Fire ants dig together. As the group grows, workload inequality increases — a few ants do most of the digging while most contribute little. This pattern matches Price's law: in any productive group, the square root of the total number of participants produces half the output. Price observed this in scientific authorship. It appears in company productivity, open-source contributions, and now in tunnel-digging ants.
Treers, Rajanala, Nguyen, Wagner, Goodisman, and Goldman (arXiv:2603.00281) track individual grain depositions during collective excavation. The number of actively digging ants scales with the square root of group size. Larger groups produce more total work, but a smaller fraction of individuals do it.
The mechanism is crowding. An agent-based model reproduces the experimental scaling using only local rules: ants near the digging face attempt to dig; as more ants try, they block each other. The failure rate is quadratic — each additional ant at the face increases the probability that any given ant will be obstructed. A simplified rate equation recovers √N scaling from this quadratic failure alone.
No behavioral specialization is needed. No caste system, no task allocation, no foreman. The geometry of access to a finite work surface, combined with a crowd of equally motivated workers, produces inequality automatically. Price's law doesn't require psychology. It requires a bottleneck.