Ok cool outfit but please eat something hearty, and soon. And repeat.

Maybe. I like to think they have an equivalent to David Attenborough who talks about preserving our world and not intervening on alien space Netflix

Oh yeah. But I wouldn’t call it culture, more like pheromone-evolved instinct. With a sprinkle of geographic determinism.

Different regions have varying soils and food sources available to the ants. Much like humans and early cement, the little civil engineers have to make it work with what’s available. Sand is more often used to make mounds. Loamy soil is easier to dig into and has enough integrity to support multiple layers of underground networks.

Some ants have invented the ant toilet. Or rather a designated spot where they all put their poop. Some use their poop to grow fungal gardens. The queen will take a bit of the garden from her original colony with her in her mouth to start another when she goes off to found her own colony, like a sourdough starter. For real.

In the Amazon there are some wild examples of specialization (as the Amazon do). Leaf cutter ants make mega-cities and create ant “highways”. Fire ants build bridges with their bodies. Bullet ants are so metal they don’t really bother building nests and just inhabit trees.

All of this, and pretty much everything ants do, is driven by pheromones and instinct. I hope we get to see a further exploration into the relationship of ant DNA variation and pheromone response in our lifetimes. Only 2.5% of leaf cutter colonies founded by a new queen make it, selection is happening at a genetic level. Whack.

While there is air inside, it might not be the kind you want to breathe. Depends on what the pipe is made of and used for. I don’t think you would be in trouble if the run wasn’t so long, conditions would have to be almost ideal. Wear a gas mask if you’re going to mad-lad it OP. 400m is a long way to go prone.

Drain the water away and allow the ice to be in contact with air. Raising the temperature of water requires many times more input energy than raising the temperature of air. Also, air will flow over the exposed surface area of the block at a larger temperature differential than the melted water. This will encourage faster melting. When ice is melting in a glass of water, the temperature of the water itself remains close to 32F until the ice has melted. All of the energy being absorbed into the water from the environment is essentially going straight to phase changing the ice back to a liquid, but as mentioned above it requires far more energy to raise the temperature of water than air