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撰文 | Skin
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When you see some ants and small ant burrows on the ground, can you imagine how big their underground anthills really are?
Although we know that ants are highly organized and socially gregarious, often living together in hundreds or thousands, it may be difficult to imagine a living space for ants.
From the ground it looks like this. ｜wiki
In 2012, a group of scientists discovered an abandoned anthill in Brazil. From the ground, they are not large (from a human perspective), but in order to unveil the nest, the researchers decided to fill the passages in the abandoned nest by injecting concrete into the ant hole in the surface and then digging it out.
The surface of an ant hole in Brazil looks like this.
It may sound simple, but in practice, it took the researchers a full 10 days to fill the entire tunnel, using up 10 tons of concrete. This shows that the seemingly unsightly ant nest is actually a "megacity".
It's an ant city |
After 10 days of preparation, the researchers finally started excavating. Due to the sheer size of the project, an excavator was used in this excavation, and a total of 40 tons of soil were dug up in the whole process, so that this huge ant maze could be truly displayed in front of our eyes.
Digging an ant hole requires such a big project. Reference 1
It wasn't until it was dug up that scientists discovered how amazing this ant nest was, not only because of its incredible size, about 8 meters deep into the ground, but also because of its ingenious structure.
The Ant Metropolis contains a variety of seemingly well-designed tunnels, and the intricate "roads" connecting the circular rooms make for efficient transportation. There are also various "paths" to connect the "fungal garden" cultivated by the ants to the garbage dump. Others are designed to keep the entire underground nest well ventilated.
Various rooms and "highways" in the Ant City|Ref. 1
It is conceivable that this once abandoned ant city once assumed all kinds of complex functions. In addition to using collective intelligence to dig tunnels, it is also necessary to transport garbage out of the nest in a timely manner, transport food in a labyrinth of rooms, etc.
Turning abandoned ant nests into works of art has even become a popular hobby for collecting that is growing by production. One such art organization is Anthill Art, which infuses non-toxic zinc or aluminum into discarded anthills to create one-of-a-kind artworks.
各种各样的蚁穴|Antillard
Researchers at Caltech wanted to know how ants dug up a nest, so they put some in jars and X-rayed them to see the details of their digging. The results of the 2021 study suggest that ants may not be "smart" designers, but they are very talented, and the researchers say that "they have stumbled upon a digging technique that conforms to the laws of physics, but is extremely efficient", so that they can dig tunnels underground that do not collapse.
Researchers also believe that this kind of excavation behavior needs to be further learned, and maybe it can be used by us in the future, such as simulating ant excavation for computer modeling, or even making "bionic ants", which can help humans dig tunnels.
It's a steep mound. Scientists mention that ants know how to dig their nests at the steepest angle they can stack at before they collapse Caltech.edu
In fact, in the human world, some of the largest underground cities are also quite astonishing. In the March issue of Everything, "Exploring the Dungeon" will take you on a tour of some of the mysterious structures underground. Among them, Turkey's Derinkuyu is the largest underground city in the world, with schools, living quarters, stables, meeting rooms and churches that can accommodate about 2,000 people.
The article will also take you through the abandoned underground stations in London, England, and how people relied on underground structures to escape the attacks of war.
The other articles in this issue are just as exciting, and in the cover article "Big Cat Attack", we will see a variety of big cats and their formidable combat prowess. What kind of combat strategies do they have, and how do they conquer prey larger than their size?
Open this article and feel the extraordinary combat effectiveness of big cats such as tigers and cheetahs!
Children of the Stars sounds fantastical, and you've probably heard the saying that "humans are made of stardust". In fact, from a scientific point of view, we are indeed made up of matter from stars. If you open this article, you may be able to understand the wonderful connection between us and the universe.
This issue of the museum column "Goodbye, Titanic" takes us into the Titanic Memorial in Belfast, where we can see the past and present life of this giant ship, and the legends related to it......
The original essay "History of the Earth in Microfossils," "Canoe Conquest of the Pacific," which tells the story of Polynesian exploration, and "Exploring the World of the Senses," explores sensory superpowers.
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