BRITAIN:Some ants are just unlucky. Researchers at the University of Bristol have discovered that some species of army ants in Central and South America have an occupational specialty that consists of using their bodies to fill potholes on the road to a food source. This allows thousands of their fellow foragers to make better time by walking over them.
Scott Powell and Nigel Franks drilled holes of varying sizes in a wooden plank that simulated a narrow route through the leaf litter.
They found that army ants, Eciton burchellii, which range from three millimetres to 12 millimetres long, found holes in the plank that matched their size and lay down in them.
The predatory ants, whose raiding parties can number 200,000 individuals, are able to move more prey per unit time over a "repaired" road than over a rutted one.
Despite the loss of ant power that comes from assigning many individuals to be living pothole filler, the fitness of the whole colony, which can include up to two million ants, improves.
"When the traffic has passed, the downtrodden ants climb out of the potholes and follow their nest mates home," Powell said in a statement accompanying the study in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Some of them, presumably, limp.