ANT CITY

I see a whole lot of these ant (termites - thankyou Waz) mounds in my travels with work. I've heard lots of stories about them, both Indigenous and European. For example; the ants (termites) build them tall, like this one I snapped at Mount Brockman a few years ago, in order to create a form of natural air conditioning. This allows the heat to stay at the top and make it cooler down near the bottom.

ants

But I've always wondered what they where like on the inside. I've seen a few broken ones but they offer little in the way of clues because of the fine grain of the sand used to construct them. It merely falls into and fills in the chambers once it breaks.

Well I can wonder no more. Some intrepid scientists have poured a heap of concrete into a mound and then excavated it over a period of weeks to expose the almost architectural like insides. It's pretty freakingly amazing stuff.



No mention of what happened to the ants (termites) though, those poor ants (termites), wont anyone think of the ants (termites)?


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