Ant Mills: A suicide match that never stops.

Nature never ceases to amaze me as I keep reading an discovering stuff going on in this planet of ours. Some of these things are beautiful, like the blooming of a beautiful flower, the melodious singing of a canary, the soft breeze brushing against your cheek. Others are downright absurd, like what I just found out today.

I was viewing status updates on my WhatsApp when I came across something a classmate posted, it was a post about ants. I, as someone who gets the creeps for army ants ever since they gave me a couple "stitches" on my forehead immediately got goosebumps all over my body. It was a very large number of soldier ants, all packed closely together, moving in an endless circle as though they were circumambulating an invisible object.

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The so-called circle is called an "ant mill" or more interestingly the "ant spiral of death". This occurs when a certain number of ants lose track of other ants with whom they were together as a result of disruption in the pheromone signals between these two groups. Since army ants are blind, they communicate and move by following each other's scent. Since the ants in the front can't smell the scent of the other group anymore, they start moving in search of them, now the ones at the back follow the scents of the one on front. The ants in front now begin moving in a circle while the ones on the follow this circle, they keep following each other's scent until they form a circle where they keep spiralling about, moving in an endless circle non-stop! Eventually, they become weak then they die due to exhaustion from continuous movement, bizarre right?

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Afterwards I did remember that I had seen something similar to this. I saw a group of ants on this "spiral match of death" once near a shop while going to a friend's but on my way back, they'd all died. I thought then the shop owner or someone else might have applied ant powder but now I know better.

This raised a lot of questions from me like how to prevent this from happening and I found out that one can actually break the spiral and they'd go their separate ways. Ants don't need my pity but I do feel sorry for them somehow...if only they have weren't blind, but God knows best🥺.

Not relevant to this: Can someone tell me what the "hive witness" thing is all about? A link to where it was discuss would be of great help.

Thanks for reading.