Fire ants lock legs and jaws to form rafts, avoid drowning

Check out the book 'Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software' (Steven Johnson) for more awesome discussion of ant behavior, among other things.

Some highlights:

* Ants will sacrifice themselves as 'living bridges' to help most of their comrades pass an obstacle.

* Individual workers choose their role by keeping a running tally of what the other workers they walk past are doing.

* Any single ant follows a pretty limited instruction set, but the colony--taken as a whole--exhibits traits comparable to the intelligence of a small mammal.

* Ants in a habitat manage to stack the corpses of dead ants as far as possible from the queen, the nursery, any food sources, and paths between them. So in any ant habitat, you wind up with a row of dead ants arranged neatly in some corner.

There's more, both ant-related and not, but the general point I'm trying to get at is that the book is amazing.

Here's a BBC video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A042J0IDQK4

Do ants do this when they become airborne? My neighbor has an infestation and sometimes as they crawl up his tree (20 to 30ft), a gust of wind will whisk them away.

I have had several land on my arms and begin crawling business as usual.

Fascinating article... pity about the random and incongruous political jabs. Did the writer have a Post-It tacked to their monitor with "More political!!" scrawled on it? :P