Ant
This morning I was captivated by a single ant and its utterly whimsical movement on the floor. I have long tried to understand if a single ant or many ants have a certain logic—movement path, if you will—when they crawl around.
One can safely assume that an ant or ants are going somewhere specific to either accomplish something specific or returning to a specific place after accomplishing something specific. There ought to be an aim and/or destination to their movement. Otherwise, why come out of the colony at all to be crushed under human feet?
I actually stared at this solitary ant for several minutes as it changed its direction randomly and several times before I felt dizzy and decided to give up and write about it instead.
Since it was alone I thought it was looking for its colony of ants or fellow ants that would have come out to forage. Unless ants come out for a morning jog or a brisk walk, that was a safe assumption. However its movement suggested it was confused as it rapidly turned at sharp angles on the tiles. It kept weaving in and out of the grooves between the tiles. Just as I thought it had found its direction it took a 180 degree turn and started in the exact opposite direction. It stopped for a moment, did some contortions with its head and then turned right back.
It must have been separated from its fellow ants because I did not see any for miles—miles in ants’ unit but less than a step for us. So its immediate goal must have been to find its fellow ants.
I did some reading about ants’ movement and discovered that they do collectively choose routes which have certain probabilities although watching them one would never suspect it. Scientists who do such research find that ants do have certain mathematical patterns to their movements. During my search I chanced upon a service known as SiNC or the Information and Scientific News Service (SINC), “the first state public agency specialising in science, technology and innovation information in Spanish.”
In a story headlined “Ants’ movements hide mathematical patterns’ dated May 11, 2015, it quoted María Vela Pérez, researcher at the European University in Madrid and co-author of a study about ants’ movements as saying, “To be more specific, they are a mixture of Gaussian and Pareto distributions, two probability functions which are commonly used in statistics, and that in this case dictate how much the ant ‘turns’ at each step and the direction it will travel in.”
Ant movements have been studied as a possible model for micro-robots to accomplish various tasks such as cleaning a contaminated area.
Coming back to the solitary ant that seemed to be lost on my bathroom floor this morning it eventually went under the door and disappeared. It struck me that I will never see it again and even if I did, how would I know? At the risk of being branded an ant racist I must say they all do look the same to an untrained eye. Perhaps that is how Nature wants it—a collective identity for an entire colony of ants rather than an individual one unlike in other larger species. Of course, a single ant has to have its own identity. It is just that I am not looking hard enough.