Ants behaving like galaxies

[Hawaiian Punch]

And spiraling into a black hole of death. Silly creatures




The Ant Room: Ant Death Spiral

This is one of my favorite things about ants -- the ant death spiral. Actually, it's a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that? Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. 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." Folks interested in things like self-organization, emergant properties, complex systems, etc. etc. like to point to this as a cautionary tale. I even found a reference to a group programming robots to interact like ants that accidentally produced this behavior in their robots. Apparently you can also reproduce this behavior in the lab by placing a glass jar into the surface. The ants will eventually circle the jar and continue to do so even after the jar has been removed. I assume just army ants. Wow, I wish we had an army ant colony in the lab.

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

Fibonacci number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

if you aren't familiar: Fibonacci Numbers and Nature

 

[Hawaiian Punch]

For bonus points you too can trick ants into a death spiral

How to create an ant spiral of death

One can create an ant mill just by diverting a few ants and placing them into an enclosed space where they are likely to loop back on their own scent. Biologist and photographer Alex Wild remembers ants getting trapped in a vortex simply by walking onto dinner plates in his kitchen and exploring the plate until they found their own scent.

But please, don't abuse the ants. Once the insects begin looping, they will literally keep going in circles until they die — or until something disrupts the circle and they blunder onto a better trail.

 

[Kalik]

RAID!

I used to collect ants (ant farms) and bees in jars and shyt as a kid. That was a nice find breh

 

[Serious]

subs.... dope thread....

There's something to be said about the circle. I mean thanks to gravity all planets are shaped like a sphere(circle). Life as when know it, tends to move in a circular motion (sun up, sun down).

I always look at humans, like ants, simply because compared to the the universe our lives are sohh insignificant...

 

[Mowgli]

And spiraling into a black hole of death. Silly creatures

Ants Circle - YouTube


The Ant Room: Ant Death Spiral

Spray them with raid, bet they find another direction to die in.