Ants were in use as miniaturized characters in Brazilian nativity scenes until at least the 1960s. “Present in Brazil since the beginning of Portuguese colonization, crèche nativity scenes were soon adapted to local reality, a propitious circumstance for the appearance of heterodox conceptions and the use of exotic elements of the fauna and flora peculiar […]
Tag: ant
Gold-digging ants – an(other) explanation
“In northern India there is a sandy desert and in this desert there live large ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes. A few ants that have been caught there may be seen at the king of Persia’s place. When digging their holes these ants throw out soil just like the ants in Greece […]
The Rheology of Ant Swarms
Room 007 of the Love Building at Gatech, Atlanta, Georgia is the home of the Hoogle Lab. It’s run by David L. Hu (Assistant Professor of Fluid Mechanics) who is the corresponding author for the robotic jumping-beans study which Improbable recently profiled. But the Hoogle Lab doesn’t exclusively focus on jumping beans, it also investigates the […]
Frog’s response to artificial ants
A frog’s eyes include networks of nerves that act as bug detectors — signaling to the frog’s brain whenever they see motion that’s typical of tasty bugs. That insight was revealed in 1959 in the study “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” written with Jerry Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, Warren McCullough, and Walter Pitts. This […]
Odd activity of an Ant
“An Odd Activity of an Ant (Cataglyphis bicolor): ‘Visiting’,” M.L.R. Harkness and R.D. Harkness, Insectes Sociaux, vol. 38, no. 1, 1991, pp. 45–9 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01242712). (That’s an except from the article “May We Recommend,” published in AIR 13:4.) Photo: Encyclopedia of Life.