Sunday, August 31, 2025
Science
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • SCIENCE NEWS
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • SCIENCE NEWS
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Scienmag
No Result
View All Result
Home Science News Chemistry

What fire ants can teach us about making better, self-healing materials

May 15, 2024
in Chemistry
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
Rafts made of fire ants
69
SHARES
625
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
ADVERTISEMENT

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Fire ants form rafts to survive flooding, but how do those bonds work? And what can we learn from them? A Binghamton University, State University of New York professor is researching those questions to expand our knowledge of materials science.

Rafts made of fire ants

Credit: Robert Wagner

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Fire ants form rafts to survive flooding, but how do those bonds work? And what can we learn from them? A Binghamton University, State University of New York professor is researching those questions to expand our knowledge of materials science.

When flooding hits a region where fire ants live, their survival response is to latch together to form a buoyant “raft” that floats and keeps the colony united. Think of it like a condensed, adaptive material where the building blocks — individual ants — are actually alive.

Binghamton University Assistant Professor Rob Wagner led research as part of the Vernerey Soft Matter Mechanics Lab at University of Colorado Boulder in which they investigated the adaptive response of these living rafts. The goals are to understand how they autonomously morph and change their mechanical properties, and then incorporate the simplest and most useful discoveries into artificial materials.

“Living systems have always fascinated me, because they achieve things that our current engineered materials cannot — not even close,” he said. “We manufacture bulk polymeric systems, metals and ceramics, but they’re passive. The constituents don’t store energy and then convert it to mechanical work the way every single living system does.”

Wagner sees this storage and conversion of energy as essential to mimicking the smart and adaptive behaviors of living systems.

In their most recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wagner and his co-authors at University of Colorado investigated how fire ant rafts responded to mechanical load when stretched, and they compared the response of these rafts to dynamic, self-healing polymers.

“Many polymers are held together by dynamic bonds that break, but can reform,” Wagner said. “When pulled slowly enough, these bonds have time to restructure the material so that — instead of fracturing — it flows like the slime our kids play with, or soft-serve ice cream. When pulled very fast, though, it breaks more like chalk. Since the rafts are held together by ants clinging onto one another, their bonds can break and reform. So, my colleagues and I thought they’d do the same thing.”

But Wagner and his collaborators discovered that no matter what speed they pulled the ant rafts, their mechanical response was nearly the same, and they never flowed. Wagner speculates that the ants reflexively tighten and prolong their holds when they feel force because they want to stay together. They either turn down or turn off their dynamic behavior.

This phenomenon of bonds that grow stronger when force is applied to them is called catch bond behavior, and it likely enhances cohesion for the colony, which makes sense for survival.

“As you pull on typical bonds with some amount of force, they’re going to let go sooner, and their lifetime goes down — you’re weakening the bond by pulling on it. That is what you see in almost any passive system,” Wagner said. “But in living systems, because of their complexity, you can sometimes have catch bonds that hold on for longer durations under some range of applied force. Some proteins do this mechanistically and automatically, but it’s not like the proteins are making a decision. They’re just arranged in such a way that when a force is applied, it reveals these binding sites that latch or ‘catch’.”

Wagner believes that mimicking these catch bonds in engineered systems could lead to artificial materials that exhibit autonomous, localized self-strengthening in regions of higher mechanical stress. This could enhance the lifetimes of biomedical implants, adhesives, fiber composites, soft robotics components and many other systems.

Collective insect aggregations like fire ant rafts already are inspiring researchers to develop materials with stimuli-responsive mechanical properties and behaviors. A paper in Nature Materials earlier this year — led by the Ware Responsive Biomaterials Lab at Texas A&M and including contributions from Wagner and his former thesis advisor, Professor Franck J. Vernerey — demonstrates how ribbons made of special gels or materials called liquid crystal elastomers can coil due to heating, and then entangle with each other to form condensed, solid-like structures that were inspired by these ants

“A natural progression of this work is to answer how we can get the interactions between these ribbons or other soft building blocks to ‘catch’ under load like the fire ants and some biomolecular interactions do,” Wagner said.



Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2314772121

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Catch bond kinetics are instrumental to cohesion of fire ant rafts under load

Article Publication Date

15-Apr-2024

Share28Tweet17
Previous Post

Bluetooth tracking devices provide new look into care home quality

Next Post

Scientists want to know how the smells of nature benefit our health

Related Posts

blank
Chemistry

Innovative Pimple Patches Offer Effective Solution for Stubborn Acne

August 29, 2025
blank
Chemistry

Revealing the Unseen: A Breakthrough Method to Enhance Nanoscale Light Emission

August 29, 2025
blank
Chemistry

Fluorescent Smart Eye Patch Revolutionizes Monitoring of Eye Health

August 29, 2025
blank
Chemistry

Protective Dual Shell Extends Lifespan of Lithium-Rich Batteries

August 29, 2025
blank
Chemistry

Interface-Engineered Antiferromagnetic Tunnel Junctions Pave the Way for Next-Generation Spintronics

August 29, 2025
blank
Chemistry

Reversible Small-Molecule Assembly Enables Recyclable Battery Electrolytes

August 29, 2025
Next Post
Scientists want to know how the smells of nature benefit our health

Scientists want to know how the smells of nature benefit our health

  • Mothers who receive childcare support from maternal grandparents show more parental warmth, finds NTU Singapore study

    Mothers who receive childcare support from maternal grandparents show more parental warmth, finds NTU Singapore study

    27542 shares
    Share 11014 Tweet 6884
  • University of Seville Breaks 120-Year-Old Mystery, Revises a Key Einstein Concept

    955 shares
    Share 382 Tweet 239
  • Bee body mass, pathogens and local climate influence heat tolerance

    642 shares
    Share 257 Tweet 161
  • Researchers record first-ever images and data of a shark experiencing a boat strike

    509 shares
    Share 204 Tweet 127
  • Warm seawater speeding up melting of ‘Doomsday Glacier,’ scientists warn

    313 shares
    Share 125 Tweet 78
Science

Embark on a thrilling journey of discovery with Scienmag.com—your ultimate source for cutting-edge breakthroughs. Immerse yourself in a world where curiosity knows no limits and tomorrow’s possibilities become today’s reality!

RECENT NEWS

  • Erzhi Pills Shield ARPE-19 Cells from Oxidative Damage
  • Rethinking Portable Suction Device Performance Metrics
  • Music and Mandalas: Reducing Stress in Infertile Women
  • Tracing Chinese Political Discourse and Ideological Shifts

Categories

  • Agriculture
  • Anthropology
  • Archaeology
  • Athmospheric
  • Biology
  • Blog
  • Bussines
  • Cancer
  • Chemistry
  • Climate
  • Earth Science
  • Marine
  • Mathematics
  • Medicine
  • Pediatry
  • Policy
  • Psychology & Psychiatry
  • Science Education
  • Social Science
  • Space
  • Technology and Engineering

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 5,182 other subscribers

© 2025 Scienmag - Science Magazine

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • HOME
  • SCIENCE NEWS
  • CONTACT US

© 2025 Scienmag - Science Magazine

Discover more from Science

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading