Ants are truly and unfathomably incredible creatures.
They can carry up to 100 times their own weight (even upside down), have survived an extinction level event over 65 million years ago, and they’re engineers on top of it, building bridges and elaborate nests. In fact, they even have garbage details within their nests.
As amazing as they are on an individual scale, they are absolutely remarkable when they band together!
One man posted a video that exemplifies their amazing skills of adaptable engineering, as millions of ants quite literally band together and form an ant bridge to attack a wasp’s nest.
Twitter user, Francisco Boni uploaded the video to his Twitter-feed on Sunday, August 5th, after perusing an entomology page on Facebook, called El Entomólogo.
The video, filmed in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste National Park, clearly pans the camera from the beginning of the ant bridge at the top corner of the awning of the house.
It then slowly follows the bridge all the way down to about 3 feet from the ground, and back up to the ceiling again where there rested an apparently delicious looking wasp honeycomb.
Although the sight is intensely creepy and strange, it is not a new phenomenon.
The term army ant, also known as marabunta, is a common name applied to over 200 species of ant. They get the name from their tendency to “raid” as an entire colony or legion in a highly organized fashion.
When they go on foraging missions, they are known to consume any and every living thing that they come across, wasps included.
The caption to the Facebook video describes the nature of these forays in detail, saying,
“Attack of legionary ants to a wasp honeycomb…Impressive, the level of organization to form that bridge. When this type of attack happens, the wasps usually escape and the ants do not leave until they completely loot the honeycomb, carrying pupae, larvae and eggs, as well as some adults who do not manage to escape.”
Well, if nothing else, they’re thorough little creepers!
In fact, they are so adaptable they have even been known to build bridges that extend through the water, or alternatively build ant rafts and actually float across it.
Inevitably, followers to Boni’s twitter thread began asking questions about this strange army ant attribute.
Should someone tell those ants that they could have just crawled along the underside of that patio ceiling, or naw? 🤔😏🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜
— Aaron J. Fentress (@AaronJFentress) August 6, 2018
Q: is that bridge only made of their bodies, or was there a string or rope that they followed?
seems impossible either way, but I’m curious.
— Yvonne Caruthers 🔥 (@resuitener) August 6, 2018
Can’t they just walk upside-down on the roof?
— Pablo (@pablopargui_en) August 6, 2018
As it turns out, there’s an answer to those questions.
Army ants tend to follow pheromone trails when foraging, but sometimes there can be a disruption in the trail that will have ants alter their course.
While they CAN carry loads up to 40 times their weight even while upside down, if there is a disruption in the pheromone trail or if it’s too hard to carry their loads it can be more effective to move around the blockage to reach their common goal.
At first I was thinking that this was merely a failure mode that happened when they decided to follow & build the bridge (premature optimization gone wrong). Or that there was something in the ceiling affecting the trail pheromones.
— Francisco Boni (@boni_bo) August 5, 2018
But then a biologist pointed out something more fundamental. Many ants have a hard time walk upside down. For ants it is more effective to follow the trail over a bridge that goes down and then up than in an inverted upside down walk. https://t.co/MXSl8x5wqf
— Francisco Boni (@boni_bo) August 5, 2018
That being said, how they form the bridge doesn’t begin where one would think.
As opposed to building the ant bridge from the ceiling downward, and then back up, it actually originates at the ground level, where the initial build follows a horizontal pattern rather than vertical.
More army ants are added to the ends at the vertical angle as necessary to reach their common goal, as pointed out by one tweeter on the thread.
They probably started as a straight path and started adding ants as gravity pulled the whole bunch down, so the bridge doesn’t end up breaking due to linear tension. So the first minutes they built the bottom part (looks less vertical) and added on the extremes on necessity 1/
— 12:51 (@godie1998) August 6, 2018
It’s only a hypothesis but — proportional to time — their bridge is perfectly reflective of gravitational pull of and object on free fall (so, as time went on, they expanded the bridge more frequently due to increased weight) 2/2
— 12:51 (@godie1998) August 6, 2018
The science behind army ants is fascinating, to say the least, and extremely complex to boot.
One thing’s for certain though; this video will have you scratching your head and begging to know more as you watch this ingenious colony carry off their “loot” with ease.
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