Snooping Around....Molten Aluminum Creations

Ants are highly social creatures who live in colonies of thousands of members.
Humans often use poisons to get rid of these creatures to protect their home and property, but an artist did something quite weird with Molten Aluminum. In this process the aluminum is carefully poured into the top of an ant nest, and the metal goes throughout all of the tunnels and settles into all of the crevices. Once the Aluminum has cooled and the dirt has been washed away, the resulting structure makes a perfect representation of the nest’s internal structure. Actually these seems to be a very rude process because all of the ants die in the process, but given the ants’ invasive nature it’s hardly worth for most of people losing any sleep over.


But these have given scientists a wide knowledge. In fact making models of the nests allow scientists to study differences between species, as not all ants make the same nests. For example, carpenter ants have simple nests with only a few tunnels while red imported fire ants have highly complex networks of rooms and tunnels.
Here below you can admire the video showing this curious process:

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