Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: it's Christian Sager. The horrors of hurricanes in Texas are
Speaker 1: right out of an hieronymous bosh painting. The flooding, the
Speaker 1: ruined homes, the tens of thousands of displaced people, not
Speaker 1: to mention the chemical fires. There's more, of course, but
Speaker 1: what seems to have captured the public imagination most are
Speaker 1: the vast, rust colored rafts of stinging fire ants floating
Speaker 1: atop Houston's already toxic floodwaters. The red imported fire ant,
Speaker 1: also known as Solenopsis invicta, is native to South America,
Speaker 1: but the aggressive species found its way to the United
Speaker 1: States from Argentina in the nineteen thirties in the cargo
Speaker 1: holds of ships. Finding themselves in a new land without
Speaker 1: natural predators, they quickly spread throughout the southeastern United States,
Speaker 1: making their way through Texas and all the way to
Speaker 1: California by the nineteen nineties. Now the ants can be
Speaker 1: found in densities that far surpass what they are able
Speaker 1: to maintain in their native habitat in the Southern Hemisphere.
Speaker 1: These ants do shockingly well in wet weather because they
Speaker 1: evolved on the Amazon River floodplains, which means they're used
Speaker 1: to their nests being inundated during the rainy season each year.
Speaker 1: They've had a couple million years to come up with
Speaker 1: a flood drill, and it involves sticking together. Fire ants
Speaker 1: are you social, which means one ant can't survive by itself.
Speaker 1: They all need each other and a queen to produce
Speaker 1: offspring for the entire colonies. So when their nest floods
Speaker 1: up to five hundred thousand or so, worker ants surround
Speaker 1: their queen and her eggs, linking arms and forming a
Speaker 1: floating raft with their waxy bodies creating pockets of air
Speaker 1: for buoyancy. They link themselves together with so many points
Speaker 1: of contact between different ants, their raft shares physical properties
Speaker 1: similar to fabric. In fact, a single ant might link
Speaker 1: with twenty other individuals in the mass. Fire ants are
Speaker 1: one of very few organisms capable of working together to
Speaker 1: make large structures. How the ants accomplished this has long
Speaker 1: fascinated not only biologists, but also physicists and engineers. This
Speaker 1: ball making behavior creates a living material that switches between
Speaker 1: having physical properties of a solid and then a liquid.
Speaker 1: And because none of these individual ants is leading the charge.
Speaker 1: Roboticists are interested in what fire ants can teach us
Speaker 1: about modular robotics. They are an inspiration. When the raft
Speaker 1: reaches something dry, the ants will swarm up it for survival.
Speaker 1: It could be a treat or a telephone pole, or
Speaker 1: it could be a house on whose roof humans are
Speaker 1: taking shelter, or it could be the ore of a robo.
Speaker 1: So for now, just remember. If you see a raft
Speaker 1: of fire ants floating by you in the deluge, take
Speaker 1: the advice of Paul Nestor, a fire ant expert at
Speaker 1: Texas A and M's Agra Life Extension Service. He says
Speaker 1: to avoid avoid avoid them. But if you come across
Speaker 1: a floating raft of ants, you can battle it by
Speaker 1: pouring soapy water over it. It will drown the nest
Speaker 1: by removing the air bubbles that allow them to float,
Speaker 1: and you will commit aunt genocide. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Jesslyn Shields and produced by Dylan Fagin. For more
Speaker 1: on this and other topics, please visit us at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com