We would put these ants in a container, and some would start digging right away, and they would make this amazing progress. "They're sort of capricious," Andrade says. Still, the ants did not always cooperate with the researchers' own priorities. Through that work, they determined an optimal size of cup to use, and an ideal number of ants to put in each cup.
Ants dig dug arrangement trial#
Not only did they need to breed enough ants to work with, there was a lot of trial and error involved in getting the ants to dig in little cups of soil that they could load into an X-ray imager. It was a process that took nearly a year, Andrade says.
Ants dig dug arrangement how to#
With Parker on board, the team started culturing ants and learning how to work with them. "What Jose and his team needed was somebody who works with ants and understands the adaptive, collective behaviors of these social insects to give them some context for what they were doing," Parker says. But Andrade is an engineer, not an entomologist (someone who studies insects), so he enlisted the help of Joe Parker, assistant professor of biology and biological engineering, whose research focuses on ants and their ecological relationships with other species. To learn about ants, the team needed to have ants to study.
"We thought maybe they were tapping grains of soil, and that way they could assess the mechanical forces on them." "We hypothesized that the ants could sense these force chains and avoided digging there," Andrade says.
The blocks that can't be removed-the ones bearing the load of the stack-are said to be part of the structure's 'force chains,' the collection of pieces jammed together by the forces placed on them. What he means by "playing Jenga" is that the team suspected the ants were feeling their way around in the dirt, looking for loose grains of soil to remove, in much the same way a person playing Jenga checks for loose blocks that are safe to take out of the stack. "We hypothesized that maybe ants were playing Jenga." "We didn’t interview any ants to ask if they know what they're doing, but we did start with the hypothesis that they dig in a deliberate way," Andrade says. "I saw a picture of one of these next to a person and I thought 'My goodness, what a fantastic structure.' And I got to wondering if ants 'know' how to dig." "I got inspired by these exhumed ant nests where they pour plastic or molten metal into them and you see these vast tunnel systems that are incredibly impressive," Andrade says. The research is described in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.īefore beginning this research, Andrade, who is also the Cecil and Sally Drinkward Leadership Chair and Executive Officer for Mechanical and Civil Engineering, had a big question he wanted to answer: Do ants "know" how to dig tunnels, or are they just blindly digging? Housner Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, the team studied the digging habits of ants and uncovered the mechanisms guiding them. Led by the laboratory of Jose Andrade, the George W. Now, driven by the desire to improve our own ability to dig underground-whether it is for mining, subways or underground farming-a team of researchers from Caltech has unraveled one of the secrets behind how ants build these amazingly complex and stable structures. This kind of construction would be an impressive undertaking for most creatures, but when performed by animals that don't get much bigger than your fingernail, it is especially remarkable. They are underground cities, some of them home to millions of individuals, reaching as far as 25 feet underground, often lasting for decades. Tunnels dive downward, branching and leading to specialized chambers that serve as home for the colony's queen, as nurseries for its young, as farms for fungus cultivated for food, and as dumps for its trash. Not very impressive, right?īut slip beneath the surface and the above-ground simplicity gives way to subterranean complexity. What do you see? A small mound of sand and crumbly dirt poking up through the lawn? A tiny hole disappearing into the ground? A few ants scrambling around busily.
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