14 DAY TRIAL // It turns out that ants have an innate ability to get themselves out of harm's way when the colony is hit by natural disasters, and a paper published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE just yesterday proves it.
In this paper, a team of researchers led by Jessica Purcell with the University of Lausanne in Switzerland explains that, when hit by a flood, ants work together to create a raft.
This raft serves to transport both workers, and eggs, larvae and the queen to safety, the researchers say.
Science Daily details that, in order to investigate how ants behave when the survival of their colony is threatened by a flood, they collected several such insects and brought them back to their laboratory.
They then pieced together several ant groups that varied in terms of the number of worker ants, queens, eggs and larvae, and exposed them to flooding conditions.
They thus discovered that, when threatened by the artificially induced natural disaster, the ants used their own bodies and that of eggs and larvae to build rafts.
In order to make sure that their queen had the highest chances to escape the flood, the ants always placed it in the center.
Interestingly enough, the brood, i.e. the eggs and the larvae, were placed at the bottom of the raft. Researchers say that this happened because they are surprisingly buoyant, and also fairly resistant to submersion.
“We expected that individuals submerged on the base of the raft would face the highest cost, so we were astonished to see the ants systematically place the youngest colony members in that positions,” says researchers Jessica Purcell.
“Further experiments revealed that the brood are the most buoyant members of the society and that rafting does not decrease their survival; thus, this configuration benefits the group at minimal cost,” the scientist further details.
By the looks of it, buoyancy and endurance are traits that also hold true for worker ants, which have surprisingly high chances to survive a more-or-less desired dive.
By working together in this manner, ants manage to enhance the survival chances and the welfare of the group they are part of.