The Amazonian Fire Ant Witch-Balls That Cannot Die -The Toast

The Amazonian Fire Ant Witch-Balls That Cannot Die

ByDaniel Mallory Ortberg

on December 2, 2013 in Animals

I have been accused, sometimes on this very site, of having an excessively morbid cast of mind, but you must admit that it is not my fault that this world is a breathing, pulsing carnival of roiling horrors. I did not invent ants. I am not responsible for them, nor for the fact that they occasionally join up in a twitching ball by seizing one another in their respective, wretched jaws and take to the sea as a horrid cannibal ship. From New Scientist:

The ants evolved to form rafts to survive the tropical wet season in their native home, the Amazon rainforest. Entire colonies can escape flooding mounds in seconds, mobilising into buoyant heaps and floating safely to their next settlements.

I could, perhaps, begrudgingly allow that, were it not for the details of their escape methods.

Previous work revealed that the ants create their unusual groupings by grasping each other’s legs and jaws. In lab experiments, David Hu at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his colleagues found that the ant bundles can act as both a solid and a viscous liquid. Balls of ants will bounce back to their original form after being stretched or smashed, like rubber. The groupings will also flow slowly around obstacles.

No. No. This hideous, writhing ant-mass, all tooth and jaw, cannot also defy the laws of physics and turn into liquid and fling itself around rocks and trees and other barriers. The ant-balls must be stopped by something. Can they turn into vapor and drift into the clouds? Can they take the shape of a single, giant ant that is capable of eating parrots and small mammals? Can they open their gnashing mandibles in unison and hiss “Alive…alive,” with great effort? Can nothing stop, can nothing kill them?

The ants can act as tiny, resistive springs by flexing and extending their legs, and they break and reform connections with their neighbours to create a flow around external forces, like being prodded with sticks. Importantly, rafts of live ants are significantly more elastic than those made of flash-frozen dead ants.

The flash-frozen dead ants will not stay dead, of that much I am sure. They will slowly but relentlessly writhe and twitch themselves back into mindless, deadly life.

“Imagine thousands of people linking their arms together, but everyone has six arms instead of two, and all of their limbs have tiny hooks and adhesive pads on them,” says Hu. “That’s why fire ants can do such dynamic restructuring.”

Why would anyone imagine that. Why can’t I stop imagining it now?

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.

Comments (34)

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+22 Vote up Vote down

JocastaCarr 134p · 591 weeks ago

I'm caught somewhere between "Wow, Nature is cool!" and "AHHHHHH NO NO NO KILL IT WITH FIRE".

+25 Vote up Vote down

JurassicBabe 106p · 591 weeks ago

I demand a garment made of live fire ants, Science. It will be solid or viscous at my whim.

5 replies · active 591 weeks ago

+30 Vote up Vote down

meanchelled 134p · 591 weeks ago

LENNY KRAVITZ, I CALL UPON THEE. you turned jennifer lawrence into a bird- make us into ant people

+9 Vote up Vote down

JurassicBabe 106p · 591 weeks ago

Oh man. How good was Catching Fire?!

+28 Vote up Vote down

NicoleCliffe 145p · 591 weeks ago

I am writing about it tomorrow. It\'s the best thing.

+3 Vote up Vote down

bustedsneakers · 591 weeks ago

YAAAAAAY!

+4 Vote up Vote down

deleted1892326 122p · 591 weeks ago

My s.o. and I laughed when my brother asked one of his friends if he wanted to go see it and he said "Nah, I've seen it twice already." But now I might/probably will go see it again. Twice might not be enough.

+7 Vote up Vote down

Amy · 591 weeks ago

"Brazil ant caramel pecan witch-balls" would be a killer Christmas cookie. A little crunchy, a little... bouncy. You probably wouldn't even need a tin to ship them!

+23 Vote up Vote down

icebergmama 113p · 591 weeks ago

I for one welcome our new ant-ball overlord.

(someone had to say it)

+9 Vote up Vote down

safvn 121p · 591 weeks ago

No. No, I don't think so.

+2 Vote up Vote down

Jizzcliner 105p · 591 weeks ago

There is a documentary about this on Netflix. It's pretty horrifying.

2 replies · active 591 weeks ago

+1 Vote up Vote down

racecaryaya 99p · 591 weeks ago

Does it star Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett, by chance?

+1 Vote up Vote down

nightsstar 91p · 591 weeks ago

I am interested in horrifying myself. Which one?

+7 Vote up Vote down

phlippin 120p · 591 weeks ago

Mallory, I always assumed your morbid turn of mind was on account of your Dark Muse, Evil Melis. If a mustachioed tortoise isn't a Familiar, I don't know what is.

4 replies · active 591 weeks ago

+15 Vote up Vote down

bustedsneakers · 591 weeks ago

two baby tortoise wearing raspberries

These. These are familiars.

+6 Vote up Vote down

Janie_S 104p · 591 weeks ago

Why are those baby turtles wearing raspberries?

+34 Vote up Vote down

melanieannemarie 85p · 591 weeks ago

Why aren't all baby turtles wearing raspberries?

+4 Vote up Vote down

bustedsneakers · 591 weeks ago

Smug on-topic statement see also Other Thread:
ACTUALLY they're tortoise.

....... but really because internet. internet internet internet. nom.

+12 Vote up Vote down

cdive 75p · 591 weeks ago

Everything I needed to know about these terrible creatures I learned from "Leiningen versus the Ants." Best line: "And so imprisoned between water and fire, they had been delivered into the annihilation that was their god."

1 reply · active 591 weeks ago

+4 Vote up Vote down

Standard Tuber · 591 weeks ago

Someone has to use that as their epitaph.

+4 Vote up Vote down

deleted5647547 126p · 591 weeks ago

HAS ANYONE TRIED FIRE? Literal fire? That'd work, right? If not I guess we're pretty doomed and whatnot.

+4 Vote up Vote down

EPWordsnatcher 126p · 591 weeks ago

HAH.

NO.

+2 Vote up Vote down

JoeLonny 12p · 591 weeks ago

They are zombie ants. :D

+19 Vote up Vote down

Abanthis 108p · 591 weeks ago

Why would anyone imagine that.

I love when scientists get so absorbed into the world of their work that they forget not everyone is like them, with the same passion for ants and imperviousness to horror.

+7 Vote up Vote down

menspraetrepidans 97p · 591 weeks ago

DISH SOAP. Dish soap is our only hope.

+3 Vote up Vote down

ssj168 48p · 591 weeks ago

This is actually a pretty cool thing.

+8 Vote up Vote down

AmazingSandwich 109p · 591 weeks ago

If velcro were viscous, bouyant, be-mandibled, and venomous, yes.

+1 Vote up Vote down

Brunhildenburg 92p · 591 weeks ago

Nononononononononononono aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!

I will pick up a spider with my bare hand but run screaming from ants. I hate ants so much.

0 Vote up Vote down

Anthony · 591 weeks ago

In the hills...the cities!

+6 Vote up Vote down

dakimel 122p · 591 weeks ago

Okay, fine. Fine. I hereby retract every time I insinuated (or outright stated) that Mallory was too dark, morbid, and/or twisted. This is proof that her worldview is, if anything, TOO sunny.

+13 Vote up Vote down

Effing 70p · 591 weeks ago

Douse them in thrice-blessed honey. Let the honey congeal and crystallize around them. While the ants are trapped, bind them in a box carved from a single chunk of obsidian and bury them at a crossroads under a new moon. They are the Devil's problem now.

Alternatively, candied fire ant rafts make a great holiday snack!

+7 Vote up Vote down

yrpretendfriend 99p · 591 weeks ago

I work (volunteer) in a lab at my school that is studying a colony of leaf cutter ants from South America but they don't do this. I hope. Also the queen is terrifyingly large but I have grown fond of my ant ladies. They're all girls except a few males for reproductive purposes only- the ideal community.

+16 Vote up Vote down

johnwthompson 90p · 591 weeks ago

Well at least now I can die secure in the knowledge that some creature on God's earth has managed to collectively become a non-Newtonian fluid

1 reply · active 591 weeks ago

+1 Vote up Vote down

AmazingSandwich 109p · 591 weeks ago

Right?

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