Fire ants create rafts to escape flooding

(Mystery.tv) - The mystery of how the fire ants survived flooding has been deciphered: These tiny insects have hooked their legs together to form a lifesaver to help them float on the water. .

>>>Video: Fire ants create rafts to escape flooding

- American engineers have used the whole-school model to study fast-forward time to clarify how fire ants gathered themselves to become rafts to save them from flooding.

- Technology researchers say that ants cling to each other by lower jaws, claws and pads sticking with 400 times more force than their weight to create their own lifesaver.

- The result is a flexible, sticky and elastic material, almost a liquid consisting of ant 'molecules', and can self-heal.

- Amazingly, an ant raft can be formed in less than 100 seconds.

The secret of how fire ant colonies can survive the floods that have challenged biologists for decades. But now scientists have discovered that they work together to form a kind of ants that help them float around for many days effectively.

The Georgia Institute of Technology observed fire ants build rafts, when placed in water by attaching themselves to others by lower jaws, claws and sticky sheets at a force 400 times their weight. . The scientists found that ants were interconnected in the same way that a waterproof fabric was woven.

Engineering graduate student, Nathan Mlot, engineering and industrial professor with Craig Tovey and David Hu, at Georgia Tech, described how ants work in groups to form a raft. Waterproof is more efficient than individual ants. These descriptions are presented in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

The armor covers an ant water-repellent ants so it can remove water, but ants have enhanced their wet-proof ability by linking their bodies together.

Ants radiate from a circle into a raft to avoid being submerged in water

The raft ants provide mounts, floating joints and waterproofing for its tiny passengers, but more notably, it can be assembled in less than 100 seconds. Scientists have evaluated the strength and buoyancy of raft ants when submerged into the water.

Small ants build rafts when stocking them in water using the lower jaws, claws on the feet and sticky pads at a force 400 times stronger than body weight.

Ants also created unstructured group structures. Fire ants are said to be electrically sucked and can even withstand being trapped in a microwave oven.

When shocked with electric shock, these tiny organisms produce pheromones that attract other workers, and they will also be shocked and attracted to the same fate. The researchers said that this is an extremely interesting discovery because at first glance it looks like a raft is a very chaotic structure.

To understand what individual behaviors are, and how fire ants work together to achieve the function of a group, it is crucial to study social insects.

Professor Tovey and his team followed the journey of ant colonies and measured the size of ants, they found that ants moved by using a string of stereotyped behaviors.

The ants crawled in straight lines, thin lines (bouncing and bouncing) the sides of the raft and crawling back until they held one edge, Tovey said, before explaining that the ants were waterproof. because of the behavior of these insects.

The ants can heal themselves, so if an ant leaves the raft, the others will crawl to fill the gap.

"Self-assembly and self-repair are standard signs of living organisms," Professor Hu said.

'The ant shows both of these possibilities, giving an example that ant colonies act like a super-creature'.

The researchers said that these findings will have implications for materials science, military logistics and include the construction of artificial floating devices. They also said it could affect the robot sector as well.

"With ants, we have a group of unintelligent individuals that operate on some behavior that allows them to build complex structures and complete tasks," Mr Mlot said .

'In self-driving robots, that's one thing to expect - to have robots follow some simple rules for a final result , ' he added.