Formiga Verde (Oecophylla Smaragdina).
Unlike humans, who tend to strive less when they work in larger groups, ants are even more working and efficient when the greater the colony.
Humans usually work with less efficiency in large groupsbut the weaving ants has developed a strategy that reverses this pattern. A new published in Current Biology reveals that these ants become stronger as their teams grow, thanks to a cooperative tactic that scientists call “turnstile of strength.”
The phenomenon contradicts the well -known Ringelmann effect, first described in 1913, which shows that individuals humans reduce their effort as the group size increases. From office meetings to cable competitions, people usually contribute less per person when they work collectively. The weaving ants (oecophylla smaragdina), however, have the opposite standard, refers.
“Each individual ant almost doubled its tensile force as the team size increased – they actually improve your work together As the group increases, ”explained the main author of the study, Madlyne Stewardson, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University in Australia.
The weaving ants are arborola insects found in Africa, Asia and Australia, known for building air nests pulling leaves and holding them with the silk of their larvae. To realize how they get such achievements, the researchers observed colonies traction chains in artificial leaves linked to a power meter.
The ants They divided the tasks into two roles: Front line pullers and rear anchors. Anchors resist and store the force generated by their teammates, effectively waging progress while the others continue to pull. This coordination produces the “turnstile of strength”, which avoids landslides and allows the team to expand their strength with each added limb.
“The larger ant chains have more grip on the ground than isolated ants, so they can better resist the force of the leaf pulling back, ”said Co-author David Labonte, from the Imperial College London.“ together, the team seems to function like a turnstile. ”
In addition to revealing new data on insect cooperation, study can inspire innovations in robotics. Current robot teams usually scale their strength only linearly, which means they can no more per unit than an individual machine. To the imitate the strategy of antsrobotic swarms can generate exponential gains.
“No one had considered to use a method similar to that used by ants to generate strength in multi-legged robot swarms, but we planned to do so,” says co-author Chris Reid of the Macquarie University.
