Overview

• Published on 12 August in Current Biology, the study found solitary weaver ants can pull roughly 60 times their body weight and individuals in 15-ant teams exceed 100 times their weight.
• Researchers at Macquarie University measured forces in up to 17-ant chains using artificial paper leaves attached to a transducer under controlled lab conditions.
• Authors propose a cooperative 'force ratchet' mechanism in which some ants act as anchors to store force while others pull, aided by ground attachment an order of magnitude stronger than in other ant species.
• The findings overturn the Ringelmann effect, a century-old principle that individual effort typically declines as group size increases.
• Study authors suggest that mimicking this ant teamwork strategy could help engineer robot swarms capable of boosting collective force beyond linear scaling, though practical applications remain speculative.