Post by Jenny on Jan 21, 2006 20:54:06 GMT
An article taken from the internet...........................
Ant trails at work. A narrow stream of black ants is flowing across my lab bench, up the side of a water bottle, into the squirt-tube and down inside. They're harvesting distilled water?!! The trail is coming from the floor, up the side of a box, across the top edge of some papers standing on edge, then up the voltmeter wires which happen to dangle over the edge of the tabletop. Following the trail backwards, I find that it goes about a HUNDRED AND TWENTY FEET back to the Mass Spectrometry lab at the end of the hall! It disappears under a fume hood. There must be several thousand ants in the trail. I guess the Chem. building ant nest must be hard up for water. I brush away ants and create a 3ft gap by cleaning away their scent trail with alcohol. But an hour later the gap has closed again. Ants trapped on the far side of the gap apparently find their way across.
Playing with ant trails! I move the water bottle, but then the arriving ants start spreading all over the desk. So I give the ant colony a wet cookie (placed 120ft away near the origin of the trail.) If the ants are a signal in an optical fiber, then the cookie should act like an impedance mismatch; reflecting the outbound ants back to the nest. Sure enough, after an hour the ant stream decreases greatly. I brush the remaining ants onto the floor and disrupt their scent trail. But in the morning it has re-formed, this time traveling up to an old bottle of Moxie Cola with a tiny bit of dried syrup in the bottom. They're still using the edge of the papers in the box on the floor, this time crawling up another test lead, transferring to the power cable of the oscilloscope, then up to the shelf with the bottle. OK, this time I convert the entire "ant-flow optical fiber" into a Bragg mirror: I drip some sugar water at many places along the 120ft trail. Quickly the stream of ants at my end of the trail has dropped to zero.
Hmmm: pranking possibilites. If I put a tiny bit of sugar water on a victim's desk, and also deposit a blob of ants, won't a few ants find their way back to the nest and create a new 120ft stream?
Ant trails at work. A narrow stream of black ants is flowing across my lab bench, up the side of a water bottle, into the squirt-tube and down inside. They're harvesting distilled water?!! The trail is coming from the floor, up the side of a box, across the top edge of some papers standing on edge, then up the voltmeter wires which happen to dangle over the edge of the tabletop. Following the trail backwards, I find that it goes about a HUNDRED AND TWENTY FEET back to the Mass Spectrometry lab at the end of the hall! It disappears under a fume hood. There must be several thousand ants in the trail. I guess the Chem. building ant nest must be hard up for water. I brush away ants and create a 3ft gap by cleaning away their scent trail with alcohol. But an hour later the gap has closed again. Ants trapped on the far side of the gap apparently find their way across.
Playing with ant trails! I move the water bottle, but then the arriving ants start spreading all over the desk. So I give the ant colony a wet cookie (placed 120ft away near the origin of the trail.) If the ants are a signal in an optical fiber, then the cookie should act like an impedance mismatch; reflecting the outbound ants back to the nest. Sure enough, after an hour the ant stream decreases greatly. I brush the remaining ants onto the floor and disrupt their scent trail. But in the morning it has re-formed, this time traveling up to an old bottle of Moxie Cola with a tiny bit of dried syrup in the bottom. They're still using the edge of the papers in the box on the floor, this time crawling up another test lead, transferring to the power cable of the oscilloscope, then up to the shelf with the bottle. OK, this time I convert the entire "ant-flow optical fiber" into a Bragg mirror: I drip some sugar water at many places along the 120ft trail. Quickly the stream of ants at my end of the trail has dropped to zero.
Hmmm: pranking possibilites. If I put a tiny bit of sugar water on a victim's desk, and also deposit a blob of ants, won't a few ants find their way back to the nest and create a new 120ft stream?
