Weaver ant nests are most common in the outer, often uppermost, sunlit branches of trees. The site of energy influx and photosynthesis, this shell of greenery is where most biological action in forests takes place and thus where the majority of resources sought by the ants accumulate. There the ants bind adjacent living leaves into a kind of arboreal tent. Ranging from the size of a baseball to the size of a volleyball but weighing not much more than an inflated balloon, the nests look frail, but they shelter the ants from wind, rain, and rivals. Transpiration, superscript,1,baseline, from their leaf walls creates a built-in HVAC, superscript,2,baseline, system, providing relatively stable temperature and humidity. paragraph 2,To begin building a nest, a worker pulls at the edge of a leaf, and if she's successful in bending it, nearby ants join her. The workers may stand side by side while gripping the leaf margins, but if the leaves are too far apart, they climb on top of one another and, seizing each other by the waist, form leaf-to-leaf chains that are strong enough to drag the foliage together. Within hours, the nearby leaves are drawn tight and aligned in a nest configuration.

paragraph 3,The name ,begin italics, weaver ant, end italics, comes from the next step, which involves a kind of child labor. In many ant species, the larvae spin silk cocoons in which they transform into adults. But a weaver ant larva does not make a cocoon. Instead, it produces silk at a young age, when still small enough to be held and manipulated by an adult worker. After bearing the larva to the construction site, the worker locates a leaf edge through palpations of her antennae, then lowers the larva's head to it. The larva attaches a silk line to the edge, and the worker then shuttles it back and forth between the leaves, like a weaver working a loom, until the foliage is bound by woven sheets. As a finishing touch, the nest is detailed with tidy entries and internal walls and galleries. The nests, I suspect, can last for years: when the leaves wither, workers bind fresh ones into the structure to replace them.

paragraph 4,Weaver ants avoid the inconveniences endured by most ants, which, as central-place foragers, spend considerable time commuting from one central nest. This is evident in driver ant raids, where hundreds of thousands of ants regularly travel dozens of meters or more. Weaver ants minimize the amount of moving around they do by spacing leaf nests throughout their territory, erecting them wherever their workers are needed and foliage is available for construction. This also makes it easy for them to handle unforeseen events quickly: a worker seeking assistance need only communicate with the ant reserves in the nearest nest.

paragraph 5,Inside the tent, among the brood piles, are smaller workers with shorter limbs. In most polymorphic ants,,superscript,3,baseline, the major workers are scarce and specialized, but with ,begin italics, Oecophylla, end italics,,superscript,4,baseline, the opposite is true, with the majors doing the foraging and nest construction, serving as the workaday ants rather than "soldiers," in the sense of a specialized defensive caste. The minors are less numerous and tend the eggs and small larvae. The physical differences between minors and majors are more modest than in the marauder and driver ants, but the two are relatively distinct, with only occasional intermediates. Typically, the queen is in a nest toward the center of the territory near the top of a crown, though she moves from time to time. Her eggs are distributed among the nests by her workers.

paragraph 6,Because weaving a nest requires an assembly of workers and larvae, one wonders how weaver ant colonies get started. What does the first nest look like? Once, in the Australian outback, I peeled apart two small leaves sewn together at chest level to find four queens and forty workers, the latter each the size of a small major worker in a mature colony, cohabiting in a space the size of a change purse. Making such a tiny nest need not be difficult. Before their first workers are old enough to do the job, the neophyte queens are likely to join forces to hold larvae and weave the nest together.

This sentence is from the passage.

"Ranging from the size of a baseball to the size of a volleyball but weighing not much more than an inflated balloon, the nests look frail, but they shelter the ants from wind, rain, and rivals." (Paragraph 1)

What is the effect of comparing the size and weight of weaver ant nests to familiar objects?

1.
The comparisons reveal that the nests serve as practical and spacious homes.

2.
The comparisons reinforce the idea that ants work as a team to build their nests.

3.
The comparisons emphasize that the nests are remarkable and surprising structures.

4.
The comparisons highlight that the primary purpose of the nests is to protect the ants.