To understand fire ant strategies for working effectively without clogging traffic jams, researchers studied how the ants dug tunnels in glass particles that simulated soil. Credit: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech

为了理解火蚁是用什么策略来维持高效工作而不堵塞交通的，研究人员探索了蚂蚁在模拟土壤的玻璃颗粒中挖掘隧道的过程。

Fire ants tunnels got excavated efficiently by only a small percentage of the group doing most of the work, thus avoiding pileups in tight spaces.

火蚁隧道通常由一小部分成员高效完成，因此避免在狭小空间内造成堆积的现象。

撰文播音：丹尼尔 阿克曼（Daniel Ackerman） 

翻译：张朵儿

审校：张清越

Freeloaders. They just sit around while their hard-working colleagues get things done. But might freeloaders actually be necessary for society to function efficiently? The answer could be yes—at least when it comes to fire ants and their efforts to dig nests underground.

旁观者。他们只是在勤劳的同事完成工作时坐在那里。但是否有可能，这种闲人是社会有效运作的必要条件？答案可能是肯定的—至少对于火蚁在地下挖巢时是如此。

 “Fire ants are quite common in Georgia and in fact most of the bottom third of the U.S., having come here in the '30s from South America.”

“三十年代的时候从南美来到这里火蚁在佐治亚州是很常见的，实际上在美国南部的近三分之一都是如此。”

Daniel Goldman, a physicist at Georgia Tech. Fire ants are highly social organisms. So, Goldman and his colleagues wanted to know how individual ants knew what to do without a central leader issuing orders.

乔治亚理工学院的物理学家丹尼尔 戈德曼说。火蚁是高度社会化的生物。因此，戈德曼和他的同事想知道在没有首领发布命令的情况下，每一个蚂蚁是如何知道该做什么的。

To find out, Goldman’s team labeled individual fire ants with paint and then watched them dig their slender tunnels—barely wide enough for two workers. Turns out, just 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the labor. “I was surprised that we ended up with so few workers actually doing the work at any one time.”

为了找到答案，戈德曼的团队用油漆标记了单独的火蚁个体，然后观察它们挖掘细长的隧道—宽度甚至无法同时容纳两个工人并排。事实证明，30％的蚂蚁完成了70％的工作。“我很惊讶最终只有这么少的工人在不停地做这项工作。”

A quarter of the ants never even entered the tunnel. Others crawled inside, but left without excavating a single grain of dirt. These idling and retreating behaviors ensured the crowded tunnels did not get clogged with insect traffic, which would grind the construction process to a halt.

四分之一的蚂蚁甚至没有进入隧道过。其它的爬进去过，但没有挖掘出一粒泥土就离开了。这些旁观和撤退确保了拥挤的隧道不会被堵塞以至于暂停施工。

And when the scientists removed the five hardest-working ants from the colony, others immediately jumped in to compensate—with no reduction in the group’s productivity. Seems that it doesn’t matter which ants are working or freeloading at a given time, as long as there is some division of labor to keep the tunnels flowing smoothly. The findings are the journal Science. [J. Aguilar et al., Collective clog control: Optimizing traffic flow in confined biological and robophysical excavation]

当科学家从这片殖民地中移除了五只工作最努力的蚂蚁时，其他蚂蚁会立即赶上来填补空缺—团队的生产力完全没有降低。看起来，只要隧道里的工作进展顺利，蚂蚁们谁在工作而谁在摸鱼就并不重要了。研究结果发布在《科学》杂志上。

Goldman’s team also modelled the ants’ nest-building on computers. And the most efficient excavation happened in the simulations where the electronic ants behaved similarly to their live counterparts.

戈德曼的团队还在计算机上建立了蚂蚁筑巢的模型。并发现模拟效率最高的模式中，电子蚂蚁的表现与实际中的表现类似。

The study could have implications for robotics. Imagine groups of robots sent to search rubble for disaster survivors. Or nanobots coursing through our bodies to diagnose illness and deliver targeted medical treatment. Such robot swarms will need to avoid getting jammed up in tight spaces. It might be necessary to program them so some just sit back and watch their comrades work.

该研究可能会对机器人界产生影响。想象一下，一群机器人被派去在瓦砾中寻找幸存者，或者是纳米机器人在我们的身体内部诊断疾病并提供有针对性的医疗。这样的机器人群需要避免在狭小的空间中卡住。也许有必要对它们进行编程，以便让部分机器人旁观它们的同志们工作。