
Fire
ants, when trapped, will build a tower of ants in order to escape.
Researchers at Georgia Tech, instead of looking for ways to kill the
invasive insects, studied the architecture of ant towers. David Hu and
Craig Tovey observed how ants at the bottom supported the weight of
those above, and how ants reaching to top of the tower stopped to let
others crawl on top of them. They left a video recorder on for an hour
after the tower was completed and went to do something else. Later, not
wanting to watch an hour of ants, they viewed the video at ten times the
normal speed. That's when they discovered that the completed tower kept
sinking, and had to be constantly rebuilt.
To
confirm the sinking behavior, Tovey and Hu contacted experts at at
Lawrence Livermore Labs and other institutes. They were told that the
technology did not exist to track individual particles in the interior
of a three-dimensional object, at the time and size scales of ant-made
towers, without killing the insects. But when they talked to an expert
at Georgia Tech, they were referred to Daria Monaenkova, a postdoctoral
researcher working in Dan Goldman’s physics lab. Monaenkova, who would
subsequently become a co-author of the new study, happened to be working
on an x-ray technology that would enable the researchers to peer inside
the ant tower itself.
And that's where the story
gets really neat. They actually fed radioactive iodine to some of the
ants in order to track them by X-ray in real time to confirm the sinking
tower. They determined that it was because the ants at the bottom
understandably got tired and left. You can read the story and
see both the original video and the X-ray version at Gizmodo.
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