blog 22 Ants can plug anything, even potholes

In Paris studies have been made on about ants. The Studies have shown that when a stunning amount ants with the total of 200 000 army carrying prey encounters a gaping large hole, the ants would automatically have volunteers to make an ant bridge with their own bodies. This is done to let their comrades to be able to walk over them at full speed until the day's work is done.
The Ants also have groups that the researchers found that are specialized for road –repairing. These ant are limited in size which only contains around 50 of them, but if a situation like this happened they would simply have ants from the groups to keep plugging away until a perfect ant bridge is created. “The study offers rare quantitative evidence that extreme specialization among a sturdy few with a lot of backbone can improve the performance of a majority”, conclude Scott Powell and Nigel Franks, biologists at the University of Bristol. The researchers’ test ants were called Eciton burchellii, which is also called as army ants. The researchers simply made a road filled with holes, by doing so they could test how the ants adapt to the artificial environment and how they would react in those situations. They also did a series of measurements of the army ant’s gain in productivity, they calculated the self-sacrificing behavior of the ants "results in a clear net gain in daily prey intake for the colony". Also from the studies made by the researchers if there were only 7500 worker ants in a trail, they can create a ant bridge by doing hole-plugging duty, the foraging party can increase its daily intake of goodies by up to 26 percent, according the study, to be published in June in the British journal Animal Behaviour. This is amazing as i never knew such tiny ants can plug holes that are 7000 times their sizes and how they would sacrifice their lives for the group. It is also freaky to know that these species of ants travel in such big numbers.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=nw20070529194328897C912447