{"id":237944,"date":"2026-05-29T02:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T07:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ripples-in-fire-ant-collectives-suggest-motions-are-driven-by-neighbor-alignments"},"modified":"2026-05-29T02:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T07:35:10","slug":"ripples-in-fire-ant-collectives-suggest-motions-are-driven-by-neighbor-alignments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ripples-in-fire-ant-collectives-suggest-motions-are-driven-by-neighbor-alignments","title":{"rendered":"Ripples in fire-ant collectives suggest motions are driven by neighbor alignments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ripples-in-fire-ant-collectives-suggest-motions-are-driven-by-neighbor-alignments2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers in Spain have discovered that in collectives of moving fire ants, rippling \u201cwaves\u201d of density and activity are likely triggered by local regions where ants collectively travel in the same direction as their neighbors.<\/p>\n<p>Described in a new paper <a href=\"https:\/\/pubs.aip.org\/jap\/article\/139\/18\/184703\/3391130\/Giant-number-fluctuations-in-fire-ant-collectives\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Journal of Applied Physics<\/i>, Alberto Fernandez-Nieves and colleagues at the University of Barcelona are hopeful that their predictions could be confirmed in future experiments\u2014potentially leading to deeper insights into the complex motions of active materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers in Spain have discovered that in collectives of moving fire ants, rippling \u201cwaves\u201d of density and activity are likely triggered by local regions where ants collectively travel in the same direction as their neighbors. Described in a new paper published in Journal of Applied Physics, Alberto Fernandez-Nieves and colleagues at the University of Barcelona [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}