Subscription Center
Credit: Andrew Quitmeyer
An ant colony, made up of many thousands of individuals, actually functions more like one giant organism. Ants use their unified strength to build bridges, raft across rivers and even wage war on neighboring colonies (as scientist Mark Moffett explains in a recent Scientific American feature). But what if you want to study the behavior of a single ant amidst the ebb and flow of the colony? How would you go about it?
The answer lies in a canister of CO2 gas, a stereoscope and a tiny paintbrush. Andrew Quitmeyer, a PhD student in the Bio-tracking Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, created the video below, which gives the step-by-step recipe for ant color-coding. It is an elegant, if painstaking, way to track the movement of one ant among many. The technique has found use in labs such as that of scientist Stephen Pratt at Arizona State University, who studies emergent behavior in groups of insects.
Video courtesy of Andrew Quitmeyer/Georgia Institute of Technology
Rights & Permissions
Dissecting the controversy about early psychological response to disasters and trauma
What unconventional fuels tell us about the global energy system
Winning the War against Cervical Cancer
The SciArt Buzz: ScienceArt On Exhibit In May/June 2013
My Heart is in Oklahoma now #OklahomaStrong
An Unheralded Breakthrough: The Rosetta Stone of Mathematics
See what we're tweeting about
Dhunterauthor A Profanity-Free Rebuttal To All The Poor Dears Whose Feewies Got Hurted When We Did The Tornados http://t.co/PiwymARrM3 via @po_st Dhunterauthor Apple’s iTax: Think Different http://t.co/TOyX8HbzFo via @po_st
DNLee5 Being here in Africa for such long stretches reveals to how much being homesick is really about missing familiar foods/tastes.
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
Share
Email
Print
Add a Comment
You must sign in or register as a ScientificAmerican.com member to submit a comment.
Click one of the buttons below to register using an existing Social Account.