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 took each ant two and a half hours to make. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (370 m) in circumference. ('Army ant,' by the way, is a term we use to refer to about 150 species of ant, per National Geographic. 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. It's more commonly known as the 'death spiral.' Army ants are 'practically blind' and rely on each other's pheromones to navigate Dr Morley Read/Shutterstock On paper, army ants are some of the most formidable ants around today. Typically they follow the scent-trails of the ants before them in the swarm. NovemThis is a video captured near the Tandayapa Bird Lodge in Tandayapa, Ecuador of an army ant death spiral (aka ant mill). 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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