On Ants and Oven Repair
Things fall apart!
The door of the oven is the place where repairs are needed most often, since it can get banged every time something goes in or out. After a long winter and rainy spring, it was time. Whole pieces of it had come off, and some of the quick repairs I had done in the fall hadn't held.
So I mixed up some more mud and sand and grass
and made sure that both surfaces were wet enough so that, with enough pressure applied, the new mix would gel with the old.
Et voilà. As you can see I wasn't going for a seamless look. Maybe some day I'll apply a full, smooth finish over the whole thing...
After a day or so drying on its own under the tarp, I decided to dry it further by firing it up.
And as the temperature got hotter, suddenly, they appeared. Thousands of them.
Ants came bursting out of cracks in the oven from all over. And they were evacuating their young!
There are a number of pillbugs that like to hang out in and around the oven too, and this guy was making a run for it. Not sure if he was being attacked by this ant or if it was merely trying to hitch a ride.
I can't say how much damage the colony sustained inside but know that the colony has since moved back in, because the next time I fired the oven up, the same thing happened. I guess they like it in there. And as long as they don't mind evacuating every so often and don't destroy the oven from the inside out, I don't mind either. In fact, I rather like the idea that they're there. Not that I could really do much about it anyway. There is no arguing with a hive mind, as Charlton Heston should have known!
But for something more educational, learn about how ants are teaching us about self-organizing systems and the phenomenon of emergence. Here's Deborah Gordon of Stanford who has studied the same colony of ants in New Mexico for over 30 years.
Very cool stuff, and it always makes me wish I had more brains to understand this stuff beyond the back-of-the-cereal-box level I operate on. The phenomena of emergence, self-organization, swarm intelligence, etc. is related to all kinds of fields, from Artificial Intelligence to, well, the now newly-burgeoning field of ants-in-my-backyard-mud-oven.
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So I mixed up some more mud and sand and grass
and made sure that both surfaces were wet enough so that, with enough pressure applied, the new mix would gel with the old.
Et voilà. As you can see I wasn't going for a seamless look. Maybe some day I'll apply a full, smooth finish over the whole thing...
After a day or so drying on its own under the tarp, I decided to dry it further by firing it up.
And as the temperature got hotter, suddenly, they appeared. Thousands of them.
(Not the best macro video, no. I leave that to the pros.)
Ants came bursting out of cracks in the oven from all over. And they were evacuating their young!
There are a number of pillbugs that like to hang out in and around the oven too, and this guy was making a run for it. Not sure if he was being attacked by this ant or if it was merely trying to hitch a ride.
I can't say how much damage the colony sustained inside but know that the colony has since moved back in, because the next time I fired the oven up, the same thing happened. I guess they like it in there. And as long as they don't mind evacuating every so often and don't destroy the oven from the inside out, I don't mind either. In fact, I rather like the idea that they're there. Not that I could really do much about it anyway. There is no arguing with a hive mind, as Charlton Heston should have known!
Leiningen vs the Ants remade as "The Naked Jungle", starring Mr. Heston battling a swarm of army ants--marabunta!
But for something more educational, learn about how ants are teaching us about self-organizing systems and the phenomenon of emergence. Here's Deborah Gordon of Stanford who has studied the same colony of ants in New Mexico for over 30 years.
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