Digitizing Ant Nests to Study Tunneling Behavior

Eva Horna Lowell and Sean O’Fallon, graduate students in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, study ant nest behavior in the Pinter-Wollman Lab at UCLA. Their original plan was to compare nests exposed to different environmental conditions using wax casts of the tunnels. But the casts were too intricate and delicate: they kept breaking, forcing a different approach.

At the Data Science Center’s Lux Lab, Emerging Technologies Librarian Doug Daniels helped them find a way to record detailed nest information without needing an intact cast. Using an Artec Space Spider scanner with 0.1mm resolution, Lowell and O’Fallon captured 3D scans of the ant nests. The casts had already broken into pieces by the time they were scanned, and the segments had to be hand-painted first (the original translucent material was invisible to the light scanner), but the team was able to reconstruct the nest virtually, piece by piece, coordinating orientation over video calls.

The resulting 3D model let the researchers study tunneling patterns, including which nestmates take the lead in building, that would have been impossible to recover from the broken physical cast alone.