Ant Death Spiral

Sick :D.

Ant mecca?

That would require a hell of a lot copper coins to get rid of....

Well, isn't that just the creepiest thing I've seen in my entire life.

I've heard about single ants doing this, but not this many!

Apparently some ant species have a built in odometer so they can calculate how many steps it will take them to get back to the nest in a straight line. So when experimenters either shortened their legs or glued on tiny stilts, they either under- or over-shooted the mark where they thought the nest was, and then proceeded to walk in increasingly larger concentric circles, hoping to come across the nest, but often dying of starvation and exhaustion before they found it.

Obviously a different mechanism to what's causing these ants to walk in circles, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

An article:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4114287,00.html

And the free abstract in J. Exp. Biol.:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5782/1965
An interesting read if you have a subscription.

It would make a great Neatorama story!

Never thought I'd say this but.... poor ants.

LisaL, take one up the **** by a horse already.

Where's my 1 meter Fresnel lens?

A metaphor for corporate America.

More about this ants circle of death phenomenon here http://www.buzzhunt.co.uk/2009/07/15/ants-spiral-of-death/

So it'd be perfectly ok to stomp on all of the ants, right?

The software Visions of Chaos has a very interesting "ant simulator", you can set the amount of feromones and how long its trail lasts, amount of food, etc.. It takes some time until it gets funny but it's quite interesting to see the patterns they follow. There are times that the ants are sort of trapped in a line that goes nowhere and until another ant touches someone in that group while still with a bit of feromone enough for it to be followed they just get stuck there forever. There is also some very interesting fish x sharks simulator.

"...they continue to go in circles until they’re exhausted and die."

Huh, sounds a lot like how I feel at the end of a work week.

I am feeding a troll here, but MeatisYummy seems to have a rage issue.

And I agree, poor ants. Insects experience pain and suffering too.

WillF, so, you hate Microsoft, IBM and Apple and Google all those big companies, huh?

Bummer, I'm pretty grateful myself, 'cause I get to use this crazy thing called Internet cheaply and easily.

I think MeatisYummy's personal attack on LisaL should be deleted.

Wow. . . Its like a recursive loop :)
break; little ant break;

Does anyone else see the "Milky Way" in that?

TELL me it's not all relative.

Lil ant hipsters there.

Someone should drop a fat grub in there and film it getting demolished.

in ever decreasing circles till they disappear up themselves lol

it's an error in the matrix

It's neat, but would have been much easier to see if it hadn't been filmed by someone with Parkinson's disease.

do NOT be like 'the ants'
do NOT follow any leader, but, thyself ;)

Too bad the picture has no clear focus, first time I see anything like that, will search more info and videoclips

Amazing images, I wonder what causes this to occur in the first place?