Researchers have determined that in the event of flooding, ants put their infants at the bottom of "ant rafts" that they build as a community.
The rafts have a specific structure that maximizes their buoyancy and increases their chances of survival, according to a report by The Los Angeles Times.
The infant ants get placed at the bottom, where there is a good chance they will likely drowning or be eaten by fish.
Though ant rafts have been studied in the past, researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland set out to determine what ants get placed at the bottom of the pile. They also wanted to figure out why the queen gets placed on the top.
"It was an interesting contribution. No one had really looked at this idea of the brood as a flotation device," said David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, according to a press release issued by the institute. "It adds a level of sophistication to the rafts that was previously not understood." Hu was not involved in the study.
Experts searched the banks of the Rhone River and found worker ants, brood ants, and queens. The researchers then split them into groups of 60 workers with queens and ten brood ants to tend to, according to The Los Angeles Times
Then they raised the water levels and studied how the ants reacted.
The queen was placed into the center of the raft, away from the water. What they didn't expect was when the ants put the brood on the bottom of the raft, exposing them to the rising water.
Eventually the researchers found the pupae and larvae to be more buoyant than the adults, according to
Rafts with strictly worker ants were less successful than those that contained brood ants.
Studies into ant rafts reveal that ants link their legs with adhesive patches to build their rafts. Ants orient themselves perpendicularly to one another, distributing their weight and creating a light, buoyant structure, according to Scientific American.
Research was published in Journal of Experimental Biology.
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