考研英语阅读：蚂蚁自然行为的背后 我们能学到什么
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Fire ants tunnels got excavated efficiently by only a small percentage of the group doing most of the work， thus avoiding pileups in tight spaces.
当火蚁挖掘隧道时，它们采用“能者多劳”、“少人多干”的方针，从而避免了在狭小空间的“交通堵塞”的问题，极大地提高了工作效率。
Freeloaders. They just sit around while their hard-working 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 and their efforts to dig nests underground.
无事可干的蚂蚁们呢?当它们的“同事”忙的热火朝天时，它就坐在一旁，啥也不干。但是否，这些“无所事事”者对社会的有效运转至关重要呢?也许答案是肯定的，至少，当火蚁挖掘地下巢穴时“无所事事”非常重要。
“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.
“火蚁在乔治亚州非常普遍，实际上美国大约三分之一的火蚁，是在上世纪30年代从南美洲来到这里的。”乔治亚理工学院的物理学家丹尼尔·戈德曼说到。
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.
火蚁是高度社会化的生物。 因此，戈德曼和他的同事想知道，当没有中央领导人发布命令时，个体蚂蚁怎么去做任务?
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.
为了找到答案，戈德曼的团队用油漆标记了个体火蚁，然后观察它们挖掘细长的隧道——隧道宽度几乎容不下两只蚂蚁。
Turns out， just 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the labor. “I was surprised that we ended up with so few workers actually doing the work at any one time.”
事实证明，只需要30%的蚂蚁能够完成70%的劳动量。 “我很惊讶于结果，自始至终，只有这么少的‘工人’一直在挖掘隧道。”
A quarter of the ants never even entered the tunnel. Others crawled inside， but left without excavating a single grain of dirt.
有四分之一的蚂蚁甚至都没有进入隧道。另有一些蚂蚁虽然爬了进去，但没有挖掘出一粒泥土。
These idling and retreating behaviors ensured the crowded tunnels did not get clogged with insect traffic， which would grind the construction process to a halt.
这些看上去“消极怠工”和“打退堂鼓”的行为实际上却避免了隧道口的“交通拥堵”，否则挖掘工程可能会随时中断。
And when the scientists removed the five hardest-working ants from the colony， others immediately jumped in to compensate—with no reduction in the group’s productivity.
而当科学家从挖掘地现场拿走了5只最“勤劳苦干”的蚂蚁时，其他蚂蚁立刻“补上工位”，这完全没有降低全队的挖掘进度。
Seems that it doesn’t matter which ants are working or freeloading at a given time， as long as there is some division of labor to keep the tunnels flowing smoothly. The findings are the journal Science.
我们似乎得出这样一个结论，即只要合理分工，保证隧道口的畅通无阻，挖掘期间谁工作谁怠工则无足轻重。研究结果刊登在《科学》杂志上。
Goldman’s team also modelled the ants’ nest-building on computers. And the most efficient excavation happened in the simulations where the electronic ants behaved similarly to their live counterparts.
戈德曼的团队用计算机模拟了蚂蚁筑巢的过程。 模拟结果得出，在最有效的挖掘情况下模拟蚂蚁的表现与其真实同类相类似。
The study could have implications for robotics. Imagine groups of robots sent to search rubble for disaster survivors. Or nanobots coursing through our bodies to diagnose illness and deliver targeted medical treatment. Such robot swarms will need to avoid getting jammed up in tight spaces. It might be necessary to program them so some just sit back and watch their comrades work.
该研究可能对机器人发展产生影响。 我们可以想象一下，当一群机器人在残垣断壁的现场去寻找灾难幸存者时;或者当纳米机器人通过我们的身体来诊断疾病并提供有针对性的医疗时，它们需要避免在狭小的空间中被卡住。这时，按照上述结果，我们可以对它们设定一定的程序，让其中的一些机器人只是静静地看着它的同伴去工作。
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