Black ant hill grounded4/17/2023 ![]() Next, Andrade’s team set about analyzing what the ants were actually doing as they worked, and a few patterns emerged. By taking a series of these scans, letting the ants work a little bit between each, the researchers could create simulations showing the progress the ants made as they extended their tunnels further and further below the surface. And some would dig for a while and then would stop and take a break.”īut once the ants got going, the researchers would take the little cups and X-ray them using a technique that created a 3-D scan of all the tunnels inside. But others, it would be hours and they wouldn’t dig at all. 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. 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. With Parker on board, the team started culturing ants and learning how to work with them. ![]() So, the heavier lines are weakened, yet even the less heavy lines become thinner as well. We see that forces near the tunnel surface become much weaker after excavation, due to arches forming within the material. The bolder the line, the stronger the force. The left image is the grain-to-grain forces in a cross-section of the tunnel before excavation, while the right depicts the forces after excavation in said cross-section. “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.” Ants do what they want ![]() “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. Video shows the surface (brown) of the volume of soil removed by ants from the container (blue). Time lapse of tunnel construction in 3D and real time using x-rays. “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. ![]()
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