Ants and queue

12/11/2020

   We have all seen the ants walking along a line towards a food source. But have you thought about how they could be so precise in their movement? Are there any traffic ants or road maker ants that make sure that ants walk in a designated path? They sure don’t have GPS to navigate their way around.

Well, the answer is simple; they use pheromones to do so. Pheromones are of different types. The ants use recruiting pheromones in making trails to food sources. Each ant species has its variety of pheromones to differentiate others’ from their own.

As worker ants leave the nest in search of food, they leave behind a trail of pheromones. Once the worker ant finds out the food source, they use the same trail created by them to come back to their nest. This makes the trail have double the amount of pheromones on the trail, creating a signal for other ants to follow it to reach the food source. The other worker ants then, with the help of the pheromone trail, get to the food source and bring food to their nests.

These pheromones are important for ants to guide them to the food source. In case the trail is wiped out in between due to any reason, one can see them dispersing from that point to find the trail again or to find a food source for which they followed the trail.

One can perform a small experiment to confirm this fact. One has to find a route of ants to the food source and then with an eraser rub the path in order to remove the trail. The ants will then disperse from the starting point of the removed part of that trail and will try to find the rest of the trail.