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.
Pogonomyrmex badius
Range: coastal plains of the southeastern United States, from Georgia to Louisiana
Average nest depth: 7 feet
