This ‘Ant Death Spiral’ phenomenon is usually done by the army ant. Some ants use their eyes to look at a path toward a food source, while many ants cannot see clearly or are blind like army ants. Sometimes it is actually helpful, I find a solution to a problem. Actually, the act of committing suicide is not done by all types of ant. The ant death spiral is formed when ants follow the pheromone signal and start moving round and round in a locked motion. Or spend anxious moments playing through future outcomes, having conversations with those people in my head. You know you cannot change it, and yet, my brain will spend time reassessing it. Or my mind replays situations from the past. You know, you want to resolve an argument, or a misunderstanding, with someone, but you cannot do it in your head &, in reality, it will never resolve, due to fundamental issues with that person. I just want to put my brain in a jar, like that old movie, Steve Martin made, The Man with Two Brains.Īnyway, there are situations that I call, Illogical Logicals, where you have a problem that your brain wants to solve, but it cannot, due to reality limitations. You exercise, sleep well, keep busy, eat well etc.īut, every now and then, my brain catches me out. I've learned techniques to avoid the relentless thought barrage. It feels like being in my own ant death circle. There are certain topics, memories and thinking that makes me all wound up, for no particular reason. I often say that my biggest enemy, is my brain. The ants go round and round, the last following the first, until they eventually, just die. If you're interested, there's another video of ant death spirals in Brazil here.There are situations where ants follow one another around and around. 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. That’s why this is called an Ant death spiral. The Ants may die due to exhaustion while in the loop. They do the death spiral because, somehow, they have been separated from the leading foraging group of Ants. I have never seen a more astonishing exhibition of the limitations of instinct. An Ant death spiral is a group of Army Ants following each other in a never-ending circle. 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. There are over 200 varieties of army ants, and apparently the type featured in this video are blind, and depend on smells to navigate. 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. 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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