When the water level starts to rise, the colony is seen gathering their babies and uniting before being swept away by the waterfall and put into the swimming pool.

However, when they try to swim, their actively kicking legs push each other away. A group of 10 or more fire ants are forced to unite by a phenomenon called the "Cheerios effect", caused by surface tension. This occurs when small objects, like cheerios in a bowl of milk, create concave indentations on the liquid surface, bringing nearby objects together into several clusters. Brief paraphrase.

Although the team did not count how many ants were on the raft, Markham said, "there are 5,000 ants on this occasion" and they found ants collecting trapped air bubbles to keep the raft afloat and buoyant.