Keith Schacht’s Weblog

YouTube: Death Spiral of Army Ants (via)

A phenomenon where army ants follow each other in circles, sometimes until they die — and thus known as an “ant death spiral” — was captured on camera at a university in Venezuela. Biologist Javier David Uzcategui Gonzalez filmed the footage at Simon Bolivar University in Miranda, describing the occurrence as “very rare”. In an August 2020 tweet, Gonzales explained that the phenomenon, also called an ant mill, will happen when some ants lose track of the colony and follow others “in a rotating circle of death.”