Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Ant Farm

Last month, we thought it would be educational to buy this mini and very cool-looking ant farm for Natalie from Toys R' Us. The idea was to create very cool "ant art" from the tunnels they would dig in the clear, blue gel. All we needed to do was catch some ants and put them inside. Easy, right?

Natalie was pretty excited to go to the park to try but it was not easy at all! First, we had trouble finding ants to catch. Second, once found, we had trouble actually catching them (without killing them accidentally). Third, they don't like to stay inside so when you open the top to put in more ants, the ones you've already caught try to escape.

In the end, Clark and Vivo Yee-yee managed to catch 7 ants BUT instead of a productive ant farm, the ants turned on each other and some were killed (due to us catching different species of ants). Instead of beautiful "artwork" ant farm, we ended up with this:

A battlefield of dead ants. There were a few survivors who lived a couple weeks. During that time, some of the ant corpses grew a strange, white mold on top.



One little guy made pretty good progress though! He dug about 1 inch into the gel before dying. Overall, Natalie was not very impressed with this little project.

1 comment:

lily said...

cool idea!! well, at least now natalie know what it means by 'shit happens', hahaha