I have a vivid memory of seeing this. Post-Hurricane Gustav in Louisiana, I was wading in nearly waist-high water toward my former car. I then see several of these fire ant rafts floating within about two feet of me, each several inches across. The thought of the fire ants crawling onto me in such large numbers, had I not noticed and waded into them, was terrifying.

Also by David Hu: The universal law of mammalian urination time:

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/11932.short

I’ve always wondered why the military hasn’t created massive airship aircraft carriers using a collection of small bladder cells each isolated from the other, inside of a heavily armored hull.

Such a platform could remain stationed above a battlefield, above the range of small arms fire, and if properly constructed, even tolerant of multiple SAM hits.

Physics, mostly. To hold the weight of any significant armor, fuel, materiel, etc. you would need an unbelievably large interior space surrounded by a relatively thin exterior.

Deployment is another issue - how do you get it to where it needs to be quickly?

Armor also isn't a good defense against modern missiles. The goal is to intercept or avoid getting hit in the first place, rather than sustain multiple hits.

I’m thinking more about a battlefield like Afghanistan, where the opponents aren’t firing anything larger than a stinger, and there is already air superiority. As buoyancy is a function of volume, which increases to the third power, and armor just needs to increase proportional to the surface area, which is the second power, a heavily armored floating aircraft carrier seems possible.

A 97000 ton aircraft carrier is equal in weight to the amount of air in a 450M x 450M x 450M cube. Aircraft carriers are only 320M long, so this doesn’t seem that far fetched.

From the group of David Hu, who also brought us "cubic wombat poo".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20975633

This is reminding me to reread "Leiningen Verus the Ants" [1] again.

[1]: https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html

The scientific term for such a raft is "Isle of the Deep".