Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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That's y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P.

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific Americans' 60 Second Science.

I'm Daniel Ackerman.

Freeloaders.

They just sit around while their hardworking colleagues get things done.

But might freeloaders actually be necessary for society to function efficiently?

The answer could be yes, at least when it comes to fire ants in their efforts to dig

nests underground. Fire ants are quite common in Georgia, and in fact most of the bottom third of

the U.S. having come here in the 30s from South America. Daniel Goldman, a physicist at Georgia Tech.

Fire ants are highly social organisms, so Goldman and his

colleagues wanted to know how individual ants knew what to do without a central leader issuing orders.

To find out, Goldman's team labeled individual fire ants with paint and then watched them dig their

slender tunnels, barely wide enough for two

workers. Turns out just 30% of the ants did 70% of the labor. I was surprised that we ended up

with so few workers actually doing the work at any one time. A quarter of the ants never even

entered the tunnel. Others crawled inside but left without excavating a

single grain of dirt. These idling and retreating behaviors ensured the crowded tunnels did not get

...