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.

Anyway, in tribute to this fabulously bizarre phenomenon, I made some Ant Death Spiral T-shirts. Check them out!

Other references:

• Schneirla, T. C. (1944). A unique case of circular milling in ants, considered in relation to trail following and the general problem of orientation. American Museum Novitates, (1253), 1--26.
• Google Video -- Crazy Ants in Panthanal - Why do they walk like this?
  
• Beebe, W. 1921. Edge of the Jungle. Henry Holt, New York
• Couzin ID, Franks NR (2003) Self-organized lane formation and optimized traffic flow in army ants. Proc R Soc Lond B 270:139–146
• Army Ants Trapped by Their Evolutionary History
• Experiments in Path Optimization via Pheromone Trails by Simulated Robots, Jason L. Almeter September 17, 1996