The Acquario Di Livorno is in the town by the sea. It is similar to our Sealife Centres and they have recently built a Reptile department where the Leaf Cutters were to go.
This is a picture of the wall where the nest tank was to go. I suggested a long, tall but very narrow tank, like a giant formicarium. Heres the sketch.....
The setup was to have a piped walkway heading out from both sides of the tank to a pair of feeding tanks which would sit side by side around 40m away.
We allowed ourselves 3 days to build the display.
The first job was to get the stands in place and build the glass tanks.
This is the nest tank, fixed to the wall and the wooden stand.
and below is the double feeding platform
As I was working on this, Alan was fitting the 80m of walkway!
Meanwhile the colony of ants we had brought with us was housed in a temporary area in the prep room.....
Once the walkway was complete we added soil and fixed the cladding to the top and bottom of the units to give the finished effect....
Finally the ants were placed into the tank. We actually finished this job a day early. Guglielmo Maglio, who is a member on here, then travelled 5 hours up from southern Italy to collect 4 Acromyrmex colonies and we had dinner with him. The early the next morning we set off on the long journey back to home.
Some ridiculous stats. It cost around £400 in road tolls, around £800 in fuel and we drove 2700 miles in the 3 1/2 days we were driving to and from Livorno. On the first day driving home we drove from Livorno right up to Watford Gap, via the Channel tunnel, a drive of around 1100 miles.
Quite the adventure!!
