'* THESE INDUSTRIOUS ANTS' 30/70 *'

ANTS are renowned for their industriousness. Ask the grasshopper in the story by Aesop. He had to come begging the hard-working ant for the food when winter came because he had frittered away his summer.

But that is fable, the ultimate in what scientists call anecdotal evidence. And new research at the  Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta suggests that although ant colonies are very efficient, that may be because 70 percent of them are doing very little - at least when it comes to tunnel digging.

Daniel I. Goldman, a physicist at Georgia Tech, and his colleagues found that the secret to efficient tunnel digging by fire ants was that 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the work:

They reported their fable shaking finding in journal Science.

The reason, it seems is that the ants were working in narrow tunnels where traffic jams could easily clog up the entire effort to build nests.  So it helped if some of them took a pileup in the tunnel as a signal to suggest that they take a break.

To come to this conclusion, the researchers set up material for the ants in containers in a lab. After painting identifying codes on the ants, videotapping them and analyzing who was doing what, the team found several things.

The ants were easily discouraged by traffic jams and were flexible enough to turn around and go back out of the tunnel. It was the hardworking few who get the job going.

''Some of them worked  five hours  at a time just going up and down and up and down and up and down. And most of the other ants never appeared at the tunnel,'' Dr. Goldman said.

This didn't have to do with some ants being lazier than the others. His team could remove the hard-workers and and another group would take over and do jobs as well, and the same 70/30 rule would hold.

After running various computer models of the behavior, that this was the ideal distribution of work and that the individual virtual ants had to have idleness built in as a potential response to a crowded tunnel.

To get the digging done efficiently, he said, ''there's only one good strategy'' - an unequal distribution of digging work and a willingness to turn away from work.

If you start out in a computer model with eager diggers, he said, you have to add some programming that says, for any ant, ''I'm going to get down there and then if it's taking too long. I'll turn around.''

He said, ''You have to add a lot of this kind of giving up in the eager ants to actually work.''

His team also tested this out with small robots  and came up with the same conclusion. And this would matter quiet a bit, he pointed out. The formula does not apply only to tunnel digging but to any situation in which a traffic jam could could stop progress, such as a swarms of robots entering a disaster site.

If this distribution of labor operates this way in your office, however [ the 30 percent may laugh knowingly now]. there's no real solace to be taken from the ant experiment, unless maybe you are digging tunnel.

It does, however, apply to kitchens with limited space. Too many chefs?

The World Students Society thanks author and researcher James Gorman.