What exactly does it take to earn the title of "ant expert"? Surely I could be a "fire-ant-bite-expert", as my left foot with its current afflictions would attest, but I don't think I can quite qualify for the title of "ant expert".
Walter Tschinkel is a professor at Florida State University. He has written a book on fire ants and studies the architecture of all types of ant hills. That may not sound very exciting, but it's actually pretty cool. He's even developed a method that allows him to make 3-D casts of the ant colonies, and uses them in his research.
Did you know that ants don't just make tunnels? They have "store rooms" where they collect seeds, hallways connecting them, and other types of rooms in the hills that they build. Different types of ants even have different styles of designs in their colonies. Some ants have long, straight-down designs with a single "hallway", others create more elaborate designs that resemble chandeliers. They are quite beautiful too! (Click here to see some of Walter's different casts)
One year at Christmas, my sister got an ant farm as a gift. I was really jealous. I loved watching the ants in that thing, and even managed to restrain myself from shaking it.
Now a days, when I see a fire ant hill, I don't feel quite as intrigued. Instead, I look for the nearest bag of poison. Hey - if it's kill or be bitten by one of those mean little things, I'll always move to squash out the ants!
1 comment:
That's pretty cool. I had no idea their hills went that far down.
And you shouldn't have been jealous of my ant farm. They didn't do any of the tricks I tried to teach them, except for "jump up and down" .... but I had to shake them up a bit to get them to even do that.
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