The invasive red fire ant may be nature’s best excavator, seemingly drawing inspiration from the popular game Jenga by grabbing onto grain particles impeding their progress and carefully moving the obstacles out of their way in even the tightest of spaces.
As Daniel Goldman, a physics professor at Georgia Tech, reports this week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the red fire ant or Solenopsis invicta is capable of digging a series of mounds and tunnels with great precision in nearly any type of soil. They can even adapt and change tactics based on the type of soil they’re digging in, according to BBC News.
“You can get them to dig in anything,” Goldman told Discovery News. “When the particles are big, they grab a grain and remove it. It’s not a trivial task. They have to carefully to hold the particle in their jaw. They have another mode of digging where they can rake and scrape the soil into a pellet, and use their mandibles and antennae in a new way to help shape that pellet.”
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