Day 6 ~ Sunday Bloody Sunday
by Jo Rebeka on 07/17/11
Well, it's 10:00 am Sunday morning, and I don't really know if the Fritizens work on Sunday, but I thought since they had yesterday off, they might want something to do....so I took a sample size of my Floribunda frit blend (1/3 of an oz) and scattered it around the Frit Depot. I'm trying to be a little bit more scientific in my experiments, so I figured it would help to document exactly how much frit I was putting out for them.
Here's a shot of the frit scattered on the ground (10 am).
Now here is a shot of the same pile of frit at 4pm:
Hmmm, I don't know about you, but I find it very difficult to tell whether or not any frit has been picked up. I can see that the pile looks different, but I don't have a sense of what exactly has taken place..... SO, I took the 10 am photo and overlaid it with the 4 pm photo, blocking out all the image of the remaining frit (that's the black area). This should theoretically show how much they carried away during the day, right?
Aha, they picked up and carried off the frit around the edges! Well, I admit I felt a little dumb when I finally figured this out... what did I think, they were going to start in the middle of the pile? LOL!
Coincidentally, when I was taking the 4 pm photo, there was a Fritizen racing all over the pile as if trying to decide which piece to take. Finally I realized that maybe I was making him or her nervous, hanging over the frit pile with this whirring object that kept clicking faster and faster the quicker he moved. Musta felt like Big Brother was watching (or Big Sister in this case).
Alright, now it is time for a little gender clarification. Even though I have recently learned that well over 99% of all ants are female, I still cannot get myself to call them all she. I guess they just don't look that feminine to me, but there you go. I really should not be so judgmental, after all they're just wearing their little ant uniforms. No wonder they feel the need to accessorize.
So, back to the story.... I wonder why they didn't pick up more of the frit, or have I just become impatient? The sample baggie that I spread for them today is much bigger than the amounts I have been giving them before. So, thinking about that, I decided it would be interesting to see how much they had actually gathered so far, so I started playing with a photo of "Ant-ioch" and trying to find a way to make the frit pop out better visually. I applied just about every inversion and contrast filter I could think of (did I mention I'm not really all that scientific, despite my best attempts?) and this was the result:
This image is the fire ant nest... it's obviously not color accurate, but I was trying to drop out the background like I said. I think I must have managed to make some of the frit disappear in all those color filters, coz it actually looks like more when you see it normally.
It still doesn't look like all that much frit, but remember that up until this morning, I had only given them maybe a total of a tablespoon of glass, so the Floribunda I gave them this morning is probably equal to the total of the Z-99 plus the Arielle's Odyssey I gave them a couple days ago.
Well, no sense in crying over spilled frit, or regetting my perceived lack of scientific method. After all, this whole experiment was not MY idea to begin with, it was something those clever Fritizens of Ant-ioch came up with on their own!
Oh speaking of which, I'll be back tomorrow with a very interesting history lesson about the Fritizens. Enjoy, and stay tuned!
