Day Two: 20 Feet Short

They weren't supposed to start tunneling for 24-48 hours, but about 16 hours later, they've excavated one entire side of the blue-agar stuff down to the bottom and created a U-shaped tube back to the surface. The excised chunks of agar have been distributed across most of the surface, but particularly at the sides, building climbing walls up the perspex. I put the early tunneling start down to the fact that my ants are special, early developers. They're better than other people's ants. Oh yes. That and the lab is boiling hot at the moment as the air conditioning's gone again so they're a lot more active.

I say most of the surface for the bricks, that's because they've left a clear patch near the exit of the tunnel where they gather for rest breaks when they're not on digging duty. The agar acts both as food stuff and tunneling substrate and during the rests they nibble at it slightly and seem to be supping. They aren't eating the big chunks that they break off.


You can see the entrance to the hole from above just south of Bertwhistle's derriere in the above shot. You can also see that they have little concept of personal space, a little like passengers on the Number 30 bus in SF (see here for number 30 adventures), and that Splodey seems to be grooming Flip whilst Tweetspawn does Boothby Graffoe. I've a feeling Tally's under there somewhere too. Between a third and two thirds of them seem to be resting at any one time with quite regular change overs.

After lunch, they aborted a second tunneling project that was starting in the opposite corner, leaving Keith dejectedly licking condensation off the wall:


And instead they plumped for a new tunnel (under the direction of Margot) starting alongside the first - I've not perfected the transfer of video from camera to web yet, and I've lost a lot of resolution going via iphoto, imovie 08 (clunky) and finally to youtube, I'll see if I can improve on the below, but here they are, hard at work. And so am I in the background. I must stop biting my nails.

Aaargh! Youtube's down for maintenance. OK - let's try this another way.




It's like ant therapy to watch them - and I should probably start charging given the number of visitors I'm attracting! You can watch them remove the blocks in two directions, up the left hand side and out of view, or up the u-shaped tunnel on the other side of the agar. More on Monday as away for a short while, all I hope is that they don't die over the weekend!