Fire ants assemble into living waterproof rafts

What happens when you dump 8,000 fire ants into a tray of water? Nathan Mlot from the Georgia Institute of Technology wanted to find out. Mlot scooped the ants into a beaker, swirled it around to roll them into a ball, and decanted them into a half-filled tray.

Two can
can
a toucan but

You can’t
decant
an ant

(sorry; I seem to have contracted poetry. A case of bad poetry.)

Here’s the repeated attempts to push the ant-raft into the water