We Build a new display in Livorno, Italy

Post your builds, private or commercial set ups. This is where we will document the creation of housing or the planning and construction of projects from scratch. This differs from the Journal Section because this section does not concentrate on the Ants or the other animals that are being kept, this section focuses on the progress of the build.
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Acromyrmexbob
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We Build a new display in Livorno, Italy

Post by Acromyrmexbob » Tue Apr 24, 2018 10:08 pm

Bit of an epic adventure here. Alan and I set off early on the Sunday morning in our van and drove down through Scotland and England to the Channel tunnel. We arrived in France at around 5pm and set off towards our overnight accommodation which was booked in a small village east of Paris. The next morning we left our comfy beds and set off on the most amazing drive. Down through France, along Switzerland and then south into the Alps. The most amazing scenery and incredible buildings and then Mont Blanc, the daddy of all the mountains and the 10 mile tunnel through its heart. After that (and we counted them!!) we drove through 107 tunnels as we descended out of the Alps. When we were level with Milan we rendezvoused with a guy from a Butterfly Centre across the other side of Italy who bought 2 Atta colonies. Then it was on through Genoa to Livorno.
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.

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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.....

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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.

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This is the nest tank, fixed to the wall and the wooden stand.

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and below is the double feeding platform

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As I was working on this, Alan was fitting the 80m of walkway!

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Meanwhile the colony of ants we had brought with us was housed in a temporary area in the prep room.....

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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....

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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!!

Jackie62
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Re: We Build a new display in Livorno, Italy

Post by Jackie62 » Thu Apr 26, 2018 11:47 am

Epic achievement! And the set up looks amazing.... :D

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Andyj
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Re: We Build a new display in Livorno, Italy

Post by Andyj » Tue May 01, 2018 10:13 pm

Stunning, gives me loads of ideas, the only trouble is that just one of those tanks is as big as my house :( :)

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