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A new research revealed that ants’ secret to working efficiently is being lazy at the right time.
In 2015, University of Arizona researchers observed that in a colony, some ants tended to be lazy, while others worked hard. However, the researchers did not have a definite explanation for the phenomenon at the time. Now, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have looked into the reason behind the ants’ idleness.
Georgia Tech scientists put 30 ants in a glass-walled container with unfinished tunnels. After the insects started digging to complete the tunnels, the scientists noticed that 70% of the digging was completed by about only 30% of ants while the rest did minimal work or nothing. However, when the hardworking ants were removed from the container, the ants that previously worked less stepped up and worked harder to complete the task.
The researchers concluded that by choosing when to be idle and when to start working hard, the ants were able to dig faster and deeper. The idle ants chose to retreat when the tunnel got crowded to give other ants more room to work in.
The scientists plan to adopt the ants’ work style to disaster relief robots in the future. They tried to replicate the ants’ behavior in robots. However, the robots were unable to fully imitate the ants because the machines cannot be as limber as the insects.
Despite the outcome, the researchers observed that like ants, many robots working at once caused crowding and reduced productivity. Therefore, the scientists concluded that an idle approach would allow robots to enter tight spaces without slowing down relief operations.