The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Fire ants self-assemble into waterproof rafts to survive floods
Open accessAbstract
Why does a single fire ant Solenopsis invicta struggle in water, whereas a group can float effortlessly for days? We use time-lapse photography to investigate how fire ants S. invicta link their bodies together to build waterproof rafts. Although water repellency in nature has been previously viewed as a static material property of plant leaves and insect cuticles, we here demonstrate a self-assembled hydrophobic surface. We find that ants can considerably enhance their water repellency by linking their bodies together, a process analogous to the weaving of a waterproof fabric. We present a model for the rate of raft construction based on observations of ant trajectories atop the raft. Central to the construction process is the trapping of ants at the raft edge by their neighbors, suggesting that some “cooperative” behaviors may rely upon coercion.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Whitesides, G. M., & Grzybowski, B. (2002) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1070821 · Cited by 7,439
Hölldobler, B., & Wilson, E. O. (1990) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-662-10306-7 · Cited by 5,438
Stochastic Differential Equations: An Introduction with Applications.
Jacka, S. D., & Oksendal, B. (1987) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.2307/2288814 · Cited by 3,964
Capillarity and Wetting Phenomena
de Gennes, P.-G., Brochard-Wyart, F., & Quéré, D. (2004) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-0-387-21656-0 · Cited by 3,121
Characterization and Distribution of Water-repellent, Self-cleaning Plant Surfaces
NEINHUIS, C. (1997) · Annals of Botany · doi:10.1006/anbo.1997.0400 · Cited by 2,848
Quéré, D. (2008) · Annual Review of Materials Research · doi:10.1146/annurev.matsci.38.060407.132434 · Cited by 2,691
DROP IMPACT DYNAMICS: Splashing, Spreading, Receding, Bouncing…
Yarin, A. L. (2006) · Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics · doi:10.1146/annurev.fluid.38.050304.092144 · Cited by 2,677
Water-repellent legs of water striders
Gao, X., & Jiang, L. (2004) · Nature · doi:10.1038/432036a · Cited by 2,609
Stochastic Differential Equations
Øksendal, B. (2003) · Universitext · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-14394-6 · Cited by 2,082
Capillarity and wetting phenomena: drops, bubbles, pearls, waves
(2004) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.41-5349 · Cited by 2,017
Cited by
Programmable self-assembly in a thousand-robot swarm
Rubenstein, M., Cornejo, A., & Nagpal, R. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1254295 · Cited by 1,308
Arzt, E., Quan, H., McMeeking, R. M., & Hensel, R. (2021) · Progress in Materials Science · doi:10.1016/j.pmatsci.2021.100823 · Cited by 253
Dong, X., & Sitti, M. (2020) · The International Journal of Robotics Research · doi:10.1177/0278364920903107 · Cited by 198
Artificial intelligence, robotics, ethics, and the military: a Canadian perspective
Wasilow, S., & Thorpe, J. B. (2019) · AI Magazine · doi:10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2848 · Cited by 42
Metadata
- Authors
- Mlot, N. J., Tovey, C. A., & Hu, D. L.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2011-04-25
- Volume
- 108
- Issue
- 19
- Pages
- 7669-7673
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2122752955
- Cited by
- 295
- References
- 29
- FWCI
- 6.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Fire ants self-assemble into waterproof rafts to survive floods. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1016658108
- The paper
- Mlot, N. J., Tovey, C. A., & Hu, D. L. (2011). Fire ants self-assemble into waterproof rafts to survive floods. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016658108
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
