The physics of fire ants.

[beowulf]

They are amazing creatures. I have watched documentaries about them before, how the can be a solid or a liquid depending on the need of the colony to survive.

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[TheGreenTBer]

Ants are some of the most adaptable, versatile and hard-working beings to have ever existed.

Fire ants have huge appetites and are not at all discriminatory; if it moves and they are capable of taking it down, it has almost no chance of survival.

There are a ton of cool ant videos on YouTube. I once spent two hours in a row watching ant clips during a bout of insomnia and I'm pretty sure it was worth it.

 

[JMCx4]

I've watched this vid-story twice, and I still can't figure out WTF it has to do with physics. Physiology, maybe a contributor. Animal behavior, sure. Engineering, only by virtue of the engineering students making the comparative leap from animal behavior to fluid dynamics. But other than at the atomic particle level, I see no physics about it.

 

[beowulf]

The physics behind how fire ants band together into robust floating “rafts”

Fire ants can survive floods by linking their bodies together to form large floating rafts. Now researchers at Georgia Tech have demonstrated that fire ants can actively sense changes in forces acting upon the raft under different fluid conditions and adapt their behavior accordingly to preserve the raft's stability. Hungtang Ko described their work at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, held in Seattle just before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Fire ants (and ants in general) provide a textbook example of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like a fluid, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts—a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow.

 

[TheGreenTBer]

I've watched this vid-story twice, and I still can't figure out WTF it has to do with physics. Physiology, maybe a contributor. Animal behavior, sure. Engineering, only by virtue of the engineering students making the comparative leap from animal behavior to fluid dynamics. But other than at the atomic particle level, I see no physics about it.

Perhaps the fire ants should be put through the double slit experiment to estimate their level of wave-particle duality?