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FLOODING can force people to abandon their homes, but there鈥檚 one animal that
can see off the problem with style. Ants living in the rainforests of Malaysia
keep their nests dry by peeing the floodwater away, say researchers in
Germany.

Ulrich Maschwitz and Joachim Moog of Frankfurt University studied the
behaviour of the bamboo-nesting ant, Cataulacus muticus. The ants live
in clumps of 15-metre-high giant bamboo, making their nests between the
partitions in the hollow stems. But a home in a high-rise apartment block is no
guarantee against flooding, as water from torrential rain runs down the stems
and in through the nest entrance.

To try and stem the deluge, two or three worker ants will block the nest
entrance with their heads. But although this helps, it doesn鈥檛 keep the nest
watertight. To see how the ants keep the nest dry, the researchers brought three
of the ant colonies back to the lab. When they put 2 millilitres of coloured
water into the nests, they found that the ants drank it, before heading out of
the nest and each excreting a large droplet of water. After two days spent
scuttling back and forth depositing around 3030 droplets between them, the ants
managed to dry out their nest.

C. muticus is the only ant known to pee its flood problems away,
although other ants spit water out of their nests. But these tricks are limited
to ants that live in stems. 鈥淲e think that many ants which live exclusively in
live stems must have some sort of water-bailing capacity,鈥� says Moog. Species
that can move house easily, such as those that nest in rotting logs, prefer to
relocate.