QFT. These aren’t just any old ants that invade your home. These are fire ants! They invade your home and burn it to the ground, at night, you and your family included. It is desired to endanger them to the maximal degree (Fahrenheit or Centigrade) possible.
BTW, I can’t actually watch the video on my mochine – it doesn’t do video. Can someone give me the tl;dr summary of what happens when you pour molten aluminum on a fire ant hill?
It looks to me like they covered the original, smaller anthill with a sand mound, possibly to facilitate pouring in the metal.
Probably less cruel than the various poisons that one could use. The super-high temperature of the metal and the tiny length scale of the ant means that molten metal will destroy their brain (and therefore any ability to suffer) within a fraction of a second when it gets anywhere near them. This is a far different proposition than throwing something the size of a human being into a lake of lava, where it will take a prolonged period of time before unconsciousness sets in.
You get a casting of the ant colony, with all its intricate tunnels and such. It’s a work or art really.
More of a work of ant.
It’s less an anthropocentric POV than an ‘every species in the area except the fire-ants’-centric POV.
Spoken like someone who has never seen their three year old child step barefoot into a fire ant mound. Molten aluminum isn’t cruel enough for those fuckers.
The caster had made a cone of sand on top of the fire ant mound to funnel the liquid into the mound. Otherwise, the aluminum would have spread all over the ground, and not into the mound.
How do you feel about stepping on them? Or poisoning them?
As well-mentioned, we’re talking about fire ants. If you’ve never been bitten by one or a hundred of them, you just don’t understand how horrible they are. People have died from being bitten by fire ants. Death by instant vaporization seems much more humane than death by anaphylaxis.
When I watch that I hear the Pink Panther theme song in my head.
Dead ant, dead ant, dead ant dead ant dead ant dead annnnnnnnt
What a coincidence. So did** cochrane **in post 13.
you gain a level.
Holy crap, those colony casts are really cool. And terrifying. I didn’t know ants went that far underground!
I’m impressed that they can construct such intricate structures. What surprises me is that these small rooms with little vertical soil ceilings between them can stand up. Not sure if they add any sticky secretions to keep the soil particles together or that they have to live in soil mixtures with at least some cohesive component. I suspect they could not recreate such a feat if they were placed in a perfectly granular soil such as a sand dune.
I was actually surprised how SHALLOW that particular colony was.
It may have have been a young colony. Maybe it would be bigger if they waited a year or two.
The ones pictured on that link are really cool. Scaled up to human size those are huge. They can be up to 12ft deep, which is about 300 times the body length of a half-inch ant. That’s on a par with humans building the CN Tower.
It’s a lot like a modern apartment complex. All these corridors and rooms where the ants live and store food.
I noticed they didn’t show how the guy positioned the hole for the liquid aluminum. It must be tricky finding and digging into the main entrance of the colony. I guess thats a trade secret. He’s making a lot of money for these sculptures.
Upside down.:eek:
I may have seen this; I’m not going to watch it right now. Is this the program where some scientists filled an ant mound with cement, and had to use a whole truckfull before they were done, and it was 20 or 30 feet deep? That was cool.
Yup. 10 tons of concrete.
The current price of Aluminum on the London Metal Exchange is about 80 cents per pound.
I used to work in a Aluminum Smelter and we sold Aluminum as hot molten metal and trucked it to customers.