7 years ago

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Those poor ants! I guess a better way would be to place GPS trackers on some ants and let them do the work, obviously not something that would happen in the 80's though. As cool as the product is, I wouldn't be as cruel as this guy even with ants. It is no wonder why so many species go extinct each year!
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Desiree

7 years ago

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I can't believe there is even a debate over whether or not killing ants for science is justified. This is inarguably a useful scientific endeavor, if only in that perhaps we can learn something useful from studying the habitat and habits of the single most successful organism on the planet. Even those of you bashing human habits can see that we have a lot to learn on cohabitation in small spaces, and better utilization of resources. Every day, people kill off anthills invading their yards. He's doing so in the name of science. I think that is a noble reason to do so. There are few places where the natural sciences can still be expanded, and this is one of them.
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@@Puckles

7 years ago

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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.
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@Puckles

7 years ago

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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.
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Lawrence

7 years ago

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"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.
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Knuckles

7 years ago

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@Puckles you are a knucklehead. IT'S ANTS!! And like a previous poster said, if ants could they would pour molten aluminum on US.
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Puckles

7 years ago

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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.
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gmoke

7 years ago

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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.

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ZZX

7 years ago

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great looking 150 million years old design
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slippyfish

7 years ago

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Really cool and alien. I wonder if the ship/pyramid designers in Prometheus took inspiration from these structures.
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Austin

7 years ago

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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.
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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.