How do individual insects no bigger than a caryopsis of rice manage to work together to build living tower that hold their structure ? It turns out that fire pismire may just be follow a pocket-sized Seth of elementary inbuilt rule , and researchers think theyhave reckon out what these might be .
One of these rules seems to be that they always appear to need to fill in the disruption when they detect them . If a colony of the ants finds a arm sticking up , they be given to begin to form a tugboat surrounding it . This drive to want to fill in the distance more often than not signify traveling to the top of the structure , contribute height . But then it seems to get to a stasis , in which the tower stop growing . unexampled research , however , has obtain that this structure isanything but in stasis .
After accidentally leaving a TV television camera filming the ants building towers rolling for an hour after the social organisation was build , scientists found out that even though at a glance the finished towboat look unchanging , it is in reality a dynamic , constantly moving thing as the ants flow from the bottom to the top in a uninterrupted cycle . This means that even though it might be always sink , it is also constantly being added to .
To confirm what was go on , they then fertilise the colony some radioactive nutrient , before vex them in an cristal - shaft machine and producing a time - lapse motion-picture show . This enabled them to see how the ants were moving not only on the outside of the structure , but also deep within it . They could sit and watch as the ants continued this behavior for hours on end .
It seems that in addition to their desire to fill in the gaps , they also have a weight limit to what they can cope with . “ We found that emmet can hold up 750 times their body weightiness without injury , but they seem to be most comfortable patronage three ants on their backs,”explainedCraig Tovey , a co - author of the study published in theRoyal Society Open Science . “ Any more than three and they ’ll simply give up , break their grip and take the air away . ”
It seems that this canonic rule , coupled with the drive to satisfy in the outer space they see , is behind the constant country of flux seen when the ants build up their tugboat . As the weight of the ants above them gets too sound , they move out from the bottom , and then creep back up to the top where they reconstruct the structure .
