Communication of Ants

Abstract

How often have you come across a large ant nest during a casual walk in the woods? You can usually spot a trail of working ants delivering some kind of material into the nest. These ants can travel miles and still find their way back to the nest and then navigate the maze of the nest itself. How come they don’t get lost? They don’t, after all, have a global positioning system built into their brains, and there is no central control mechanism. The truth is that each ant only follows the movements of its most proximate ants, and in addition it follows the smell markings that previous ants have left on the ground.