Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges

Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges
npr.org

If we find a sharp definition of such a line we will know there is truly a difference. Personally though my bet is there is no such line.

https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/The_Ant_Raft.html

("ants as fluids" linked at the top of that page grabbed my attention a few years ago; myrmycology meets physics, rather than "just" the robotics angle - see again a few paragraphs further below)

An article about Nathan Mlot's work, vintage 2011:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fire-ants...

(Outcomes for the ants are sadly not always great in Hu's lab at GATech, e.g. the ones who died in a CT scanner: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.15400>).

Some 2021 CU Boulder work:

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/03/02/fire-ant-rafts

(and their "Emergent Behavior in Fire Ants", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrLc-uDv7GU>)

Another recent study of ant raft dynamics from a physics perspective:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2021.021... (Also, ants are small: "To conduct experiments, we collected 3–10 g of worker ants (or approx. 3000–10 000 ants)")

Another interesting but somewhat sadder behaviour in ants is the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill

Also really cool are the structures made by burrowing ants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#/media/File:Walter_...>, but the eusocial insects who are the builders most interesting (in a casual sense) to me are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound-building_termites

Their constructions are individually incredible, and there are so many of them. ("... in northeast Brazil ... about 200 million termite mounts spread over an area the size of Great Britain. Some of the mounds are 3m (10 ft) tall and 10 m (33 ft) wide and they are spaced about 20m (66 ft) apart. Underneath the mounds are networks of tunnels ... radioactive dating on 11 mounds ... youngest mound was 690 years old. The oldest was at least 3,820 years and possibly more than twice that").

If we could sensibly communicate, I wonder what they would make of human skyscrapers, and whether they think of themselves as living in arcologies.

Sadly, they have an enemy that makes Godzilla seem tame. Thirty-five thousand "urban" victims a day per giant anteater: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v0vc4 (this is a great video for seeing a number of ant mounds that are "only" about 150cm tall).