How do ants cooperate to carry huge objects than theirs?

BySubith Premdas

When walking while watching the ground, you may sometimes see the sight that ants pulled food and tree leaves etc collectively and brought back to the nest. If you are a human you can interact with each other to determine the direction, but ants that can not communicate by words should not take that method. So, how do ants jointly carry things larger than ourselves, research contents that have investigated such things are announced.

How do ants synchronize to move really big stuff? | PBS NewsHour
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/ants-move-really-big-stuff/

This research was conducted in IsraelWeizmann Institute of ScienceThe research team led by Professor Ofer Feinerman. This team conducts research on ant behavior.

Ofer Feinerman's Lab: Ant Collective Behavior Group


From the point of view of evolution, there are merits and demerits in the act of carrying animals with great power together. In the case of ants, the fact that large foods can be brought back to the nest is advantageous for survival, but at the same time, the response to sudden events is delayed by acting in groups, the disadvantage of being attacked by natural enemies Exist. Therefore, there is no habit of carrying things jointly to many animals, and it is limited to one kind of spiders and hunting pars, such as spiders and ants and humans that do such an act.

As mentioned earlier, humans can carry luggage to the place of interest by hoofing voice or indicating direction by hand, but in the case of ants it is because they will pick up the parcels with the chin in the first place, rather than the language It is impossible to communicate by sound because it does not have a sound, communication of information that touches "haptic" which is a requestor's rope is also useless because contact is interrupted when carrying a large package.

ByTroup Dresser

So how can ants bring home things larger than their own to the nest? The hypothesis that the research team set up first is "that ants gather in the vicinity of the nest, the pulling force faces towards the nest" and "there is one ant to become the leader, indicating the direction to go" Although it was, these hypotheses are denied in the research.

The research team said that he used "Aliga's" Higgenaga Ameroro Ant "to transport things to be food. The thing actually carried is a little larger thing which puts objects made of plastic from small things like dog food pieces overnight in the cat food bag.

The first thing about the hypothesis is that the direction of power is determined by concentrating ants in the direction of the nest. Although this was certainly confirmed in the case of a small object, in the case of a large object such as a diameter exceeding 4 cm, since ants were clustered in all directions of the object, it was not recognized as a reliable basis It turned out to be. And there is another denial about the point that there is another "leader". Certainly, ants that are biting objects have been confirmed all the way, but the reason is that the orientation was not necessarily oriented close to the nest.

This movie contains a state of carrying objects many times larger than myself.

Nature Communications - Video 3 - Feinerman et al. - YouTube


Ali's individuals are numbered for images by computer processing, and the trajectories that have been moved are indicated by lines. Yellow numbers indicate ants in contact with objects, white numbers indicate ants that are away from objects. On the other hand, you can see that ants are clustered in a biased manner, and there is no way that there is a leader that only indicates the direction to go, but it is moving toward the nest in the upper right of the screen.


Instead, the research group found out that "the ant newly joining the group shows the direction of advance". Although not shown in the above movie, ants coming from the direction of the nest will apply force to pull on the object and pull towards the nest. Then, the ant that was carrying until then naturally tries to head towards the direction the new ant pulled. By repeating this movement, the research group's view is that the direction to carry things is gradually determined.

The research group also said that they investigated how large ants can carry objects. We prepared a few sizes of objects that would not be encountered in the natural world, up to a diameter of 8 cm, and brought them to ants, it turned out that it was the largest size a 4 cm diameter object could carry.

Nature Communications - Video 2 - Feinerman et al. - YouTube