Ants build high-rise "live towers"

Ants are amazing creatures. Some of the strongest (they can raise the entire 50 times their own), live in strictly organized communes, where everyone has their own role, are engaged in farming, grow mushrooms and so on. Recently, scientists have discovered another feature of these insects: red fire ants build living towers. True, they do this not out of love for cheerleading, but for a very practical purpose: to save themselves from floods.

On a small raft ...

As scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have found, insects build complex structures to escape from water, while each ant can hold up to three "colleagues." Insects had to master such complex acrobatic studies, as they live in a swampy area, where during the rainy season you have to somehow survive.

First of all, ants build “living rafts”: due to the distribution of weight, the structure does not sink in water, even if it consists of several thousand ants, each of which, with the help of an adhesive surface on its feet, holds two or three neighbors. Moreover, if at some point the balance is violated, the ants begin to redistribute in real time. From the side it looks as if the raft "flows" over the surface of the water.

Studying the construction of rafts, scientists noticed that sometimes ants build not horizontal, but vertical structures - up to 30 individuals in height. At the same time, the insects that formed the “foundation” of the structures felt fine and did not receive injuries from overvoltage.

Stand in a circle

To study how they succeed, scientists placed several colonies of ants in plastic containers into which they inserted Teflon rods of different diameters and heights. Due to the slippery surface of Teflon, ants could only build towers with each other resting on each other.

To understand the behavior of ants inside the tower, scientists gave half of the insects in each colony water with radioactive iodine. X-ray images showed "radioactive" ants, so making tracking their movements easier.

It turned out that the principles of the formation of the towers are similar to the principles of the construction of rafts: if you are below, then do not move, if you are at the top, then swing, do not hold more than two or three brothers. The fourth principle on which the stability of the tower depended - the ants inside the tower build a closed ring.