A squirm bulk of fire ants floating across the urine is affair of repugnance and a marvel of applied science . But how do you consider the architecture of ever - twist ants ? Byflash - freeze them and surface in glue , as scientist did for a recent subject field . Ant rafts , it turns out , are more complicated than you might think , and they could one day serve us building smart , ego - assembling automaton .
In nature , rainy weather do fervency emmet to pour out of their nests and relate together to make blow rafts as great as dinner plates . It is , asNature puts it , a material “ effort of social cooperation and biophysics . ” David Hu and his team at the Georgia Institute of Technology feel they could get ants to constitute these rafts by just pour out the creatures into a cup and stirring — no water needed . Then came the fluid nitrogen and the gum , which permanently bonded the ants together into a still mass that could be three-D skim .
The structure of the ant rafts is actually quite incredible to contemplate : Each emmet is link up to an norm of 14 others , with some pismire link up to as many as 20 . “ It turns out that 99 % of the legs are connected to another ant and there are no free loaders,”said Hu . The ants had also consciously orient their bodies perpendicular to one another , creating an interconnected and lightweight anatomical structure . The raft is at once water - repellant and light enough to float .
Not speculative for creatures with pretty petite brains ; peradventure tiny automaton could take that cue . automaton designers envision a dependency of little robots that can connect to one another and self - organise into different shapes like these ant . Human - designed robots be given to be stringently geometric , but the liberal lattice of ants suggest more an organic organization can also work . Fire ants , after all , have done a pretty good Book of Job ofinvading the world . [ Journal of Experimental BiologyviaNature ]
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