A research team at Georgia Tech was studying how the fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) were building a tower, according to a press release. They only planned to record for two hours while the critters formed the tower—but the camera rolled for three.They assumed that there would be nothing to see once the ants assembled the writhing tower. But as researcher Craig Tovey tells Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience, his colleague Nathan Mlot “was too good a scientist to discard data." Even so, it seemed like a waste of time to watch an hour of nothing. "So he played the video at several times regular speed.”While fast forwarding, Mlot noticed that the ants forming the tower were not stationary as the researchers believed. Instead, the tower was in very slow, constant motion with the column of ants slowly sinking, like butter melting.