Watch: Ants Use Their Own Bodies to Build Bridges
Watch how a colony of ants manages to build a bridge all by itself.
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Video Editor: Mohammad Irshad Alam
If you know a thing or two about mythology, then the idea of animals building bridges won’t be an alien concept to you.
A recent study co-authored by Simon Garner, director of the Swarm Lab, showcases a colony of ants building bridges using their own bodies.
Garner said the ants use a simple algorithm to accomplish this feat.
The leader ant slows down and eventually freezes when it encounters a gap, allowing its fellow ants to step over it. The next leader in line repeats the same process, which goes on, until the gap is bridged.
The ant colony, which is traveling at an average speed of 12 centimeters per second, take less than a minute to build these bridges.
According to Garner, the ants use up to 20 percent of their colony’s population. This way, they ensure the disposal of minimal ants while covering the shortest distance possible.
To showcase that, Simon and collaborators, Chris Reid and Matthew Lutz, used a V-shaped structure for their field tests in Panama to speculate how the ants prioritise where to build their bridges. The ants built their bridge close to the angle of the V.
An ant knows how many times it has been stepped on by previous ants, judging the width of the bridge.
When the number of steps hit a certain number, a frozen ant may choose to rejoin the march if it feels that too many ants are occupying the bridge.
Garner said, "in the past, there has been a lot of descriptive work of the structures built by these ants.
"The originality of our work was the creation of experimental setups that we could bring to the tropical forest in order to experimentally control the conditions under which the ants build bridges to shortcut deviations along their trails."
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