Tisserands ants form complex channels to pull their weight more than 100 times

Tisserands ants form complex channels to pull their weight more than 100 times

By Rohini Subrahmanyam Edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

The feet of the weavers have an incredibly strong grip – individual members of a species can, without sliding, hold a whole dead bird hanging at the edge of a table. And the powerful insects rarely work alone, often associating to transport and fold the oversized leaves while they build their houses filled with foliage. Scientists have now found that, as an asian weaved ant teams, they win more members, they strategically use their adhesive feet to become more and more effective in shooting leaf tips. Unlike typical human behavior, ants work harder in larger groups than when they are alone to get relatively enormous weights.

In a measurable phenomenon called the Ringelmann effect, the more humans join a team, the less each individual member tends to exercise; Researchers generally attribute this to reduced motivation and the difficulty of coordinating more people. “When you shoot a rope, like a rope, it is actually less effective to have more people aligned Current biology.

Reid and his colleagues connected the tip of a sheet of paper to a strength measurement device and filmed weavers firing the tip through the sheet to fold it. They found that single ants drew 59 times their weight on average, but individuals in groups of 15 drew their weight 103 times. The more the ants have been included, the more the increase in efficiency.

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To get there, the ants gathered in chains of two to four, one behind the others. The front ants leaned their legs and pull hard at the forefront of the leaf with their mandibles while the rear ants held the motionless sheet.

Researchers propose that these traction channels could act as forceful clips. The front ants are “active shooters”, and the rear ants are the “passive resistants” – they go to the bodies of the front ants, firmly plant their sticky feet on the sheet and store the forces generated by the front ants so that the leaf does not fly back.

“Examples of real abolition are very limited,” said ecologist Scott Powell from George Washington University, who was not involved in the study. Strong army ants strictly following a pheromone path to transport heavier loads are another known example. But with effective coordination, the physical features of the weavers seem to give them an advantage.

These unusually adherent feet make them “very well adapted to a strong traction force in the other direction”, explains the biologist Helen McCreery of Tufts University, which was not involved in the study either. “The world is full of organisms solving problems in a way completely different from the way our brain thinks to do it.”

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