Andrew Quitmeyer is a PhD student at Georgia Tech who recently devised a perfectly handy how-to video on painting ants for scientific experiments. Handy, that is, for all of you ant aficionados reading ZME Science that want to take things a bit further and selectively study your colony, maybe even add a bit of color. Yeah, I thought so too, but if there are any ant researchers out there, have your say below in the comment section.
“Here’s a video I made as a design meditation for an automatic ant painting device that I am working on. This video works as an instructional video for painting ants that also demonstrates difficulties faced by social insect scientists […] Also it’s just pretty weird to see how scientists have to actually paint with little tiny paintbrushes and microscopes onto ants,” said Quitmeyer for io9.com
Can you imagine an automatic machine doing this? Crazy stuff.
via io9