But now you know how to dig dead bugs out of the relay and get the A/C back on!
I’ve seen several articles recently that show ants building bridges out of living bodies for various reasons. Living ant bodies, that is. I’ll see if I can look up a cite.
Here’s one.
That is a fascinating article.
The behavior described in the op seems credible to me.
From the above article we know that individual ants can choose to pick up an object to drop in the vicinity of a food source, and will drop objects in something perceived as a sticky food source. They can determine (no question not as individuals but by group optimization behavior) which is the object that succeeds better, as above. Many glue traps are scented (either peanut butter or sweet).
Ant pathways are optimized by stimergy, following pheromone traces. They can coordinate complex building behaviors in this manner.
An ant using the dropping an object in a perceived food source had a small increased chance of succeeding to get to the lizard and back to the colony than an ant not using that technique. All it took was one ant doing that. If that ant’s behavior was then followed, and replicated as that was the ant coming back and forth with food, then others would follow its path of behaviors including the picking up of the object and dropping it and a bridge becomes built.
Coordinated behavior solving the problem, intelligence, emerges.
When growing up in Sierra Leone, my sister and I took a good deal of interest in the doings of ants. We would spend ages watching them manovre a sugar cube up a wall and out of a window. We woul catch the common black one that didn’t sting (much) and drop them in a bunck of the nast red ones - or vice versa. We would mess with marching columns that went across footpaths with ‘soldier’ ants forming a double line while the workers scurried along between them.
Our kitchen table stood in four tins filled with disinfectant which was changed frequently. Sometimes enough ants would die in the stuff to make a bridge and there would be swarms of them on the table.
The falling in the disinfectant thing was easy to understand. Even the almost sisyphean task of pushing a sugar cube up a wall was probably just trial and error. But how did they ‘know’ to post guards on the marching column where it crossed bare earth?
I used to keep a hummingbird feeder hanging by a wire from a nail in the overhang of my covered front porch. The fire ants would discover the wire and make their trails to the feeder, and I would slather the wire with hot sauce and petroleum jelly and move the feeder from spot to spot, and they would always defeat my efforts sooner or later.
