Mandibles dripping she is practically carried by all the other ants pushing to get to the center. They are following a strong sent of food and they are all hungry. I see one lone ant traveling on this great pilgrimage with all her ant buddies. Hope I answered some questions and raised others. I think it would be a great experiment to see how the behavior would change if food was introduced. Placing a food item would lead to mostly the same behavior as they'd eat enough to bring back to the nest, where they could transfer food through trophallaxis to the nursery workers, but when they realized the fact that they were not getting home soon, they'd instead give mouth-to-mouth to the other members of the spiral until all were fed, regardless of who ate the food originally. The spiral would quickly slide from beneath anything you placed on it, leading it into a frenzy of escape, which would have them spraying more powerful chemicals leading all ants to dissipate in every direction. They can communicate over vast distances(relative to the ant world, of course) to coordinate a raid on an "enemy" nest. Slave-maker ants are exclusively queen and soldiers with no workers in the species. The soldiers of some species can actually communicate more effectively than the workers. The scouts aren't the only ones who lay trails, no. I don't know about this particular behavior, but I'm equally fascinated as to how something like this could happen and how common it is. Within 15-20 mins, the chemicals disappear, so if this circle continued for that long, all hope of reaching the nest would be gone. The various chemical trails they secrete all mean something different, but ordinary scent trails leading toward food get stronger as they're traversed more. I did a speech on the evolution of ants just a few weeks ago. Does each ant lay its own scent trail thereby telling the other ants "This is a heavily traversed trail, there must be something important at the end of it?" I thought only the colony scouts laid the scent trail, but I may just be completely wrong in thinking that. I wonder what it takes for something like this to occur and how common it really is. Wilson sort of "steers" the line of ants by swabbing the chemicals used for ant scent trails onto a q-tip and tracing a path.Īlso, what would happen if something were placed into that insect maelstrom? Would the ants consume it and then have more energy to perpetuate their whirlpool? If an ant can lift ten times its own body weight, how much could that spiral (theoretically) hold up? I wonder if you could induce this purposefully on a line of ants? There was that documentary, "Lord of the Ants" where E.O. Okay, now that all the puns, politics, and usual reddit fare are taken care of, let's talk science.Īnts in general are somehow incredibly fascinating to me.
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