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For the curious:
Speaking to MailOnline, Willot confirmed this 'was indeed a tricky procedure. They are very reactive and won't stop struggling once caught, preventing any shaving attempt if not anaesthetised.'
This was done by exposing the ants for a few seconds to carbon dioxide, then strapping them down firmly.
Hairs were removed using a high-power binocular telescope and a very sharp blade.
'It's the same as shaving your own chin: the scalpel blade has to move in the opposite direction of the hair's growth. It has to be a delicate and gentle motion,' said Willot.
After practising on large soldier ants, he found that a smaller worker ant could be entirely shaved in an hour of delicate work.
He estimates around 40 ants were shaved altogether to produce seven good examples for the experiments.
The world is a really interesting place. I would have never guessed that there are people out there that shave ants.
It's probably just the one guy. He probably only spent a total of 100 hours doing it so he's not even an expert.
He's probably the world's subject-matter expert on shaving ants.
No, you need 10,000 hours of experience to be an expert. He's just an ant-shaving hobbyist at best.
We've finally gotten to gatekeeping shaving ants 💪💪
A hobbyist in a field no-one else has explored is a leading expert.
It's a joke, you ant-shaver.
The average person has shaved one ant, but only because Dr. Ant-Shaver Willot has shaved 7 Billion ants and therefore he should be dismissed as a statistical outlier.
"average person shaves 3 ants per year" factoid actualy just statistical error, average person shaves 0 ants per year. Ants Georg, who lives in cave & shaves 10,000 per day is an outlier adn should not have been counted
I think I did pretty well reciting it from memory and swapping out the details.
people who get paid to shave ants, no less
I don't know why I needed to know, but I did indeed need to know. Thanks.
anaesthetised
*Antaesthetised.
Ant aestheticized
get that holier-than-thou extra-useless-letters british spelling outta here