The movie was removed from Google Video, but you might be able to download it using bittorrent. I haven’t tried it myself. Somebody posted my favorite part to YouTube.
If you’ve never considered ants to be particularly interesting, this should change your mind.
53 minutes. Link to Video
This film is full of incredible stuff. Here are some notable examples:
- Indonesian ants have domesticated mealy bugs and feed on sugar and vitamin rich honey dew excreted by the mealy bugs. The ants are nomadic, periodically moving their mealy bug herds to new plants for fresh grazing.
- When a colony is disturbed, scout ants spread out looking for a new site. The site is selected by a form of democracy. Individual ants vote by leaving pheromone trails to preferred sites. At the end of voting, the site with the strongest pheromone trail is used.
- Grass cutter ants use relay teams to transport food. Each team covers a set distance and hands it over to the next team.
- Wood ants harvest tree resin to use as an antibiotic and fungicide.
- Grass cutter ants cultivate underground fungus gardens. They build gravity ventilation systems to maintain desired temperature, humidity and CO2 levels.
My favorite part is toward the end. They fill a grass cutter ant hill with concrete. After it dries they excavate the site revealing the underground ant architecture:
For more information check out: Bert Hölldobler & E.O. Wilson | The Ants. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. It’s been on my Amazon wishlist for years, but I haven’t been able to justify paying $200. Hölldobler is listed as a scientific consultant in the credits of this film.
