This is the most endearingly strange thing you'll watch all day. Andrew Quitmeyer, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, has alerted us to his handy video tutorial on painting ants for scientific experiments. If you ever need to open an ink parlor for a six-legged clientele, this is your huckleberry.
Those readers with vise-like memories may remember Andrew's previous project, the giant duck head that vomits candy at children. Here's how Andrew described his present pursuits to io9:
Here's a video I made as a design meditation for an automatic ant painting device that I am working on. This video works as an instructional video for painting ants that also demonstrates difficulties faced by social insect scientists [...] Also it's just pretty weird to see how scientists have to actually paint with little tiny paintbrushes and microscopes onto ants.
I can't wait to see what his "automatic ant painting device" looks like. I'm picturing a carwash the size of a matchbox. Sorry, all you artisanal formic body painters, the march of technology stops for no one.