Over 200 kg (440 lb) Aluminium Casting of a Meat Ant Nest - Iridomyrmex purpureus - 2015/10/19



Aluminium Casting of a Meat Ant Nest (Iridomyrmex purpureus). www.facebook.com/australianantart This casting was quite the challenge. It was a mound with 36 entrances. These entrances are generally thought to be separate parts of the same nest, this video shows that it is not so for this nest. Many of them were connected underground. After casting and excavating the nest the next problem was getting something that size, weight and fragility from hanging over a hole onto a ute. After which we drove for an hour to move it to its resting place. Meat ants are quite amazing. They can form super colonies covering a number of kilometres and housing thousands of ants. They can strip a carcass clean of all meat, preforming vital environmental work. Meat ants will also create foraging trails, easily visible due to the absence of vegetation, and ants will forage on these to trees they favour most. The trees are an important source of food and water, especially when days are hot and dry. Meat Ants are Australia’s most successful ant. Cast Dimensions: Weight: Over 200 kg (440 lbs) Height: 1000 mm (39") Length: 1500 mm (59") Width: 1500 mm (59") Music: "The Complex" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Comments

  1. it seems they sure have a lot of spare time on their hands in Australia
  2. looks like a futuristic coral reef
  3. 1 hour prior to the casting...
    "That dude wearing the sandwich board - "The end is nigh!" - I mean where do those crackpots get off trying to freak people out like that?"
    "Yeah, I get ya, man, the dude should get a job - maybe nursing the brood or heading outside to look for bits of detritus to bring back and digest in to pulp."
    "For reals."
  4. scorched earth tactics
  5. Where do they get so much aluminium and where do they melt it?
  6. Terminated an ant kingdom
  7. how many thousands of the ants do you think were molded into the casting?
  8. WOW! What a empire! That thing is HUGE! I'm amazed, to actually see how the ants designed their underground tunnels. I'm very impressed! I wonder which one of the chambers housed the Queen? I guess we'll never know. I'm sure some of the ants fled the scene. They probably were off from a distance looking screaming, "For God's sake, these MF giant ass aliens destroying our beautiful empire! This is bullshit! Now we have to go to a got damn flea bag motel!" LOL! Thanks for sharing such amazing footage guys.
  9. just curious, how many ants do you think could live in a colony that size?
  10. i started off watching samurai jack

    how did i get here
  11. Totally going to buy one of these, ant art burial grounds smh :/
  12. This is basically Age of Empires 2 music.
  13. How the fuck do you have all this aluminum
  14. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
  15. motherfuckers live hot aluminum on the ants
  16. Jewish ants dying (1943, colourised)
  17. is that the music from dying light?
  18. white people
  19. Jesus! That must have been hard to pull off with all those entrances!
  20. Children in Africa could have eaten those ants


Additional Information:

Visibility: 1412672

Duration: 6m 39s

Rating: 6835