This is one of my favorite things in all of ant science.
Chances are you've seen something like this before, either here on YouTube or somewhere
else on the internet.
There are hundreds of videos, some with millions of views, of metal being poured into an ant
nest and being dug out of the ground.
And if you search through Ebay, you'll find dozens of these metal casts being sold as
art or home decoration.
But before these became the things of viral videos and Etsy shops, casting underground
ant nests in metal was a scientific method invented by this person, Walter Tschinkel.
He created the field of ant nest architecture research, and pioneered the methods to do it.
He's just published this book which tells the stories of his discoveries and his research
process in this field.
So, I decided to spend a couple days filming with him down in Tallahassee, FL.
I think more people should know about this corner of science and hear about the story
of the invention of nest architecture research and the person who started it.
I've never wanted to a person who is in the center, in the mainstream of science.
That's not my nature.
I tend to be on the periphery, to look at things that other people aren't looking at.
And, it's the objects and the art that also made ant nest architecture particularly rewarding to me.
There's the discovery angle, of course, because when you first cast a species you don't know
what's down there.
Nest casting was only possible when people figured out what material to pour into the
ground that would fill the chamber areas, harden, and then could be dug out of the ground.
The first nests weren't metal.
Some of the first were this material here, which is dental plaster.
A paper was published on using dental plaster for making nest casts, and the authors had
done a few species.
Partial casts, they weren't complete casts.
And I though, well, there a material that would be good.
And, so I bought some dental plaster and made a nest cast of a fire ant nest.
Because of it's structure, it all came out in this big glob of dirt and then I took it
home and washed the soil out and I was really surprised because it turned out that I hadn't
envisioned it right at all.
It was really quite organized in space.
And it clearly consisted of vertical shafts that connected horizontal chambers.
But there were so many of these shaft and chamber units that they melded together.
So at that point I realized that nest casting had the potential of showing me stuff that
wasn't really easily seen from just excavating a nest.
After that first fire ant cast, the second plaster cast that Walter ever made became
his most famous.
It's permanently mounted to a wall in a biology building at Florida State.
Ok, well this is the plaster cast that got me hooked on doing nest architecture.
It's a Florida harvester ant nest and it is still the biggest one i've ever cast, so I
guess it was a lucky thing because it really did hook me.
Besides hooking Walter into doing decades of research, that nest was also the first
to get major public attention, debuting with an article and full-page picture in Natural
History magazine.
So, what was impressive was the scale of that thing.
I guess that was unexpected it would be so large.
But also the beauty of it!
Once I saw what the underground chambers were like, how they were arranged, the helical
shaft that connected them and all that, I saw that that was something really special.
Mounting that cast was a big job, it 180 pieces of plaster.
Plaster nests come out of the ground in pieces like this.
Once glued together and mounted, an assembled cast is fragile, nearly unmovable.
So, a major step forward in doing this work was figuring out how to melt metals in the
field to make casts that could be dug out of the ground in more or less one complete piece.
So I was looking for a stronger casting material, and I fiddled around with a number of things
that didn't really work and I new eventually I would have to go to molten metal.
So the question is how do you melt metal in the field, right?
Walter's garage workshop is filled with casts and the equipment he's designed and built
over the years to do this type of work.
Ok, these are a couple of the kilns i've made.
Two sizes.
This is probably the smallest one and this is a medium size one.
I do have one that's bigger than that.
They're both built on the same principle of a container that is lined with an insulating material.
In this case, it's an organic fiber blanket.
The blanket is protected by a steal mesh, and inside that is a cage into which the crucible fits.
So, this is a crucible.
It's made from the bottom half of a steal scuba tank.
I put a bucket handle on it.
And at the bottom it has little loop so that once you've pulled it out of the fire you
can hook it and tilt it and pour it.
So this fits in there and it takes anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour and a half to have
a bucket full of red-hot aluminum.
I take the short cut now.
None of this matches and fat lighter.
Yeah, let's go with that for a while.
This is Apalachicola National Forest in northern Florida, where Walter has done most of his field studies.
This site, where we are prepping to do a cast of a Camponotus carpenter ant, is his favorite.
A place he calls "Ant Heaven".
For this cast, the metal being used in aluminum.
He sourced from a failed, cut-up scuba tank.
And after about 90 minutes of heating, fueled by only charcoal and a passive draft chimney,
the metal is liquid and hot enough to pour.
The first step is lifting the red-hot crucible out of the kiln.
"Come on, don't do that.
There.
*grunt*" Once the hook is looped, the crucible is tipped and the contents are poured.
"Ok, here we go..."
And if you listen close, you can hear the crackling of vegetation as it ignites from
the intense heat.
"It's a big one."
After the pour is done the crucible goes back into the kiln to keep the remaining metal liquid.
It will be poured out later into divots in the sand to create ingots for reusing.
"Now, we neaten this up."
Once it cools and hardens, digging starts to extract the cast and reveal the shape of
the underground nest.
"Oh my god, it's all the way out here!"
"These are easy to cast because they are such large caliber nests.
So, there's no problem in herding aluminum down a thin shaft.
Ah, got it.
There you are.
It's a beauty, don't you think.
They often have these chambers with the holes there because they expand the chamber all
the way around.
So, taa daaa!"
All of this is pursuit of trying to describe and understand the biology of these organisms.
And the casts themselves present many un-answered questions.
This one's different from many because it's so apparently chaotic.
Remember some of the Pheidole nests were extremely regular and very patterned, but this one is
the opposite.
So, once again you see figuring out how relatedness and taxonomy is related to architecture is
a major challenge and there's no really obvious answer to it.
I had made a cast at ant heaven, where I work, and I had my head down and was digging it out.
Wasn't a very deep one, just, you know, Camponotus socius.
All of the sudden my attention was jerked by... there was a guy coming towards me.
It was a deputy sheriff, with his green uniform and his gun and all that, and I thought 'oh god.
What is he going to challenge me because I am digging in a national forest.'
No, he wanted to know what I was doing.
So, I told him.
Oh, he says, you're the guy.
You're the guy with all those metal casts of ants.
And I said, yeah, i'm the guy.
So, he says, hang on I gotta get my cell phone.
My kid is going to love this.
So he took pictures and video of me.
So, yeah, it gets around.
So, that's the story behind casting ant nests in metal.
The rest of the story is in here, along with the over 40 species of ants that Walter has
made casts of.
If you want to learn more about this area, I recommend you check this out.