The problem with ants is that they have poor business-management skills. I'm no contractor, but let me tell you that if I were an ant, I could do things better.
Two months ago I purchased an AntWorks ant farm, was filled with thirty-odd brown Florida harvester ants. I took some nifty macro photos of it, too.
The directions instruct you to poke four holes in the blue gel, which prompts them into digging. The first mistake was that they picked one of the short holes to begin expanding. It's obvious now that the ants learned lessons from the unions and want to bill more time.
Additionally, the ants are obviously English, not Floridian. They've build multiple roundabouts in their tunnels in areas that obviously support sufficient two-way traffic. Unnecessary!
According on the enclosed publication, the life span of a brown Florida harvester ant is about two-to-three months. Some of the ants have by now perished, and a few bodies were thrown into an isolated pit and sealed off. Dead ant bodies grown fungus, so they're intelligent in that they try not to gag themselves on deadly spores.
Some moron, however, decided to seal the ant grave prematurely. Their solution? Dismantle the body of every ant deceased thereafter, and glue her parts to the wall of the display like some sicko avant-garde modern art. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I'd slap the piss out of my kids if they ever cut my dead body up and glued parts of me to a window.
Beautiful macro-pictures you got there.
My better half ( > me / 2 ? ) gave me one of those ant farms last year and we pretty much saw the same necrologic behavior (chamber of the dead, then recycling of members of, er, dead members of the colony as makeshift direction sign).
The funny thing is that even though those ants are supposed to live up to two months max, the last two or three survivors of the colony went into a kind of hibernation. Which means that for six months or so, they periodically woke up to their itsy ant version of '28 Days After'...
