Ants also have made the news. Fire ants survive floods by turning their bodies into life rafts. Engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered that tens of thousands of ants can keep themselves afloat by linking together and forming a water tight seal that keeps them from drowning. Th results have far reaching implications. By studying how ants interact, engineers may be able to design robots that run on smaller processors and can work in concert to build things like emergency bridges. 

While it's been known that chimpanzees and orang-utans show cultural variations in activities such as tool use, little is known about cultural traditions in gorillas, Richard Byrne and his colleagues at the University of St Andrews in Scotland discovered that captive gorillas picked apart stinging nettles to eat them and reduced their exposure to stings by squeezing nettles together rather than by detaching the stinging leaf stalks (also see). Wild gorillas in Rwanda also pick apart stinging nettles but they do so by removing stalks and folding, rather than squeezing, the nettles. Byrne argues that local traditions are spread among group members and can differ from group to group. This study shows that we've just begun begun scratching the surface of the cognitive lives of gorillas and it's likely we'll discover they're as skilled as their great ape relatives.

Stay tuned for more on the fascinating lives of other animals.