Timelapse: Fire Ant Hill on a Log in the Rain, Collapsing and Being Rebuilt

A timelapse of a fire ant hill on a log being collapsed by rain and then being rebuilt by the ants, twice. The playback speed varies throughout the video but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of a few 100x normal speed. The audio is normal speed recordings I made during the timelapse.

This is an interesting fire ant colony, being built directly on top of a large rotten log. I don’t see them built like this very often so I had to get a timelapse of it. It’s not as dramatic of a collapse/rebuild as my last timelapse video but it turned out pretty cool.

I setup the camera taking pictures at fixed intervals and waited for the rain. Shortly after they rebuilt, more rain was on the way. So, I setup for a side view shot of the next rain (0:24). After they seemed to be done rebuilding the second time, I left the camera running night to keep shooting, thinking they may build some more. Sure enough, after dark they came back and built some more (0:40).