James Barron in The New York Times:
The office where Daniel Ksepka was working was overrun with ants. On the wall above the desk were army ants, bull ants, leaf-cutter ants and turtle ants. On a shelf were two honeypot ants that looked as if they had yellow balloons where their stomachs should have been. Kspeka, the curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., did not call an exterminator. There was no need to: None of the ants in the office were real. The ones on the wall were drawings. The honeypot ants were plastic models made on the museum’s 3-D printer in preparation for an exhibition called “Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives” that will open on Nov. 13.
“I love ants,” Ksepka said. “They keep the world running.” Let him count the ways. “They are architects,” he said. “They are farmers.” They construct elaborate nests, stockpile food and tend fungal gardens. Some harvester ants in East Africa even collect bones — the remains of birds, lizards and pygmy mice. Some can snap their jaws shut in one-tenth of a millisecond.
More here.
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