The physics of fire ant rafts could help engineers design swarming robots
Noah rode out his flood in an ark. Winnie-the-Pooh had an upside-down umbrella. Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta), meanwhile, form floating rafts made up of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individual insects. A new study by engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder lays out the simple physics-based rules that govern how these ant rafts morph over time: shrinking, expanding or