I thought this was incredibly cool. I strongly considered being a Myrmecologist for many years, and Bert Holldobler is one of my heros. One of the primary reasons I chose not to do this sort of work was because the best way to get information about ants is to destroy their colonies, and I thought that i would make me too sad to do it. I don't think it's wrong, because I don't think that the ants are capable of feeling hurt and I don't think that the ecology of the pasture they were in will be much changed, since a new colony should be back up to that size in a year or two, but it is sad.

Also, as far as whether this accomplishes anything: knowing how ant ventilation systems, toxin control systems and the like work could give human engineers some ideas about how to design human buildings or even human cities in such a way that they can stay warm or cool with minimal fossil fuel use. Because ant organization is radically decentralized, ants are a great model for market systems and decentralized computer programming. Google's search algorithms are based in part on bee foraging patterns. Ants are also used by some economists as market models, so it's conceivable that understanding how they work could help avert future financial crises. Not to mention the obvious and less romantic use that knowing how ants work helps us disrupt the colonies of pest ants and invasive species without totally destroying the ecologies around them.