Ants are arguably the most common and inconspicuous insects in our daily lives. It is also a small insect that many children love to lie on the ground and observe. There are also many proverbs about ants in life, such as, "Ants move the snake aisle, tomorrow there will be heavy rain." Ants are a typical social social animal, they not only have a clear distribution of status, but also a clear division of labor. There are queens responsible for breeding offspring, worker ants responsible for caring for young ants to find food, and soldier ants responsible for guarding the safety of nests, so the ant family forms a huge social system of division of labor. But even if their social structure is so complete, if something goes wrong, they will collapse. For example, the "death vortex" unique to ant colonies
Ant death vortex
The "death vortex" is a phenomenon in which a group of ants constantly rotates around a center, and to this day scientists' explanations for this are still not comprehensive enough, which can be said to be an unsolved mystery. But although ants existed earlier than humans, the first time we observed and recorded this phenomenon was in the late 1930s, when an ant biologist Schneira discovered this strange scene, he observed a group of ants that did not stop spinning for a day, and a heavy rain at night did not stop the group of ants from escaping and hiding, until the next day, many ants had died of exhaustion, and some of the remaining ants were still struggling to spin with their last bit of strength. What is the force that makes them circle around in spite of life and death.
Death Vortex
Some experts believe that this is due to the odor information error left by the ant, because the marching ant has no vision to rely on smell to communicate, once there is a secretion of information, the ants behind may not be able to correctly identify it will be in a circle in a place at the same time will secrete pheromones to guide the ants behind, so they enter the infinite cycle, one after another circle and secrete pheromones, so that never stop until death.
Galaxy
Some people also think that this is due to the fact that ants will have a leading marching ant to guide them forward when they are traveling, and once the leading marching ant makes a mistake, after all, the creature will always make accidental mistakes, causing them to circle in the same place, and once they are connected end to end, they will follow a cycle one by one. To this day, however, there is no definitive evidence to explain this phenomenon.
Ant communication
However, it is normal to make mistakes as animals, for example, the evolution of animals is not that the errors of genes just adapt to changes in the environment. And a huge group of ants is inevitable to make mistakes, just like the animal gene is also a huge information base, usually work normally step by step, once the tumor occurs, it will also enter an uncontrollable dead cycle, the ant colony may also be the same reason, once the sample is large enough, there will always be a time for error, after all, people are not sages, so animals, genes, cells are not each "sage".
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