BBC Earth is routinely on the cutting-edge of nature documentaries and imaging technology, capturing the hidden world of plants, recording remarkable footage in the world’s largest cave, and shooting high-resolution footage in pitch dark conditions. One of BBC Earth’s latest videos shows a macro view of fire ants building a living raft of their comrades to survive flooding.
Fire ants, perhaps best known for their painful sting, are exceptionally resourceful and resilient. They are well known for their ability to survive extreme situations, including the dangerous flooding seen in the BBC Earth video below.
With just minutes to exit their underground colony and find a way to survive, thousands of ants evacuate their tunnels to avoid a watery grave. The ants rush to extract larvae and young from the colony, hoping to save them from death. But as the legendary David Attenborough explains, the colony seems doomed.
“But from chaos comes order,” Attenborough explains. “The fire ants band together, each locking legs with its neighbors. They’re building a living raft.”
As he explains, fire ants have very fine hairs across their bodies. These hairs can trap air, a brilliant adaptation that makes the mass of ants buoyant. Scientists believe that as many as 100,000 ants can coalesce into a living raft. These rafts, which include the queen and larvae in the center — protected and provided with air trapped in the surrounding ants — can float for weeks without any ants drowning.
The behavioral mechanisms at play with these living ant rafts are fascinating and of great interest to scientists and engineers, who look to the fire ants for insight into a wide range of topics, including biological survivability, evolutionary biology, and materials engineering and fabric design. That the ants seemingly coordinate their efforts purely on instinct and create something so resilient and strong against water ingress is among nature’s most incredible spectacles.
“As both a systems engineer and biologist, I’m fascinated by the ant colony’s effectiveness in diverse tasks, such as foraging for food, floating on water, fighting other ants and building towers and underground nests – all accomplished by thousands of purblind creatures whose brains have less than one ten-thousandth as many neurons as a human’s,” writes Craig Tovey for The Conversation and Scientific American.
Through what Attenborough describes as “the power of the colony,” the fire ants become unsinkable and able to withstand their home’s unpredictable, often inhospitable, and brutal nature. At least until a predator swims along.
Image credits: BBC Earth