.png)
3 months ago
4
Toggle the table of contents
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Ant Spiral" redirects here. For the Lemon Demon song, "Spiral of Ants", see Spirit Phone.
An ant millAn ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants, separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. This circle is commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and in ant colony simulations.[1]
The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant merely follows the ant in front of it, which functions until a slight deviation begins to occur, typically by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms.[2] An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 370 m in circumference. It took each ant two and a half hours to make one revolution.[3] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.[4]
- Feedback loop – Process where information about current status is used to influence future status
- Information cascade – Behavioral phenomenon
- Rat king – Collection of intertwined rats
- Stigmergy – Social network mechanism of indirect coordination
- The blind leading the blind – Idiom and metaphor in the form of a parallel phrase
- Woozle effect – False credibility due to quantity of citations
