Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff, it's Christian Sager. The horrors of hurricanes in Texas are right out of an hieronymous bosh painting. The flooding, the ruined homes, the tens of thousands of displaced people, not to mention the chemical fires. There's more, of course, but what seems to have captured the public imagination most are the vast, rust colored rafts of stinging fire ants floating
atop Houston's already toxic floodwaters. The red imported fire ant, also known as Solenopsis invicta, is native to South America, but the aggressive species found its way to the United States from Argentina in the nineteen thirties in the cargo holds of ships. Finding themselves in a new land without natural predators, they quickly spread throughout the southeastern United States, making their way through Texas and all the way to
California by the nineteen nineties. Now the ants can be found in densities that far surpass what they are able to maintain in their native habitat in the Southern Hemisphere. These ants do shockingly well in wet weather because they evolved on the Amazon River floodplains, which means they're used to their nests being inundated during the rainy season each year. They've had a couple million years to come up with
a flood drill, and it involves sticking together. Fire ants are you social, which means one ant can't survive by itself. They all need each other and a queen to produce offspring for the entire colonies. So when their nest floods up to five hundred thousand or so, worker ants surround their queen and her eggs, linking arms and forming a floating raft with their waxy bodies creating pockets of air
for buoyancy. They link themselves together with so many points of contact between different ants, their raft shares physical properties similar to fabric. In fact, a single ant might link with twenty other individuals in the mass. Fire ants are one of very few organisms capable of working together to make large structures. How the ants accomplished this has long
fascinated not only biologists, but also physicists and engineers. This ball making behavior creates a living material that switches between having physical properties of a solid and then a liquid. And because none of these individual ants is leading the charge. Roboticists are interested in what fire ants can teach us about modular robotics. They are an inspiration. When the raft reaches something dry, the ants will swarm up it for survival.
It could be a treat or a telephone pole, or it could be a house on whose roof humans are taking shelter, or it could be the ore of a robo. So for now, just remember. If you see a raft of fire ants floating by you in the deluge, take the advice of Paul Nestor, a fire ant expert at Texas A and M's Agra Life Extension Service. He says to avoid avoid avoid them. But if you come across a floating raft of ants, you can battle it by
pouring soapy water over it. It will drown the nest by removing the air bubbles that allow them to float, and you will commit aunt genocide. Today's episode was written by Jesslyn Shields and produced by Dylan Fagin. For more on this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com