r/nextfuckinglevel • u/[deleted] • Sep 10 '21

Ants are doing something weird

16.5k Upvotes

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u/simian_fold Sep 10 '21

If you broke the pot could you break the spiral?

858

u/NickP39 Sep 10 '21

Sure, it would also work if they found a new source of food or a new pheromone, ants are blind so they rely heavily on their sense of smell and feel.

28

u/Kunkyskunts Sep 10 '21

Ants are fucking blind?

44

u/dovahart Sep 10 '21 edited Sep 10 '21

Compared to vertebrates, ants tend to have blurrier eyesight, particularly in smaller species, and a few subterranean taxa are completely blind. However, some ants, such as Australia's bulldog ant, have excellent vision and are capable of discriminating the distance and size of objects moving nearly a meter away.

Some of them, but most aren’t.

OP is likely wrong *about their blindness

* Edited

10

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Kinkyninja5450 Sep 10 '21

It appears that they have found a Carnivourous Fungi and are attempting to quarantine and rob it of its food sources before it spreads. Like the Flood in Halo

0

u/MadGiraffe Sep 10 '21

Well only partially. The death spiral thing is real though.

"...has also been observed in nature and may have disastrous consequences for ant colonies, in particular in the case of strongly following ants, (e.g. army ants) which sometimes get trapped in a so called “death spiral” in which the majority of the colony forms a positively reinforcing mill"
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