The entrance is a rude crack in the ground surrounded by a halo of trash: shells & husks mainly, some tiny pebbles brought up from below, and an occasional insect corpse.
When they arrive, ants take their seed straight down the hole (presumable to storage chambers). Sometime later detritus is brought back up. In between, what happens?
The trash seems to reflect what's currently in seed within 100 feet of the nest. If that's the case, their harvest doesn't stay in storage long. They do make mistakes and gather the inedible.
Below is the same nest yesterday (~2 months later).
The mix has largely changed.
The white parachute seeds appeared only yesterday. I'll look around a see where they come from.
One curiosity is that harvesters feed on a single plant at a time; they don't scatter helter-skelter, but travel bee-line from the nest.
Here's a path running due left from the hole. Up close it looks like they'd worn a gutter in the ground with a billion little footsteps.
Below groundlevel, it looks so: an actual mold of a harvester nest.
The scientist poured molten copper down the hole of Florida harvesters in order to capture the architecture.
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