Jan 14 2009Cool!: Massive Underground Ant Colony

Top 5!!
Wohoo!

Haha!
First!

I have a ant colony twice the size of this in my sock drawer...

just awesome

WTF kind of sciencebastards kill millions of ants? that sounds like something the mental skin head kid you grew up with would do

Concrete? I though molten zinc was used for doing this.

That's effing incredible.

I think thats kinda sad a whole colony of ants wiped out... O_O would be like someone pouring concrete down your chimney or through your letter box. Still pretty neat though, I won't cry to hard about it.

All that work for the ants and this guy clobbers them with 10 tonnes of cement

@8 - More like someone pouring concrete in downtown New York City. :( Still, the total weight of all the ants in the world it many times greater than the total weight of all the humans, so thankfully the overall population should be fine. [I'm still personally conflicted over the benefits to science versus the annihilation of an entire ant colony. Glad I wasn't the one who had to make that decision.]

Awesome!

I'm with Elmo. When they showed the lone ant walking on top the what was once a tunnel its colony built, I seriously could have cried. Go on you cynical heartless cyberbastards, say what you will, but the depth and complexity of this colony destroyed should break your hearts, at least a little bit. That was full scale ant genocide.

I saw this on the discovery channel a while back, quite fascinating. It's amazing what those little bastards can do.

@10 Who gives a crap about a bunch of ants? They were probably relieved when they realized they didn't have to carry any more f***in' dirt to the surface. I'm sure they were also stoked to know that they didn't have to pull larvae out of the queens ass anymore. They probably didn't even like her anyway.

If I had to haul dirt and pull stuff out of the queens ass all day I would be BEGGING for someone to bury me in cement. (NOTE: That's cement, not semen)

This would be awesome if it were originally an abandoned colony. Isn't it sort of against the ethics code to kill an entire colony/ecosystem to study it?

"[I'm still personally conflicted over the benefits to science versus the annihilation of an entire ant colony. Glad I wasn't the one who had to make that decision.]" wow over sum f***ing ants? you people need to get a grip, you kill shit everyday

@15 Kudos. Now maybe if I were assigned the duty of killing a bunch of homeless people, that might be a hard decision. Actually, no it wouldn't. I would just do it for the sake of cleaning up the streets.

@15 Thank you. A sane person. Holy crap you guys are emotional bitches. They're ants. Tiny insects. No one will miss one of the hundred billion colonies. $50 says that none of that ants that survived gave as much of a shit as any of you do.

While you're bitching, you should start boycotting soap. After all, everytime you wash your hands it kills millions of bacteria. Bacteria genocide!!

15-17, I'm more surprized they did this in the first place, I really think it's against their own rules, kinda like PETA wearing pelts...
No one is hand wringing here, no one is pulling a Queen of Hearts "Off with their heads!". I
rony, why are YOU so damned emotional about it? got something against ants? Did they ruin your picnic? Am I now acting like an asshat... shit... yes...

FAKE!!!!

This is a complete photoshop job. You can tell its a fake because the shadow's are all wrong.

This is exactly like that scene in the movie Never Back Down where Max and Baja are having a picnick and they are invaded by ants. Max kills some of them but that just releases pheremones that attract more ants. Eventually there are ants everywhere and Max and Baja are naked in the park trying to clean them off each others bodies.

Later the police were called because of a disturbance involving 2 naked people and some insects, they are brought down town and the town hall becomes ant infested.

The police dust everything with powdered sugar. The ants and lice for that matter hate the stuff and the day is saved.

@8 They didn't use Zinc because it would have cost them about $27,800.

Don't worry about the ants. They were notified 48 hours in advance, relocated and given lifetime entitlements under the new Obama plan. Get your checkbooks out hardworking Americans!

@21 That would not surprise me in the least.

FAKE!!!!

This is a complete photoshop job. You can tell its fake because the shadow's are all wrong.

This is exactly like that scene in the movie Tender Dracula where Dracula is working in a big building full of little sectioned off areas. Dracula's resurrected man-servant also works there, and later sets the place on fire when someone steals his red stapler.
The ruins are filled with concrete and put on display.

I think the tags pretty much sum up what I think about this video.

I am proud to announce that I am against the large-scale slaughter of ants and that this video makes me butthurt.

Still f***ING AWESOME though.

Who gives a f*** about ants? That's like crying everytime your neighbor cuts the lawn claiming mass grass beheadamentadopolis. Get over it and think of what a great lawn sculpture that thing would make. It'd be easy to hang christmas light on

Haven't you ever wiped a few thousand ants on the sidewalk with the bottom of your shoe? It looks a little like bacon

It's not about ant death, known, it's about killing a HUGE community of non-parasitic creatures.
I step on ants all the damn time. No, they do not look like bacon. I'm sure everyone will agree with me. You just have a weird preoccupation with bacon.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE WEREWOLFS THINK ABOUT THEM :'(

Seen it.

I told you I was hardcore, and my ants are too.

#27: yeah ok I see.

The bacon obsession today btw is because I made my 1st bacon cheese roll thanks to this website. Consuming some of that thing this morning has had me thinking about more bacon these past 8 hours than jim gaffigan would talk about while hosting porkapalooza when someone was being arrested on stage.

I'll probably eat the rest of it tomorrow so more bacon shall ensue from meh

I really couldn't believe that anyone could murder all those ants and nobody thought to call the officials and prosecute these people for cruelty to animals.

This is murder plain and simple. You people disgust me. All those ants die, and you joke about it. Lets have a moment of silence for these intelligent and caring and obviously talented tunnelers who are now dead in the interest of questionable science.

This is science guys. Sacrifices need to be made. The noble ants have died to serve a higher purpose.

EEK! THEM!

@20

Ah so.

Ants astound me because all of their complex behaviours are completely hard-wired. They don't think, they don't feel, they don't communicate (at least not the way we think of it) - they simply operate. Ants have no conciousness, yet each 'knows' its role and task moment to moment. It will be fascinating to see quantum biology eventually consider the ant.

Bastard... Kill a full colony... that makes me really sad... we should do the same to their house...Should take a long time for these ants to build all of that... and they called them self scientist...

That's pretty awesome, i had no idea a colony could grow to be that epic, shame about the ant-carnage though...

While I don't like the idea of creatures dying, I'm still grateful for the project. It gave me a whole new respect for ants. So I like to look at the death of these little creatures as done in the name of science/learning/wonderment. Besides, probably many of you who are attacking the researchers eat meat. And that meat was probably not accidentally killed, but it was killed in the name of human want. So, if you're that angry about the ants, and you eat meat, you should probably turn vegetarian, or vegan....if you also don't like hypocrisy. Because meat isn't a NEED.