Ever since our wonderful teacher (Mrs.C) told me about the picture on our class blog http://itc.blogs.com/minds/2007/05/lets_have_a_lit.html I've gone ant crazy! So here's some ant facts!
here the colonies located at? -All study colonies were located at a site about 16 km southwest of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, within the Apalachicola National Forest.
How did they do it? -
The architecture of the nest void was rendered by two methods. In the first, a pit was dug next to the nest and the chambers were exposed horizontally, one at a time, starting from the top. The depth and orientation of each chamber were recorded, its contents collected for later counting and measuring, and its outlines traced on transparent acetate sheets. This method produced a reasonable rendering of the two-dimensional outlines and spatial distribution of the horizontal chambers, and a complete record of the distribution of ants and seeds within the nest. It did not record the vertical shafts connecting chambers. Except for the details of nest architecture, the results of these excavations have been published (Tschinkel 1998; 1999a; b)
In the second method, the nest void was filled with a thin slurry of orthodontal plaster poured into the nest entrance (Williams and Lofgren 1988). This produced a (usually) perfect three-dimensional rendering of the nest's voids. The hardened cast was excavated and then reassembled to produce the finished cast. For reassembly, chambers were supported with steel rods driven into holes in a backboard. Because the shafts of P. badius are large in diameter, the thin slurry often completely filled a 3 m-deep nest in a single pour. The sandy soils of the Florida coastal plains allow the plaster slurry to displace the air within the chambers, filling them completely. Heavy clay soils often produce incomplete casts and voids within the plaster because of trapped air. Although a few images of the nest casts of several ant species have been published (Tschinkel 2003), the details of the nest architecture of P. badius are presented here for the first time.
(to be continued)
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