>>Walter Tschinkel: I've always been interested in insects, from the time I was a child.
By the time I was six, I knew I wanted to be a biologist, but I didn't know what that
entailed, obviously.
>>Walter Tschinkel: Ta-da!
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: I can't imagine many young biologists would have imagined
research that entailed this.
In the Apalachicola National Forest just south of Tallahassee, we get to watch Walter Tschinkel's
distinctive brand of entomology in action.
First, let's meet the ants.
>>Walter Tschinkel: This is one called Forelius pruinosus, and they always make these trails.
>>Walter Tschinkel: I call this soite Ant Heaven.
It has a very dense population of ants.
That's actually why I came to work here, because there's an unusually large and dense
population of Florida harvester ants.
You can see that they decorate the nest with charcoal they collect in the area.
The charcoal they collect is mostly the burned end of pine needles.
Because this area, naturally it would have burned every two or three years.
Now the (US) Forest Service does prescribed burns, not that often, but probably every
3-5 years.
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: They're always redecorating.
>>Walter Tschinkel: If you're going to ask me why do they do that?
I'll have to tell you I don't know.
We've tested eight different hypotheses at this point, and none of them were supported.
>>Walter Tschinkel: So, in the last eight years, I've kept track of harvester ant
colonies here at Ant Heaven.
This is number 98, an old friend.
This is a colony I marked at least 8 years ago.
But this is where it moved from.
As you can see, this is what I call a ghost.
So here you can see a still older ghost of the same colony.
They move on average once a year, they don't move far.
All they're doing is a random walk around some central spot.
I know you're going to ask me why they move, and I have to tell you right at the outset
that I don't know.
I don't know why they move.
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: So here we have ants exhibiting behaviors that have no obvious
survival benefit.
But that's not the most surprising thing we learn about ants from Dr. Tschinkel's
research.
>>Walter Tschinkel: You only really want one layer of charcoal around the outside, because
everything else is wasted.
The most recent project, which is why we're here today, is that I started working on the
nest architecture of underground ant nests.
What spaces do they create under there?
And about fifteen years ago, I developed some methods for making casts of those hollow spaces.
And when you make a cast, it reveals the tiniest details of the shape of that negative space,
that empty space.
This is sort of a cheating way of starting fire
>>Walter Tschinkel: I remembered from college chemistry and physics, and actually the principle
is very simple.
If you're combusting material, if you want it to reach very high temperatures, you have
to contain the heat within the furnace.
>>Walter Tschinkel: So now you can see the furnace is really cooking, and I think it's
time to add the aluminum.
This is the aluminum that we're putting in now.
It's uh, these are pieces of old Scuba tanks that have failed the pressure test.
We'll wait for that to melt, and then we'll probably have to add more.
>>Walter Tschinkel: Ah!
I love that sound.
(laughs) That's good sound.
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: Conducting this research requires scientific knowledge beyond biology.
>>Walter Tschinkel: Science isn't really all that compartmentalized.
We do teach it as biology, chemistry, physics, and so on, but in fact the overlap among all
those disciplines is really extreme.
If you want to build a kiln, you need to know a little bit of chemistry, a little bit of
physics, like gas laws, and combustion, and those kinds of things.
And then, basically, it's a question of solving problems.
And here we go.
And I like to spread my legs wide so I don't get scorched.
Ah!
My pants are almost on fire.
[Blows]
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: It hardens quickly.
>>Walter Tschinkel: It keeps you fit.
>>Walter Tschinkel: Yeah, it is going to be fractured.
A fractured fractal.
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: The metal didn't reach all the way to the bottom, so he pours
again and digs deeper.
>>Walter Tschinkel: I had dug up a lot of fire ant nests, and I thought I knew, just
from the cross sections of digging, just how their space was organized underground.
But when I made a cast, I found out that I was wrong.
That instead of a chaotic swarm of chambers, they were actually quite strictly organized
into vertical shafts and horizontal chambers.
That was quite an epiphany.
And after that, I started casting other species to see what they looked like.
And of course every time you do another new species that you haven't done before, it's
always a surprise.
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: Dr. Tschinkel now makes casts of the hundred or so local species
found in the Apalachicola National Forest.
These are the castings featured in his current exhibit at the Tallahassee Museum.
>>Walter Tschinkel: Well, it's an interesting line of work.
It never fails to reward, actually.
>>Rob Diaz de Villegas: For WFSU, I'm Rob Diaz de Villegas.
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