When it comes to teamwork, there's a lot we can learn from ants. In Panama, a particular species of army ant displays inspiring acts of solidarity with a distinctly architectural flare: when the terrain gets dicey, they band together to form scaffolds with their bodies. These army ants usually march along at a quick pace, so it's remarkable that they stop completely to create a safer route for the colony as a whole. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany, led by Ian Couzin, decided to study these feats of camaraderie as a model for how the behavior of individuals can give rise to order in a complex system without explicit directions.