BBC Earth is routinely on the cutting-edge of nature documentaries and imaging expertise, capturing the hidden world of vegetation, recording outstanding footage on the planet’s largest cave, and taking pictures high-resolution footage in pitch darkish situations. Considered one of BBC Earth’s newest movies exhibits a macro view of fireplace ants constructing a residing raft of their comrades to outlive flooding. Fireplace ants, maybe greatest recognized for his or her painful sting, are exceptionally resourceful and resilient. They’re well-known for his or her capacity to outlive excessive conditions, together with the damaging flooding seen within the BBC Earth video beneath. With simply minutes to exit their underground colony and discover a approach to survive, 1000’s of ants evacuate their tunnels to keep away from a watery grave. The ants rush to extract larvae and younger from the colony, hoping to save lots of them from loss of life. However because the legendary David Attenborough explains, the colony appears doomed. “However from chaos comes order,” Attenborough explains. “The fireplace ants band collectively, every locking legs with its neighbors. They’re constructing a residing raft.” As he explains, hearth ants have very wonderful hairs throughout their our bodies. These hairs can lure air, a superb adaptation that makes the mass of ants buoyant. Scientists imagine that as many as 100,000 ants can coalesce right into a residing raft. These rafts, which embody the queen and larvae within the middle — protected and supplied with air trapped within the surrounding ants — can float for weeks with none ants drowning.
The behavioral mechanisms at play with these residing ant rafts are fascinating and of nice curiosity to scientists and engineers, who look to the fireplace ants for perception into a variety of matters, together with organic survivability, evolutionary biology, and supplies engineering and cloth design. That the ants seemingly coordinate their efforts purely on intuition and create one thing so resilient and powerful in opposition to water ingress is amongst nature’s most unimaginable spectacles. “As each a programs engineer and biologist, I’m fascinated by the ant colony’s effectiveness in various duties, resembling foraging for meals, floating on water, combating different ants and constructing towers and underground nests – all completed by 1000’s of purblind creatures whose brains have lower than one ten-thousandth as many neurons as a human’s,” writes Craig Tovey for The Dialog and Scientific American. By means of what Attenborough describes as “the ability of the colony,” the fireplace ants grow to be unsinkable and capable of stand up to their dwelling’s unpredictable, typically inhospitable, and brutal nature. Not less than till a predator swims alongside. Picture credit: BBC Earth
