By Ben Hoare
- We think we’re pretty clever by building the Gherkin and the Shard, but these enterprising animals can create some smart structures of their own… some of which even have built-in air conditioning
Army ants in huge raiding columns will deploy their own bodies to form living bridges so fellow workers can cross gaps quickly. A bridge consists of up to 50 ants and a colony may have 40 or 50 bridges in use at any time. Myrmecologists (people who study ants) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Swarm Lab: https://www.theswarmlab.com/ have worked out a simple rule governing this behaviour.
Ants only stay in a bridge if they feel sufficient numbers of other ants scurrying over their backs. To justify investing that much labour, the shortcut has to be popular. If fewer ants cross, forming a bridge isn’t worth the effort – it’s better for the colony if these ants go around the obstacle the long way.
It’s a wrap
In 2010, countless trees were left shrouded in swathes of silk in Pakistan following monsoon rains https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150279/devastating-floods-in-pakistan.
It’s thought that the flood waters forced millions of spiders to take refuge in the trees, where they spun these veil-like webs. Though the identity of the spiders in this image is not known, some species will congregate in composite webs, often resembling huge hammocks or sheets.
Spiders https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/rem-sleep-in-jumping-spiders/ live alone as a rule, but some – most of which are small and occur in the tropics – exhibit varying degrees of social behaviour. Communal webs enable them to catch much bigger prey and share the energy-sapping tasks of spinning the webs and maintaining their structure. Occasionally, enormous megawebs appear, covering several hundred square metres in silk, perhaps because a superabundance of prey caused an explosion in the local spider population.
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