Space Miners
My favorite office pets: harvester ants with powerful jaws.
This gel farm was developed by NASA to survive rocket 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. So it’s a zero-maintenance pet – no feeding, no noise, and they move their dung and dead to the midden pile. Perfect for he office. =)
And now, taking the research further, Deborah Gordon packed 600 ants to the ISS (on the same spacecraft as the 28 Planet Labs imaging satellites). She is studying the robustness of the antenna-tickle quorum sensing of the hive mind for optimizing decentralized search algorithms.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/january/ants-in-space-011714.html
Deborah Gordon is my social insect muse, inspiring my very first blog post (on how we might detect supra-human emergence). Most memorable: the colony learns lessons over long periods of time, longer than the life span of the ants themselves. The hive itself is a locus of learning, not just the individual ants.
There are about 1.6 million ants for every person on earth. The ants you see crawling around are all female.
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