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. 2017 Jul 12;4(7):170475. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170475

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© 2017 The Authors.

Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Figure 2. — Spontaneous tower building in the laboratory. (a) Fire ants build towers around water sources. (b) Close-up of the ants within the tower. In both images, a vertical test tube dispenses water into a Petri dish. Fire ants also build towers for escaping a container. (c) Fire ants building a tower on a rectangular block of wood coated with Fluon, liquid Teflon, to render it difficult to climb. (d) An ant tower built from within a beaker permits ants to escape the beaker. (e) A pile of dead ants has a conical shape. The slope is constant at an angle of repose approximately 36^° from horizontal. (f) By contrast, the ant tower shows a bell shape.