(upbeat music)
- [Voiceover] So there's
a scene in Ant-Man
which Michael Douglas does
this thing where he's like,
"Okay, there's this kind
of ant and this kind of ant
"and this ant is gonna
build a bridge for you
"and this ant stings really hard,"
like they all have kind
of their own superpower.
But the bridge-building
ants, that's for real,
fire ants can act like
either a fluid or a solid
but they can basically pour
themselves out like a liquid
or spring back when something
presses down on them,
and it's not one fire ant shifting
back and forth between states,
it's the whole colony of them.
The reason why they have
this ability is they have
to cope with periodic downpours
in their natural environment
so they evolved the
ability to clump together
into structures and they
found that these fire ants
can flow and move around as a group,
acting like thick fluid, right?
Or like rubber, in some instances,
and yes, they construct
bridges to get across gaps
in the same way that you see
them do this in the movie.
They can also quickly repair any damage
to the structure they create, right?
So let's say they make a
bridge and like a rock falls
and kills like ten of the ants,
well the other ants are
all gonna sense this
and reinforce the living
structure and move in.
They also pull closer to each
other and tighten their grip
to fill in holes and make sure
that the structure holds together.
If you drop a penny into
a quote "ocean" of ants,
they absorb the impact
of the penny dropping,
by catching it and then slowly lowering it
to the bottom of whatever they're in.
These live ants will even let go
and behave like they're
dead in some instances,
so that they can help
decrease the viscosity
of the overall ant structure
and allow it to have more
of a liquid flow to it.
So, that part of the science,
bridge-building ants?
Yeah, real.
(upbeat music)
