August 29, 2010

the ants [an experiment]

Garrett Burke I'm exploring china lake and it's surrounding grounds. I've spotted more than 10 ant hills in the area, and plan to go mark them all with spray paint, in order to more easily track the ants from nest to nest. Next is black light with flourescent ink.2 seconds ago · · Comment · Like



Garrett Burke dur, I was distracted. What I mean at the end there, was I'm going to find the most active mound and spray all the ants (after disturbing the mound to make more come out) with fluorescent paint then I'll come back the next night and see if I can spot any of the ants. I did it with spray paint to two of them and very shockingly they cleaned up all the paint, and I could only find one ant with paint on it.

UPDATE:

I've gone and marked over 5 hills with paint, very thoroughly.

I waited 3 days and came back to inspect all the ant hills. I found that all of them had the paint completely removed from the majority of the mounds. The outer rings of the mounds still contained twigs and pine needles with a touch of paint on them. 

The shocking thing, in every case, was that I couldn't find any trace of the painted branches. This means that the at least double  fist worth of twigs and needles covered completely in paint had literally been taken so far away I couldn't find the pile. I couldn't find a garbage pile of any kind when I thought to look for one.

I looked and looked and studied the hills for a good ten minutes each. I only saw one ant that still had any paint on him. I'm not sure what that means. Did the others die and get taken to the trash pile? Did they go into hiding for fear of being more easily spotted by pray?

I'm not sure what all this means, I can however tell you that I'm very excited to go and try it again.







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