Animal Survival Technique - Smarter Every Day (T-5)

Hey, it's me, Destin.

We got a lot of rain here in Alabama over the last couple of weeks, and I wanted to show you an interesting survival technique I've found in one of the local species.

Anyway, you can see all the area behind me used to be a wide open grassy field, but right now it's nothing but water. So in order to show you what I want to show you, we're going to have to get in the truck and drive through the water. So let's do that now.

[Engine noises, water splashing]

Okay, so... I found a pretty shallow spot where I could show you this, but you can see what's normally a field has been covered with water. But in one particular location, we see this clump of this floating stuff, and it's hard to tell what it is.

But this dark spot that you see in front of me is actually a bunch of living organisms striving to stay alive. They're fighting desperately, actually.

I'll give you a closer look. What you're looking at is what used to be a colony of ants that would live in the ground. Here you can see they've clumped up into a raft, with some of them on the bottom helping the other ones on top float. They've grabbed on to some grass to try and anchor off and try to get more of them above water.

But if you look real close, you can see it's literally a living raft. Very interesting survival technique, I would say. You can see they're even carrying their larvae.

After a little investigation, I found out that right under the top layer, that's where all the larvae are kept. You see? All the white? Just under there! You can see they're scrambling to let all the, uh... the larvae be on top first, then they encase them with their bodies.

If you notice the ones on bottom, such as right here, these little guys... aren't moving. Maybe a little grass. Other than that, pure biomass!