I wouldn’t think concrete is thin or viscous enough
Hmm, would this work with any clear material so you could see the ants as they suffer? I mean, for uhhh… science?
You’d pick up a lot of sand… Normally you’d use a metal like aluminum. You can sandblast that clean.
But clear means epoxy. That stuff doesn’t hold up very well under sandblasting. It can be done, but expect mistakes.
“Normally”!? I thought it was a one-time thing for that famous youtube video.
There are thousands of ant hill sculptures in the world.
The two main ways of making them are either aluminum or some sort of concrete or plaster.
Aluminum is used more often, due to the ease of extraction from the ground, and the fact that you can clean it with a garden hose or pressure washer.
Cement or plaster are used when accuracy is desired, but those sculptures need to be removed from the ground with hand trowels and brushes, and will likely need individual parts to be reinforced or braced to prevent breakage.
Both methods can be used to study the structure of and ant hill. But aluminum far more common for the more artistic versions of the sculpture.
Aluminum is great because it has a relatively low melting point, and a casting furnace isn’t all that expensive.
you can never see them “suffer”
“Ants are not subjected to feeling the same pain humans do. They can recognize damage and respond to it, but they don’t genuinely feel pain the same way people do”
What are you quoting?
some article i looked up
When you quote things, provide attribution to what you are quoting. “Otherwise you just look insane.”
Couldn’t you apply that logic to literally all animals including humans? Pain is just a sensation to make us respond to damage, the suffering part is entierly subjective and no one can be sure any of the other humans even are capable of it, we just assume its the case based on personal experience and empathy.
Nature is very cruel, but not so evil to evolve suffering in animals who don’t have the capacity to learn from it.
Pain and pleasure are the greatest survival teachers, I’d expect them to be the basest feelings a living thing can have.
Saying some creatures don’t feel pain just because their physiology is different is like how we were taught that animals couldn’t think back in the 20th century.
“Survival of the fittest” is about a species, not an individual. For larger animals pain and pleasure are the greatest teachers, because we can learn from those. These species benefit from individuals learning survival skills. Insects have no use for it, they don’t learn to adapt, they survive through numbers, their behavior adapts through evolution.
They react to damage the same way plants do. If you want to call that pain, sure. It doesn’t make sense evolutionary that they would suffer from it though.
And we know it’s not inherent to life. Even some people are born without nociceptors because of genetic issues. Not-suffering is a big problem, kids get infections etc because they don’t learn to stop hurting themselves.
Yeah, hearing about this technique for the first time was a ride. Like, yeah, it’s kind of cool? But also, you’re doing a genocide.
Invasive ants can overwhelm and genocide native ants.
A lot of the castings I’ve seen have specifically been done on invasive ants for this reason.
I wanted to comment on fire ants for this (which are an invasive one). Anyone who has experienced fire ants would not feel sorry for a genocide on them.
It’s impossible for fire ants to be invasive in general.
They’re invasive to SOMEWHERE. We don’t all live in the same neighbourhood.
They are invasive in most places except for a relatively small part of South America
TBH if you live somewhere where fire ants are native, MOVE.
I’m not going to let the ants win.
We don’t all live in the same neighbourhood.
My immersion is ruined.
Classic US defaultism. They often have problems understanding the concept of the world wide web.
Invasive fire ants aren’t just a US problem. They’re one of the worst invasive species in the world.
They also never said anything that would suggest they were talking globally. They just said they were an invasive species of ants.
you’re doing a genocide
Yes, if you are dumb about it. Actual scientists doing this use abandoned colonies or move the colony first.
I always thought it was extremely hot aluminum poured into them.
It could be any liquid that hardens later on. I’ve seen aluminum and concrete.
extremely hot
Melted?
Molted?
To shreds, you say?
*n
nolted?
monted
Evaporated?
Gaseous state
plasma
deleted by creator
Could be worse. Could be the guy filling them with copper or whatever molten metal it was on YT.
I would probably prefer getting almost instantly fried by molten hot metal than slowly suffucate in liquid cement
I think I remember that setting concrete has an exothermic reaction going on so you could be cooked as you suffocate.
I suspect the amount of the nest that gets affected is larger. (Technically, IIRC theyre mostly there to exterminate the ants, it’s just becoming art in the process.!
Probably a different instance to the one you’re thinking, but I have not forgotten that TechRax video of him pouring molten aluminum onto live hissing cockroaches. I don’t even know why he added the cockroaches, the subject of the video was the iPhone 6 vs molten aluminum.
Oh yea, I still remember that one, I hate cockroaches, but that video kinda disgusted me. Like… why torture other living things for nothing?
That’s horrifying, what the actual fuck.
I think I was These guys. Could be wrong, but part of what they’re doing is removing nests that are problematic to humans (or our cattle.)
I wonder what kind of concrete you’d use because I feel like any type I can think of would be too brittle and would break apart during even the most careful excavation.
It’s aluminum.
I would imagine for any significantly sized colony, molten metal would cool down and solidify too fast to cover everywhere; whereas concrete can stay liquid long enough to permeate everywhere.
The moisture would get sucked out of the concrete by the earth, and it’s not flowable that well. If you’ve made it like soup, it’s lost most of its strength when it cures already.
A 1/2 hole in plywood gets filled by grout pretty fast, a dirt ant tunnel I would be surprised if it went more than a foot to be honest.
It seems implausible to me, too (as an engineer), but the article says what it says. I guess they must be using tiny paint brushes like an archeological dig in order to excavate it without destroying it.
It’s “what it looks like” or “how it looks”, never “how it looks like”. That’s as dumb as “what it looks”, which I’m sure most people understand isn’t correct.
It’s one thing to make that mistake in a random comment, but in your fucking web comic? Seriously?(Writing this comment in the style it describes is self-referential and confusing, and I might get it wrong, but I’m going to give it a go.)
It’s often good to start out with self-deprecation (if not self-reference). Something like “English can be a bit odd” or “English has traps for the unwary” and then gently segue into what’s bugging you and what’s right and what’s wrong.
We’ve got to at least try to be nice, even if the natural instinct might be to be offended and direct.
There’s a meme on my homepage at the moment that uses the template of Gordon Ramsay giving a hug versus calling someone a donkey. The underlying gag it’s being used for isn’t all that important. The point is most people would prefer the hug from the expert rather than the alternative.
It would be even better if we could give the scientific, linguistic reason as to why other than just “it sounds wrong”, but, yes, that’d be really going the extra mile. Most of us have no idea (myself included), precious little idea on what exactly to go research, and the recipient might not be able to do much with that information anyway.
I will undoubtedly fail at following this advice myself at some point. Hopefully, this isn’t it.
Calm down dude…
Yeah, no one’s ever made a mistake before. And everyones first language is English. Ya bonehead.
Came here to say that. #noChildLeftBehind, right?
