Susan of French Road Connections was inquiring how our ants were doing so I thought I’d update.
There they are. Day 20. There’s a wee bit of tunneling down the side of the habitat, just a little more than evidenced on day 10.
The three perforations towards the center of the gel are the ones we made before we put the ants in their new home, as per instructions. The ants have pointedly ignored those.
For comparison, this link shows what ordinary ants achieve by day three in Allen Hong’s NASA gel ant habitat.
But Allen Hong has ordinary Harvester ants. We have exceptional non-tunneling Harvester ants…who like making sculpture of the few granules they’ve mined.
Susan inquired,
If they were honeybees acting like that, it would be symptomatic of queenlessness. Are they touching mandibles or grooming each other? That’s how they would be sharing pheromones and promoting “hive mindâ€, if they were functioning as a colony. Do you actually have two camps, or is there some contact between the two groups? Is there a source of electromagnetic radiation ( motor or flourescent light?) near enough to disturb them?
Susan, they’re supposed to tunnel despite the lack of a queen (it’s illegal to sell the queens). From what Uncle Milton wrote, the scent of even one worker ant is supposed to inflame the others into joyous paroxysms of tunneling behavior.
They do appear to groom each other, but what do I know, they may instead be pretending to groom each other. There are not literally two camps of ants. Mostly what they do is all sit on top of the gel in a little bundle, consulting on what not to do next, while one lone ant struggles at tunneling behavior off to the side.
I moved their habitat in order to take this picture, which is why they’re all running around, upset by the earthquake. But we keep it, as advised, on a shelf where they’re not disturbed, away from direct sunlight. There are no motors or florescent lights nearby. Just books. As instructed, we don’t disturb the habitat, but I’ve read of children veritably playing soccer with ant habitats and the ants blithely continuing to tunnel away.
Uncle Milton said I should keep them updated on the progress of our ants. I suppose I’ll send them this pic. I may also send it along to Dezeen.
P.S. Melisaur’s Flickr photoset shows what our ant habitat could have looked like by now if our ants gave half a damn. But our ants appear to be cousins to Wes Barnes’ ants who also were philosopher ants done in by the futility of endeavor in the face of the yawning void.
Melisaur’s ants actually have a queen as they were farmed off a tree.
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