In 1936, when ant biologist T.C.Schneirla was studying ants, he discovered a strange phenomenon:
Hundreds of ants form a strange circle, and the ants keep rotating around this circle.
This phenomenon lasted all day, and even a heavy rain failed to stop them. By the next day, most of the ants had died, but there were still some ants who were weakly turning around and were in a state of dying. T.C.Schneirla described this experience in a paper: “The whole area is covered with dead and dying ant carcasses. A small number of survivors walked heavily around a small and irregular circle.”
This is the famous ant death vortex phenomenon.
The death vortex of ants may have existed for thousands of years, but the first official observation was the ant biologist TC Schneirla mentioned above. After that, people continued to discover this phenomenon of ants, for example, the famous insect photographer Alex Wild, also described this phenomenon on the blog a few years ago. He wrote: “When I lived in Paraguay, I often saw this phenomenon. This kind of cycle appeared in the fields, kitchen plates, and even coffee cups. This kind of small cycle is fatal for individual ants, but It is meaningless for the whole ant colony.“
What caused the ants to go crazy and go to extinction?
The biological world does not seem to have an exact answer. Because of this, this ant death vortex phenomenon is also known as the death circle, revealing a sense of mystery similar to the “cropfield circle“.
Mystery belongs to mystery, but that doesn’t mean that no scientists will use scientific methods to study it.
Among them, the most famous scientist is probably Edward Wilson.
A great scientist usually has an iconic title, such as “Schrodinger’s Cat” and “Pavlov’s Dog“. But to say which scientist has the most research on ants, it must be Edward Wilson. With his life’s persistent research on ants, Wilson has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, and he is definitely well deserved to praise him with “Wilson’s Ants“.
Wilson once did an interesting experiment to reproduce the cycle of death of ants:
If such ants are made into a circle when they are crawling, they will sometimes keep walking until they die.
This shows that the ant’s cycle of death is likely to be triggered by an accidental “program infinite loop“, just like when we are writing computer programs, occasionally infinite loop errors occur, or if you deliberately write an infinite loop program , so when no one interferes with the ants, the ants will sometimes fall into the infinite loop and cannot get out of the loop like the program loop written by the programmer, and if someone deliberately turning them into an infinite loop, they will also fall into this infinite loop and can’t get out of it.
So what exactly is the mechanism that causes this kind of dead cycle in ants?
In the fifth chapter of Edward Wilson’s book “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge“, he mentioned:
In the 1950s, when I became an entomologist when I learned these facts, I guessed that the emergency signal sent by the worker ants might be chemical. Researchers at the time referred to this chemical communication substance as a “chemical release”, which is the pheromone we called today.
In order to test my ideas, I collected redharvest ant and some other ant species that I have in-depth knowledge of.
Afterwards, I put these ants in an artificial nest, just like children are building an ant nest, and then use a stereo microscope and tweezers for making watches to dissect the workers who have just died after being persecuted, and take out the organs of pheromones that may contain emergency signals.
I took a thin stick and used the tip of the stick to crush these small white pieces that are barely visible to the naked eye one by one, and then put the tip of the stick into the resting ant colony.
Using this method, I learned that there are at least two glands that can produce effects. One of them is located at the base of the worker ants’ jaws, and the other is near the anus. The substance released by these glands will cause the ants to rotate around the tip of the stick like fully charged, only occasionally pausing to check and biting the crushed tissue.
I did find the source of pheromones, but what kind of substances are they? I then turned to the chemist Fred Regnier for help.
Rainier and I are about the same age and just started their professional career. He was able to analyze extremely small organic samples, and his expertise was the most needed at the time for research on the way ants communicate.
Rainier used the latest technology at the time, including gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, to confirm that the effective substance was a mixture of simple alkanes and terpenoids.
He then synthesized the same compound with high purity in the laboratory, and put a small amount of samples into the ant colony. We observed the reaction of the ants in the same way as I observed in the preliminary experiment. Therefore, the gland compound identified by Rainier is indeed the pheromone that transmits emergency signals.
This shows that the dead cycle of ants comes from the design of their biological programs, and the key to this is the pheromone, that is, the transmission of pheromone.
The transmission of information between ants relies on the transmission of pheromone, and the small body of ants certainly cannot tolerate the highly complex biological programming possessed by large and complex organisms. For example, there are many ways to transmit information in humans. Information can be transmitted through language, text, gestures, and even eyes. A variety of information transmission methods can be used to ensure the correctness of information transmission, that is, redundancy to ensure the reliability of information transmission.
But the ant’s information transmission method is obviously not so rich, it can rely on pheromones.
So, what is the procedure to guide the ants forward?
In fact, relying on the pheromones left by the ants in front, the ants looking for odors behind also leave odors for other ants to follow, so the ants move forward in this way.
Under normal circumstances, ants do not form a circle, which is why we often see ants lining up to move forward.
But once the ants are connected end to end due to accidents, they form a strange circle, enter an endless loop, and never get out.
This ant circle reminds me of a famous game: Greedy Snake.
When the snake eats its own tail, it will game over.
Therefore, when the leading ant followed the pheromone left by the last ant in the queue, it also game over.
The infinite loop of ants makes me feel the computer character embodied in life. If humans are computers, what are such tiny ants compared to humans?
Is it possible to think of the ant as a small computer program? This program is simple in design and even has fatal flaws.
However, no one can deny that ants are not a kind of life.
This made me ponder:
If a computer has life, then as a small program in a computer, such as a scientific calculator, is it also a kind of computer life?