Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) form floating rafts made up of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individual insects.
A new study by engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder lays out the simple physics-based rules that govern how these ant rafts morph over time: shrinking, expanding or growing long protrusions like an elephant’s trunk. The team’s findings could one day help researchers design robots that work together in swarms or next-generation materials in which molecules migrate to fix damaged spots.
The results appeared recently in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
“The origins of such behaviors lie in fairly simple rules,” said Franck Vernerey, primary investigator on the new study and professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Single ants are not as smart as one may think, but, collectively, they become very intelligent and resilient communities.”
Fire ants form these giant floating blobs of wriggling insects after storms in the southeastern United States to survive raging waters.
In their latest study, Vernerey and lead author Robert Wagner drew on mathematical simulations, or models, to try to figure out the mechanics underlying these lifeboats. They discovered, for example, that the faster the ants in a raft move, the more those rafts will expand outward, often forming long protrusions.
“This behavior could, essentially, occur spontaneously,” said Wagner, a graduate student in mechanical engineering. “There doesn’t necessarily need to be any central decision-making by the ants.”
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