How to make a giant aluminum ant nest

The internets have been abuzz with this photo today (Click for the full size version). It’s a photo of an aluminum cast of an ant nest made by Walter Tschinkel, a Florida entomologist–but there haven’t been a lot of additional details. The nest you are looking at is one of a Florida harvester ant, and appeared with many other photos and casts in a 2004 paper about nest architecture in the Journal of Insect Science.  They are things of great beauty, and tell us a lot about how […]