Ant’s nest
April 26th, 2007 by rbanks
Here’s a shot of a hidden world. This plaster cast is of the INSIDE of a Florida Harvester Ant’s nest. It has 135 chambers and 12 meters of vertical shafts. Quite an architecture.
I liked this quote, which gives such a societal feeling to the colony. Basically they’re saying the young ants work at the deeper end, while the old ants stay near the surface:
“Carbon dioxide concentrations increased 5-fold between the surface and the depths of the nest. A preference of young workers for high carbon dioxide concentrations, and a tendency for workers to dig more under low carbon dioxide concentrations could explain both the vertical age-distribution of workers, and the top-heaviness of the nest’s architecture.”
“A plaster cast of a large Pogonomyrmex badius nest. This nest consisted of 135 chambers and 12 meters of vertical shafts. The top-heavy distribution of chamber area and spacing is typical for the species, as are the helical shafts and the decrease of chamber size with depth (photo by Charles Badland).”
follow me on Twitter
Alice Says
What a beautiful and complex strucutre! How on earth did they get the cast out of the ground?
Apr 27th, 2007 at 9:40 am
rbanks Says
Looks like they literally poured plaster (and later on some metals) into the nest and then excavated and reconstructed the elements to make a final version. No idea if the nests were empty at the time…
Apr 27th, 2007 at 10:52 am