BURSTAUSTIN (KXAN) — Residents of Texas's capital are reporting fire ants floating on floodwaters, forming living rafts out of their own bodies.
On Wednesday morning, one Austinite shared video of one such raft drifting on Lake Travis.
When their underground nests flood, fire ants link their legs and jaws together to create buoyant, self-assembled mounds. These floating colonies can contain thousands of ants — and they can still bite or sting if disturbed.
Fire ants are widespread in Texas, and researchers at Texas A&M University are studying how they respond to flooding.
The insects bite one another and interlock their limbs, forming tightly packed rafts that don’t sink. Their waxy skin helps repel water and keep the group afloat, as seen in the video from David Todd, a viewer of Nexstar's KXAN:
“It’s called a self-organizing or self-assembling process. And it’s something only social insects do,” Ed LeBrun, a research scientist at the University of Texas’ Brackenridge Field Lab in central Austin, said.
“There are a lot of other structures that ants make in a similar way. For example, army ants will make bridges across rivers,” LeBrun added.
Creating a "raft," however, is more rare in the ant world: Fire ants are the only kind that do this, according to LeBrun.