What are many ants doing in a circle ~

There may be several answers in this regard, please refer to the following explanation:

1. There is food in the ant colony. In order to carry a lot, the ant colony forms a circle. Please refer to the picture.

A drop of honey fell on the leaf.

When a mass of ice cream falls to the ground, ants who like sweets and sweetness will gather at once!

Ant army drinks coke, and ants die for food. A few ants fell into the cup in the middle, and many of them directly swollen to death!

When the prey is in the center, the marching ants will quickly surround and attack.

2. Suicide "death cycle" of army ants: the death vortex of ants is related to biological pheromones.

The strange phenomenon that military ants go round and round until they die of exhaustion is often called the ant death vortex.

These ants seem to turn around like crazy, because military ants are invisible, unlike most ant species.

They don't have a fixed nest and don't live in the same place.

Ant colonies will keep moving in search of food.

The leading ant will leave pheromone traces (similar to pheromone smell) for other ants to sniff out and track, but when it makes a mistake, the ants tracking pheromone traces may form a suicide cycle. If this cycle is not broken, these ants may never escape, but will die in constant movement.

The picture above shows the pattern of death vortex. The death vortex of ants may have existed for thousands of years, but this phenomenon was first observed in 1936.

The death vortex of ants is an observable ecological phenomenon. The ant team is formed by the hormones left by the ants in front to guide the ants behind, just like the blind walking by smell.

When a group of ants miss the direction of pheromones, they follow the previous one and slowly form a vortex of death.

The ant colony will move in a cycle until all the ants die of fatigue, or some ants break away from the routine.

In fact, this cycle is extremely difficult to solve, because the farther the ant colony goes, the higher the hormones will be thrown away, and the greater the chance of going back to the original road.

The vortex of ant death may have existed for thousands of years, but in 1936, biologist T.C. Schneirla met hundreds of ants in a circle, which lasted all day.

Even if it rains heavily, it can't stop them. By the next day, most of the ants were dead. Although a few ants are still spinning, they are all weak and dying. He described this experience in a paper of 1944, and wrote down the ant hovering and its consequences: "There were almost no ants hovering where that strange scene happened yesterday. The whole place is full of dead ants and dying ants. Some survivors were teetering, at the same time, no more than thirty ants formed an irregular small cylinder. Their steps are very slow, turning counterclockwise. 」

Interestingly, other ants nearby took advantage of their fallen partners.

The paper wrote: "There are all kinds of small ants in Forminae and Polypodinae nearby, and they are busy carrying away the bodies. 」

Although there are more than 200 species of military ants in the world, genetic evidence shows that they may all have a common ancestor, and have retained the advantages and disadvantages of evolution for more than 654.38 billion years. As Delsuc Frederic2003 wrote in PLOS Biology in 2003, all military ant species have the characteristics of collective foraging, nomadism and wingless queens that can produce a large number of larvae. The similarity of these forms and behaviors enhances their collective behavior, and a single ant cannot survive independently.

Alex Wild, a famous insect photographer, described this phenomenon on his blog a few years ago.

He wrote: "I often saw this phenomenon when I lived in Paraguay. This cycle will happen in the fields, dishes in the kitchen, and even coffee cups. This small cycle is fatal to individual ants, but it is meaningless to the entire ant community. "

Although there are more than 200 species of military ants living on the earth, genetic evidence suggests that they may have a common ancestor. They have maintained their evolutionary advantages and disadvantages for more than 654.38 billion years. All kinds of army ants are collective foragers and nomads, and they all have wingless queens. Although evolution has given ants a successful group life strategy, it may also leave ants with an unnecessary pathological behavior.

Humans have the same mechanism. External material stimulation, including drugs, drugs, alcohol, etc. It will also stimulate the secretion of dopamine in the brain and act on specific brain areas, further generating the feeling of addiction. These behavioral information will stimulate and activate the reward mechanism of the brain, whether it is the satisfaction of primitive desires or the use of external substances. The reward mechanism produces psychological dependence over time, and this euphoria will be deeply recorded in the hippocampus of the deep memory of the palm of the brain. As long as there is no euphoria, you will try your best to get this feeling.

At present, there is no way to determine why ants have been spinning around. Experts speculate that because ants guide their peers by leaving pheromones, this phenomenon may be caused by some wrong pheromone information, so it becomes a cycle until ants run out of physical strength and die. Experts also call this circle "the death vortex of ants" ...? As we all know, when ants walk back and forth between food and nests, they secrete a chemical: pheromone. When there are many paths to choose from between the nest and the food, individual ants tend to choose the path with strong pheromone. This complex communication system coordinated by chemicals allows ants to act collectively and accomplish things far beyond the ability of a single individual. The wisdom of the group creates the reproduction of ants, which we call intelligent groups.

This way of choosing the best path with pheromones as a group, when there is false guidance, and because of the simplicity of individuals, can only adhere to the principle of biological instinct, and finally get deeper and deeper into the death trap established by their own groups until death.

Interestingly, Asimov, the master of robot science fiction, has a similar short story in The Complete Works of Robots.

Asimov is the inventor of the widely popularized three principles of robotics and the founder of the word robotics, and is called the father of modern robot stories.

The follow are three principles of robot:

The first rule: robots must not harm human beings, or stand by and watch human beings get hurt.

The second law: unless the first law is violated, the robot must obey the orders of human beings.

The third law: robots must protect themselves without violating the first and second laws.

In Asimov's short story The Circle, the three principles of robot appeared for the first time. More interestingly, Asimov made a story similar to the ant vortex by taking advantage of the loopholes in principle. The background of the story revolves around two human beings who are sent to perform tasks at the Mercury base. They found that Aauto Quicker, a robot sent to the selenium dissolving tank for mining, has been hovering around the dissolving tank. Finally, it is found that the real reason is that there are substances harmful to Aauto faster in the solution pool, which causes the robot to switch between the second and third principles repeatedly and form a circle.

In general, the third principle is lower than the second principle, but a boundary condition will be set when setting it. When the robot is damaged to a greater extent, the proportion of the third principle will increase, and conversely, when the damage degree decreases, the proportion of the third principle will return. And this boundary condition is set to be easier to realize because auto fast is an expensive robot.

Because of this feature, when A auto approached the pool faster, the aggravation of the third principle led him to surpass the second principle and forced him to turn back. But when he left the pool, the proportion of the second principle came back, which made the robot want to go back and finish the task, and finally caused repeated circle behavior. At the end of the story, in order to protect human beings, human beings hurt themselves with the highest priority first principle, let the robot leave the vortex of death, and the robot function returned to normal.

People with information background may have learned an interesting "philosopher's dining problem", as shown in the figure:

「...？ Suppose there are five philosophers sitting around a round table and doing one of the following two things: eating or thinking. When they eat, they stop thinking, and when they think, they stop eating. There is a big bowl of spaghetti in the middle of the dining table, and there is a fork between every two philosophers. Because it is difficult to eat spaghetti with one fork, it is assumed that philosophers must eat with two forks. They can only use two forks in their left and right hands.

Philosophers never speak, which is dangerous and may lead to deadlock. Every philosopher holds a fork in his left hand and always waits for the fork in his right hand (and vice versa). ...？ 」

Although this is not a cycle like the first two examples, it is also an endless state (everyone picks up one fork and waits for another fork, so no one eats), which we call deadlock.

Because of his adherence to principles, he fell into a whirlpool dilemma. Perhaps it is the principle caused by biological instinct (he must follow pheromone's steps), or the principle of making robots serve human beings (following the three principles of robots), or the principle of a hypothetical logical problem (following the principle of eating with two forks).

3. Surround the enemy (different kinds of ants or natural enemies, etc. ) and attack!

The picture above shows that giant ants in Taiwan Province Province are surrounded by other kinds of small ants. At first, the big ant passing by was entangled by two small ants, one grabbed its foot and the other jumped on it to attack it. When I took out my camera, the little ant's reinforcements came, which made the giant ant unable to resist in just a few minutes!

Weaving ants attack a black ant, and different ethnic groups are enemies!