Thursday, April 29, 2010

Antworks is Cool

We had some friends spend the night Wednesday night. If waking up with friends isn't exciting enough, we had our ants arrive Thursday morning for our Antworks Illuminated ant farm.

The ants arrived in a small vial. You get 30 but some of them are obviously expected to die in transport because the farm indicates it holds 20-25 ants. We had about 6 dead ants and plenty of dead ant parts. Holding them in the little vial was CREEPY!

Since Scott wasn't home, the job of moving the ants from their vial fell to me. *shiver* Once we got them into their new home, we watched them for a bit.

The information that comes with the habitat says that it may take 24-48 hours for the ants to start tunneling. However, we had a good tunnel going after just 7 hours. It goes from the middle of the gel to the against the glass on the back side of the tunnel. Using the high magnification tool, you can see the teeth on their mandibles pinching the gel into little balls that they then carry up to the top of the habitat before heading down the tunnel again. If you look from the top down, you can see down the tunnel just a bit and watch them come up it. There's about a dozen ants working this tunnel.

They've also started a tunnel in the corner on the front side of the habitat. Only half a dozen ants are working this tunnel.

The ants have been busy overnight. Here's what we woke up to. The two tunnels don't connect yet (one is towards the front of the habitat and the other is towards the back) but will within a couple of hours.

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