These are harvester ants with powerful jaws. In a strange coincidence, a harvester ant colony has a comparable number of neurons as a human brain (and sometimes they try to convey this message visually =) Blog on the hive mind.
There are about 1.6 million ants for every person on earth. The ants you see crawling around are all female.
This gel farm was developed by NASA to survive Space Shuttle launches (sand would shift and crush the ants under many G’s). They wanted to study tunnel formation in microgravity. The gel does not collapse during launch, and it contains all the food and water the ants need. It also has some antibiotics and anti-fungal agents.
The subject of Puzzle 39.
69 responses to “Miners”
Sweet, Rock on! Cool picture, thanks!
That stuff is way better than the messy, opaque sand that comes with most ant farms. Did the ants dig through that stuff or are they traveling through existing tunnels? More importantly, where I can buy and ant farm with NASA gel in it?
He he. I guess I should have waited 2 minutes for the description to be composed…
Now THAT is glow in the dark luminescence, Billy. Aproppos of yesterday’s Steve Puzzler.
Thanks.
Billy: I have the AntWorks system. I tried the local ants in California, but they were too small. There is an order form where for $3, they ship 25 harvester ants to you. I highly recommend that, unless you have those ants where you live.
I have to say that your photos are cooler and pretter than theirs. They have the trouble of having to be advertising too, but still, looking at theirs showed me just how well you did with your lighting and picture taking.
That feeling of being under water is very pretty.
Great contrast and such minute details to please the eyes. Great shot.
I agree with Smaragd. Beautiful shot and interesting subject.
Steve, if you bought it from ThinkGeek, you should send this photo as an action shot.
I always wanted an ant farm when I was a kid, but I felt sorry for the ants that had to be shipped all the way to my country. And most of the times, they didn’t ship them outside the U.S. If I ever get an ant farm, I want one like this.
OOMMGG!!! Thats one awesome photo!!!!!!!!! wooowww.
I just got the ants into mine just yesterday afternoon, and as of this morning they’ve tunneled down about 2 inches (in a corner) and have made a 90-degree turn along the front wall– I’d heard they don’t tunnel too quickly after being introduced– who knew?
I’ll be posting pics of my own, once I work out some of the manual focus settings on my camera, heheh.
By the way, Here’s the link to the NASA experiment that stimulated the creation of the blue agar in the pic. The experiment was created by some New York high school students. You can read all about the special agar (which wasn’t blue in the experiment) which contains both water and nutrition as well as anti-fungal measures to prevent common ant afflictions.
The experiment was tried on the ground to make sure the protocols and machinery all worked, and then sent into space. The experiment was on STS-107, the Colombia shuttle that was lost on reentry, but the data including hourly photos were beamed down.
The ground-based trial of the experiment was fairly fruitless, but the space-based experiment created some nice tunnelling– the ants were more eager to tunnel than anticipated.
Thanks Sunburn! Cool link. Very Interesting. Got to building some huge tunnels! I’ll have to look at the movies from home, mp isn’t playing them here..
Cool!
The hue of the gel is striking and the tunnel’s construction and imperviousness to the G-force is remarkable. Nice closeup shot!
Reminds me too much of my kitchen! LOL.
This is amazing…It looks as if they’re digging through ice.
Thanks y’all.
They are fascinating to watch. I keep them on my desk as zero-maintenance office pets.
the pests!
I ordered one. It should get here soon. Looking forward to it.
This idea is stunning. I’ve seen agar used in germ growth before, but this use is much more fun. This isn’t blue though, but cyan (turquoise in commonish).
Where’s all the ant waste? Hmm, and why do they include ant-killing tools?
Cool. It came. The ants started tunneling within a few hours.
jogales: So it’s photo time. =)
lys dex: those are not tools of ant abatement; they are tools of observation and setup.
-Ant-: these are your peeps, man.
Hey Steve, how are your little ones doing? Mine are closing on the 2-month mark and starting to stiffen up a bit. I’ve lost about 6, I think. I’ll probably order more in a week or so.
Uncanny timing. They were all thriving until about 2 days ago. About 5 dead now.
Be careful not to mix batches of ants. If they are not from the same colony, they will kill each other. Well, actually, if you do that, have your camera ready. =)
Now mine have stopped tunneling. They tunneled a few inches straight down, and stopped. Oh well, I can just order more ants, and yes, I will have my camera ready for any ant wars 🙂
You can have all the ants that’s here in Texas, it’s free….they even bite! Red Ants…they make mounts of them…and we need to get some sort of Ant killer!!They even bit my dogs "Babies"…great capture of this glowing thing though…
Nice pic. This gel is awsome for weird picures. Using a blue light source can make pictures even more special, as shown on my blog :
fourmi-bleu.blogspot.com/
Hey, according to the new Flickr "interestingness" algorithm, this was the most interesting photo of the day… yahoo!
That’s so cool. That gel is true genius.
Oh wow. That just made my day.
Congratulations, this image has been blogged on the Cream of the Crop blog.
Blog: Cream of the Crop
map
Admin’s fave Group C&C MacroPhotography. Thanks!
That is so interesting. At first glance I though they had been frozen.
Intriguing photo and background – love it! (Macro 1-2-3)
This is a lovely picture (macro 123)
Sweet pic. I have been thinking about getting a family member one of those ant farms for Christmas. (123)
Wow!!!
Awesome and interesting. I’m happy to have learned something here.
Very cool and informative! Love the blues.
amazing!
Wonderful work and amazing shot!!
I’ve added this photo to my Natural Wallpapers Blog and the photo is automatically set as wallpaper for the people today. (The post is here.)
SUPERB photo.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve tagged this image ‘refreshphoto’ for inclusion on my photography/new media showcase website, Refresh. I am compiling a gallery of my 10 current favourite images on flickr and this is one of them.
http://www.refreshlinks.org.uk/photos.php
The photo will of course link back to your photostream, but if you do not want the image to appear on my site, simply remove the tag.
cheers,
Guy
Thanks for applying to the 1500 views and 60 faves group! This is a superb photo. You have been accepted!
It’s a shame that the novels of the french writer BERNARD WERBER are not translated into english yet, maybe you’ d like his trilogy "The ants" " The day of the ants " " The revolution of the ants".
Nice shot!
http://www.bernardwerber.com/
Very interesting shot! And cool pets 🙂
bella
nice description !
Very nice!
—
Seen in Scientist Photographers (?)