Scientists find mind-blowing ant city 'equivalent to the Great Wall of China'

In 2012, scientists unearthed an incredible underground ant city in Brazil, as highlighted in the documentary "Ants: Nature's Secret Power." This intricate network of roadways, pathways, and gardens was once home to millions of leafcutter ants, renowned for forming one of the most complex communities on Earth. According to the Daily Mail, the queen starts her colony by collecting 300 million sperm from males. The offspring then build and gather vegetation, with their roles determined by their size. Known as a "superorganism" for their remarkable self-organization, the colony built this extensive structure, though the exact time and cause of its disappearance remain unknown.

To reveal the tunnels, experts poured about 10 tonnes of concrete into surface holes that the ants used as air conditioning ducts. Over ten days, the concrete filled the maze-like tubes, covering 500 square feet and reaching 26 feet below the surface. After a month, scientists led by Professor Luis Forgi excavated the astonishing metropolis, dubbed the "ant equivalent of the Great Wall of China."

The "Nature's Secret Power" documentary reveals that ants excavated about 40 tonnes of earth to build their labyrinth. Each ant carried loads of earth several times its weight, over distances equivalent to just over half a mile for a human. This created a highly efficient megalopolis with an optimized network for transportation and ventilation. Main highways connected primary chambers, while secondary roads led to numerous garbage dumps and fungal gardens cultivated from vegetation gathered by worker ants.

The plant matter cultivates fungus, which feeds on leaves and nourishes the ant larvae. Older or more expendable ants handle waste management, storing garbage in dumps before moving it outside the city. This ensures the removal of harmful parasites like the phorid fly.

The phorid fly plants its eggs in the cracks of worker ants' heads, leading to their doom. Larger ants, called majors, act as an organized army to fend off such threats. Similar to human armed forces, they also assist with tasks like tunnel digging.

Joe Parker, assistant professor of biology and biological engineering, whose research focuses on ants and their ecological relationships with other species, told Science Direct, "It's been a mystery in both engineering and in ant ecology how ants build these structures that persist for decades. It turns out that by removing grains in this pattern that we observed, the ants benefit from these circumferential force chains as they dig down."

When asked if ants are aware of what they're doing when they dig and build these complex structures, Parker calls it a behavioral algorithm. "That algorithm does not exist within a single ant," Parker says. "It's this emergent colony behavior of all these workers acting like a superorganism. How that behavioral program is spread across the tiny brains of all these ants is a wonder of the natural world we have no explanation for."

This article originally appeared 2 years ago.