This is perfect soil for this kind of work,” says Walter Tschinkel, as sweat runs down his face. “You can dig a six-foot hole in an hour here.” His voice is muffled because that’s just what he has done—and then some. He’s crouched in the bottom of an eight-foot-deep hole in the ground, in a hot, dry, open field between the Tallahassee, Florida, airport and a sewage-treatment plant. Clay-infused sand comes flying out of the hole as he shovels. Tschinkel, 62, rests a moment, then picks up a trowel and pokes sand away from one wall of the pit. He glances up. “I think we can start taking it out,” he says.

As he prods with the trowel tip, a fantastic sculpture begins to emerge from the earth. He scrapes away more sand, revealing tubes and elliptical lobes that a moment ago were completely buried. The thing is so delicate that, as Tschinkel and his graduate students remove it from the ground, it breaks into dozens of pieces. An ant nest, perfectly cast in three dimensions, it will be reassembled later in the laboratory. Tschinkel has spent this fine April morning mixing dental plaster to the consistency of eggnog, adding glass fibers, propping a cupped leaf against the nest’s entrance as a funnel, pouring the plaster, and letting it set. That’s when he dug the pit beside the nest and liberated the cast.


JH PeteCarmichael

Pogonomyrmex badius

Range: coastal plains of the southeastern United States, from Georgia to Louisiana

Average nest depth: 7 feet

Average number of chambers: 100

Average colony size: 5,000

A mature nest of the pogo, or Florida harvester ant, can reach 10 feet and contain 200 chambers. Typically, the colony survives for 15 years, until the death of the queen.

“It’s a typical ant nest—a vertical tunnel with horizontal chambers,” he says, carefully laying out bits of it on the grass. For more than a decade, Tschinkel, a myrmecologist, or ant specialist, at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has studied the behavior and social organization of ants. His curiosity was aroused by their nests—mysterious underground caverns never clearly seen by scientists. “It’s hard to visualize what’s underground,” he says. What did the nests look like, really? What could they reveal about ants and how they structured their lives? A few sketches had appeared in scientific journals but rarely to scale and with little detail. Tschinkel tried excavating nests and making his own sketches but found he couldn’t see their three-dimensional structure clearly. Then, 15 years ago, he got an idea. He mixed plaster and poured it into a fire-ant nest. When he dug up the casting and painstakingly glued the pieces back together, “it was a revelation.”  

Now, he says, we can describe ant-nest architecture much more precisely, leading to a better understanding of the insects and the mysterious principle known to science as self-organization—simple units of nature forming larger patterns through interactions with one another. An ant colony develops when each individual does its job in response to outside cues. The rules for this behavior, Tschinkel says, are “somehow internally programmed; they result from the way the nervous system is organized.” Each of thousands of earth-nesting ant species has a specific nest design, and each builds from a particular set of rules. “What is that set of rules? How do they come by them? How do they execute them?” Tschinkel wonders. “How does a group of individuals with no leader, no plan, create such complex structures in the dark?”

Myrmecologist Walter Tschinkel of the University of Florida holds up a partial zinc cast of a seven-foot-deep Florida harvester-ant nest. The flat chambers are living quarters as well as storerooms for seeds, which the foraging harvesters collect, shuck, and deliver to the workers underground for stocking and sorting.

Most ant colonies begin when one newly mated queen digs a single-chambered nest, seals herself in, and rears a first brood of workers. Queen ants need be fertilized only once: They store a lifetime supply of sperm in a sac, and in mature colonies, if the ambient temperature is warm enough—72 degrees Fahrenheit—some queens can lay 1,000 eggs a day for many years. The brood hatches in a week and, feeding on reserves in the queen’s body, grows to maturity in a month. Then the workers begin foraging—in the case of Florida harvester ants, for insects and seeds—to feed the next brood of eggs. And so the colony expands. Workers live about a year, but a colony can survive 10 or 20 years, until the queen dies. The colonies of most ant species, including the harvester, are social, cooperative, seamless organisms, differing from what we think of as an individual organism only in that “they’re not stuck together,” as Tschinkel puts it. The colony is a kind of creature—a superorganism.