Ah, the amazing-animal story, that standard of gee-whiz journalism that few of us can resist. Nor should we.
Comes now a report in PNAS by mechanical engineers at Georgia Tech, which is situated in fire ant country. When the insects’ burrows are flooded, the ants don’t drown or float off in all directions. They glom together by the thousands, forming a raft that can float for days or weeks until it finds dry land, whereupon the colony is still together and ready to dig in again. (In the photo, a small raft is pushed down by a twig but remains afloat. Photo by researchers Nathan Mlot and Tim Nowack.)
But how do they float, the engineers wondered. When individual fire ants are dropped in water, they float, buoyed by tiny bubbles of air trapped among hairs over the body. Drop a whole colony in water, and the insects grab onto one another, jaws and legs intertwined and clamped, effectively merging their individual air pockets to form one huge bubble weaving through the entire raft.
The Washington Post‘s Brian Vastag knew full well what his editors really cared about. His lede: “Congress-and perhaps the rest of us–could learn a thing or two about teamwork from Solenopsis invicta, the dreaded fire ant.”
Katharine Gammon, of Inside Science News Service, run by the American Institute of Physics, was clearly writing for a science savvy readership, wrote that the ants “can form a raft that stretches the boundaries of the laws of physics.”
Other takes: Wynne Parry of LiveScience and picked up by MSNBC.com. The National Geographic‘s Web site has a brief story by Rachel Kaufman plus a link to a video of fire ants swarming but not forming rafts. Scientific American‘s Cynthia Graber has another brief account plus a podcast and writes that “This discovery could help roboticists interested in building self-assembling flotation devices.” Maybe so, but do we really need to reach that way when we’re just doing a nice, easy gee-whiz story?
Grist: The PNAS article.
–Boyce Rensberger
Leave a Reply