If you're interested, there's another video of ant death spirals in Brazil here. For nearly two whole days these blind creatures, so dependent on the contact-odor sense of their antennae, kept palpating their uniformly smooth, odoriferous trail and the advancing bodies of the ants immediately preceding them, without perceiving that they were making no progress but only wasting their energies, till the spell was finally broken by some more venturesome members of the colony. I have never seen a more astonishing exhibition of the limitations of instinct. The phenomenon was first observed in in insects in 1910 by the scientist W.M. The mill persisted for two days, "with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest." It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The death-spiral is an example of what happens when the swarm as a whole gets misdirected - and a convenient metaphor illustrating the perils of follow-the-leader behavior in any society.īeebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. Typically they follow the scent-trails of the ants before them in the swarm. It will then be locked into following the ant in front just like every other ant, causing the entire line to travel in an endless circle. It took each ant two and a half hours to make. There are over 200 varieties of army ants, and apparently the type featured in this video are blind, and depend on smells to navigate. An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (370 m) in circumference. It happens when a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the. The "ant death spiral" is a phenomenon noted seemingly only in army ants, which unlike other kinds of ants do not make permanent nests and are always on the move while they're alive. As the USDA research entomologist in the video below explains, the ants are just continually following the chemical trail of the ant in front. More colloquially, its often referred to as an ant death spiral. This video has been making the rounds lately, but I haven't seen a lot of accurate descriptions of what exactly is going on in it.
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