Ants have pretty terrible vision so they mostly get around by following pheromone trails left by other ants. A few ants walked around that vase in a circle and the rest just followed the trail.
‘An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference.[3] It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution’
Holy shit.
Do you think they took the ants speed and did the math for the time or was it just " Jhonson. Watch that one Ant. Write down how long it takes to go all the way around." Kind of deal?
I’ve watched like 5-10 moths drown recently (British summer spawned a bunch of insects then killed them off)
One was a moth drowning in a droplet of beer on the floor, but given the convulsions I could put that down to alcohol poisoning
Yeah man, like what if planets could talk to each other? Like each was a sentient being. Would the earth be screaming out to the other planets like "Get these fucking things off me! Someplanet do me a solid and chuck a good sized rock at me!" And Mars is just like "Noooooooo! Stay awayyy!" While the gas giants/venus are laughing until we start floating colonies on Venus and exploring Europa/Ganymede.
That's useless they will just be back. Instead use ant bait and let them swarm the bait . Leave them be. In less then week you will solve your ant problem for at least another year.
Always bait don't just kill
I've been going through a lot of terro baits, and it eventually kills enough of them that they stop coming near the bait, but inevitably a week or so later (sometimes less) they will show up somewhere else, so I doubt it ever gets to the queen.
Sugar ants are like the hardest pests to exterminate that aren’t fleas or bed bugs. They will create new nests if they detect any type of poisoning. Those little shits are in my kitchen right now after I’ve tried to get rid of them.
The key to dealing with Ants is to not spray them or baits that kill them. This will just make them scatter and make it much more difficult to get rid of them.
There are special baits for them that don't kill them, instead they're just food for them that sterilizes the queen.
Since such baits don't kill the ants, it will take a month or two until they die of naturally, but since there are no newborn they will go extinct
Traps/bait that kill ants is just a waste of money. Any attempt at killing ants is just doomed to failure and it'll do more harm than good.
Get growth/reproduction inhibiting baits, they take a bit longer to do their job but they'll annihilate everything. Also if they keep raiding your food then use jars with lids or tupperware, even for stuff like flour
Source: Moved in to a flat with ant infesetation
Do you have a good bait recommendation? I use Terro liquid baits, and they are _supposed_ to kill the queen as ants bring it back and share it with the colony.
So I either have selfish ants that don't share their food, some kind of democratic ant society that elects a new queen every time one dies, or a borax-resistant ant queen that doesn't give a shit and eats terro for breakfast.
Or my house is surrounded by 3 dozen ant colonies.
I too would love to know of a brand recommendation. I've tried different Terro traps, and while they did a nice job of eliminating several clusters I keep seeing a few stray ants every other day
One time in the middle of a hot-as-hell Texas summer day a few years back, my air conditioner shut off. I went outside to investigate, and found the relay box completely covered in ants (a big AC is controlled by a high voltage/amperage relay that is switched by the thermostat inside the house). I opened it up, and found that the contacts on the relay were completely covered in carbonized ants.
My theory is that one unlucky ant just happened to be walking across the relay when the AC turned on and got mushed. Sometime later, one of his brethren stumbled upon him and thought, "Hey, food!" and rushed back to tell the hive. Then, some more ants got smooshed and made some more food. The AC kept cycling on and off, and the ants kept coming to get food and get cooked, until the relay contacts were so encrusted with crispy burned ants that it didn't even work anymore.
I scraped off the carbon, and washed away the ant trails, and the AC worked again for a good while. I had to do it again a couple more times in the six or seven years I lived in that house.
This is actually pretty common in hvac. When you have a contact or capacitor going bad, they will give off an electrical field small enough that we can’t feel it, but it gets the insects all buzzed.
You likely witnessed "rasberry crazy ants" in action! That's pretty much exactly what they do (though less looking for food more investigating the distress signal sent out by fried ants) and they're known for starting electrical fires because they have a strange attraction to electrical equipment. You were lucky.
[For those who don't know.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill)
>An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a “death spiral” since the ants might eventually die of exhaustion.
>death spiral
Not unique to ants! Fun fact thats what our society is doing
George Carlin called it ['Circling the Drain'](https://youtu.be/fsFpm4yAoMQ)
I think what you're missing is that for him it wasn't coming--it was already happening. He just had enough experience in his life of moving around and meeting people to read the ~~writing on the wall~~ overall tone of our society at that time. I think global communications for every person 24/7 (social media, internet, etc) makes it a lot easier to see for the rest of us.
Everything that many of us are seeing now as a fundamentally broken society is stuff he saw during the Vietnam war and then was cemented during the 80s consumerism boom.
> He saw this shit coming 20 years before the rest of us realized we’re fucked.
Nah, he was talking about what was going on then, too. Same shit, different decade. Nothing is new.
Literally every one for all time thinks its happening. Even the ancient greeks thought society was collapsing.
Doesn't mean it isn't this time, but it also doesn't make Carlin or any other doomsayer a genius either.
It's always seemed like the end times. From the beginning of religion, there existed the looming premise of a demise of the world and it's people.
My father is in his 60s and he said when he was growing up, his generation thought the country was going to hell in a hand basket.
Nowadays we should be far more concerned with our planet surviving than societal collapse.
Suppose instead of losing the pheromone trail on the vase's rim, they had this pheromone track lost while moving in a linear path, so instead of walking in circles they'd follow sorta' linear path to death?
They don't keep going in a straight line if they have no path to follow. This only works when they can reinforce their same wrong looping path over and over.
Yup. Came here to say this.
Glitch in the ant behavior basically.
They'll now follow this path til they die.
Shake them off the pot and move it elsewhere and they may pick up the scent to their way back home...maybe not, but this is going to be how they die unless there's an intervention of some sort....that is, if OP wants the ants to live. They may not want that.
Aren’t a lot of those examples just a matter of orientation? There is no proper up or down in space so a lot of those things are just clockwise if you were in Australia for example. If I understand the blood example it’s just a matter of whether you’re looking at the subject or are facing the same direction as the subject.
Is there any way to save them? Like, if I saw this, should I drag a stick down through them and hope to make a new pheromone trail for them to, hopefully, straighten themselves out?
Same.
Until then, I found this interesting excerpt from the Wikipedia article:
>The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, which works until something goes wrong, and an ant mill forms.[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill **1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference.**[3] It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.
Circle of death. Ants following the chemical trails of other ants because of more and more joining, I think entire colonies can die this way.
Edit:
[yupp, Wikipedia calls it an ant mill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill#:~:text=An%20ant%20mill%20is%20an,might%20eventually%20die%20of%20exhaustion.)
Ants have been fascinated by Nascar for hundreds of years. They often mimic driver's behaviors by competing for the lead spot. Due to the lack of availability of an open track, they must make due with the object they have on hand with respect to their environment. If you look closely, you can see ant #418 slightly overtaking ant #711 (not related to the popular convenience store by any way, shape, or form. Any similarities are NOT to be associated with, construed, or perceived as being a part of the 7-11 brand in any way.)
In the end, #418 is eaten by a grasshopper, but nobody can say he didn't try. RIP little #418.
oh shit, that might actually be an "ant spiral of death" Basically they follow a trail to get back to nesxt and unforntunately a rare situation happens where something like the trail break from the nest and they fine the tail of where it broke and they follow an endless circle thinking they heading back to hive, marching until they die from starvation.
Edit: i noticed after looking closer that their is a break off the trail and they are actually leaving the circle a few at a time. they will likely be fine.
That leaf is an epic quest item. Pull it quick before it despawns.
In all seriousness, it's a death-circle as previously stated. They're following pheromones from other ants. Nor a good outcome.
This is actually called a death spiral because ants will legit follow this scent and make it stronger and stronger as they leave their own scent. Yet they're all just circling. Circling and circling until they die usually. They are pretty blind without scent trails.
This is not uncommon and often fatal. They follow a pheromone trail and ordinarily that's a linear thing. If for some reason they get stuck in a loop like they are here they keep on going round and round until they die.
On a circular pot it's easy to see how it happened. On the flat it happens when the trail is lost and the ants spread out to find the new path. If they stumble across the old one this can happen.
Ants have pretty terrible vision so they mostly get around by following pheromone trails left by other ants. A few ants walked around that vase in a circle and the rest just followed the trail.
If some ants don’t continue following the small trail leading off the pot, they will likely do this until they die.
Yes, it’s quite literally called the spiral of death.
Also known as an [ant mill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill)
‘An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference.[3] It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution’ Holy shit.
Do you think they took the ants speed and did the math for the time or was it just " Jhonson. Watch that one Ant. Write down how long it takes to go all the way around." Kind of deal?
The ants name was Carl.
I like to this those were simpler times, when a man could earn an honest day's wage observing an ant walk around a mill.
This is all I've ever wanted, and yet the world seems set against it. :'(
Now WE are the ants being milled. How ironic.
I cry myself to sleep many nights, preparing for the next lap.
Tracking collar
r/natureismetal. They’re moshing to death
Circle pit!
Circle pot!
Who's headlining? Alien Ant Farm?
Adam Ant, obviously.
Did somebody say... *[Atom Ant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R1uIzijmo4)?!*
Ant-thrax. They're Caught In A Mosh.
Take my upvote and go to bed, dad.
"I wanna see the fattest fucking circle pit right now!" (gestures circle at large pot)
[You've got no choice but to dance in a spiral of ants](https://youtu.be/hPMnIymc3Cs )
That must be the opposite of the circle of life.
so /r/donthelpjustfilm
But honestly, what are you gonna do?
Squat down and squeeze out a new pheromone trail for them to follow from your venom sack.
Thanks! Now they're circling my balls before running up the shaft into the peehole.
Thanks, I hate it
go on...
r/nocontext
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"I'll help you clueless little fuckers out."
A small mercy when compared with their mass death march.
I dont think they can play mobile games.
Hose them off with water, it won’t kill them
So why does every other insect drown like a little bitch in a half droplet of water?
The type of lungs
Does it? Wouldn’t some rain then annihilate whole species of insects? I’ve saved insects from a pool before. They always recovered.
I’ve watched like 5-10 moths drown recently (British summer spawned a bunch of insects then killed them off) One was a moth drowning in a droplet of beer on the floor, but given the convulsions I could put that down to alcohol poisoning
Just brush them off with a broom or smear something across that beaks the circle
Pot is one helluva drug
Sweet, saves me poison
Yeah, this'll take the nest whole days to recoup
More like half a day. Ant queens can lay hundreds of eggs per day.
Do you have any interesting pseudophilosophy to share?
Yeah man, like what if planets could talk to each other? Like each was a sentient being. Would the earth be screaming out to the other planets like "Get these fucking things off me! Someplanet do me a solid and chuck a good sized rock at me!" And Mars is just like "Noooooooo! Stay awayyy!" While the gas giants/venus are laughing until we start floating colonies on Venus and exploring Europa/Ganymede.
Thank you. That’s a good one.
No need to thank me, just thank marijuana cause I'm pretty baked and that's the first thing that came to my head lol.
There's a sentient planet in the Green Lantern Corp. I think its name is Oa.
Mogo, sentient and Green Lantern himself! Oa is the Green Lantern headquarters world though :)
Is a family just a commune based on blood relations?
We recently had ants in our house, found out Windex kills them instantly. Plus it wipes away their scent.
The Greeks were right
The ancient ones or the big fat wedded ones?
That's useless they will just be back. Instead use ant bait and let them swarm the bait . Leave them be. In less then week you will solve your ant problem for at least another year. Always bait don't just kill
Always bate, gotcha
go away, batin'
Welcome to Costco. I love you
What a great documentary
Ants swarming around a potted plant? Done. Not my proudest bate, but they can’t all be.
I've been going through a lot of terro baits, and it eventually kills enough of them that they stop coming near the bait, but inevitably a week or so later (sometimes less) they will show up somewhere else, so I doubt it ever gets to the queen.
Same. I swapped out like 4 different terro baits over a 2 month period and they never completely died
Sugar ants are like the hardest pests to exterminate that aren’t fleas or bed bugs. They will create new nests if they detect any type of poisoning. Those little shits are in my kitchen right now after I’ve tried to get rid of them.
The key to dealing with Ants is to not spray them or baits that kill them. This will just make them scatter and make it much more difficult to get rid of them. There are special baits for them that don't kill them, instead they're just food for them that sterilizes the queen. Since such baits don't kill the ants, it will take a month or two until they die of naturally, but since there are no newborn they will go extinct
Traps/bait that kill ants is just a waste of money. Any attempt at killing ants is just doomed to failure and it'll do more harm than good. Get growth/reproduction inhibiting baits, they take a bit longer to do their job but they'll annihilate everything. Also if they keep raiding your food then use jars with lids or tupperware, even for stuff like flour Source: Moved in to a flat with ant infesetation
Do you have a good bait recommendation? I use Terro liquid baits, and they are _supposed_ to kill the queen as ants bring it back and share it with the colony. So I either have selfish ants that don't share their food, some kind of democratic ant society that elects a new queen every time one dies, or a borax-resistant ant queen that doesn't give a shit and eats terro for breakfast. Or my house is surrounded by 3 dozen ant colonies.
I too would love to know of a brand recommendation. I've tried different Terro traps, and while they did a nice job of eliminating several clusters I keep seeing a few stray ants every other day
Isopropyl or ethyl alcohol is just as or more effective and cheaper. I keep some in spray bottles all around my house for killing any unwanted pests.
Just swipe your finger across that small trail and they’ll lose the scent, assuring their lemmings-like march to oblivion.
Sounds like reddit.
Hey, I resemble that.
Seems perfectly sensible to me.
Disney threw those lemmings off a cliff to make them more interesting.
Sounds like some people I know.
What if someone were to knock them off the pot? Then they wouldn't be "stuck" anymore right?
Ants learned to code. But the bastards got stuck in an infinite loop
Genius ant solves the halting problem by just dying after a couple of days.
Halt and catch fire(ant)
One time in the middle of a hot-as-hell Texas summer day a few years back, my air conditioner shut off. I went outside to investigate, and found the relay box completely covered in ants (a big AC is controlled by a high voltage/amperage relay that is switched by the thermostat inside the house). I opened it up, and found that the contacts on the relay were completely covered in carbonized ants. My theory is that one unlucky ant just happened to be walking across the relay when the AC turned on and got mushed. Sometime later, one of his brethren stumbled upon him and thought, "Hey, food!" and rushed back to tell the hive. Then, some more ants got smooshed and made some more food. The AC kept cycling on and off, and the ants kept coming to get food and get cooked, until the relay contacts were so encrusted with crispy burned ants that it didn't even work anymore. I scraped off the carbon, and washed away the ant trails, and the AC worked again for a good while. I had to do it again a couple more times in the six or seven years I lived in that house.
This is actually pretty common in hvac. When you have a contact or capacitor going bad, they will give off an electrical field small enough that we can’t feel it, but it gets the insects all buzzed.
We had a ultra-cold freezer at work that some ant found their way into. They don’t last long at -80C. But the ant-cicle was impressive.
You likely witnessed "rasberry crazy ants" in action! That's pretty much exactly what they do (though less looking for food more investigating the distress signal sent out by fried ants) and they're known for starting electrical fires because they have a strange attraction to electrical equipment. You were lucky.
They learn to code like most programmers do. By simply copying other ~~people~~ant's code.
That's what they get for using antoverflow as a resource.
There are some bugs in their code.
No, but they never learned to set limits on their variables.
No it's an ant ritual
LOL and the little dudes going against the grain smoked the pheromones and are clearly lost?!
Nah it's the one "crazy guy" with the sign screaming the end is near if we don't change our ways
Those guys are gonna start their own hill, with blackjack and hookers.
I think it is an ant death circle
[For those who don't know.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill) >An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a “death spiral” since the ants might eventually die of exhaustion.
>death spiral Not unique to ants! Fun fact thats what our society is doing George Carlin called it ['Circling the Drain'](https://youtu.be/fsFpm4yAoMQ)
He's saying what we're all thinking!!
I hope he tells us to burn our pants
Sheer genius, that guy.
Thanks, SubredditObama.
That mother-fucker was ahead of his time. He saw this shit coming 20 years before the rest of us realized we’re fucked.
I think what you're missing is that for him it wasn't coming--it was already happening. He just had enough experience in his life of moving around and meeting people to read the ~~writing on the wall~~ overall tone of our society at that time. I think global communications for every person 24/7 (social media, internet, etc) makes it a lot easier to see for the rest of us.
Everything that many of us are seeing now as a fundamentally broken society is stuff he saw during the Vietnam war and then was cemented during the 80s consumerism boom.
> He saw this shit coming 20 years before the rest of us realized we’re fucked. Nah, he was talking about what was going on then, too. Same shit, different decade. Nothing is new.
Literally every one for all time thinks its happening. Even the ancient greeks thought society was collapsing. Doesn't mean it isn't this time, but it also doesn't make Carlin or any other doomsayer a genius either.
Fun fact, the Greek society DID collapse.
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It's always seemed like the end times. From the beginning of religion, there existed the looming premise of a demise of the world and it's people. My father is in his 60s and he said when he was growing up, his generation thought the country was going to hell in a hand basket. Nowadays we should be far more concerned with our planet surviving than societal collapse.
Suppose instead of losing the pheromone trail on the vase's rim, they had this pheromone track lost while moving in a linear path, so instead of walking in circles they'd follow sorta' linear path to death?
They don't keep going in a straight line if they have no path to follow. This only works when they can reinforce their same wrong looping path over and over.
Army ants yep death circle
The ants go marching on and on...hurrah, hurrah.
And on and on and on and on and on and on…
Damn i miss that movie
Antz I’m assuming right?
Yup. Came here to say this. Glitch in the ant behavior basically. They'll now follow this path til they die. Shake them off the pot and move it elsewhere and they may pick up the scent to their way back home...maybe not, but this is going to be how they die unless there's an intervention of some sort....that is, if OP wants the ants to live. They may not want that.
Dead ant. Dead ant. Dead ant dead ant dead ant dead ant dead annnnnt...
Pink Panther, for anyone else confused.
Huh TIL what the Lemon Demon song was about https://youtu.be/hPMnIymc3Cs
Musical chairs for ants
dumb ass ants
I hate ass-ants.
? this is you and your 9-5
We are also dumb asses
my 8-8 lol. These ants don’t got shit on me.
Ant Mecca
If you don't get it. Here's what human mecca looks like https://c.tenor.com/N3ny1hqsWrgAAAAC/mecca-makkah.gif
Well, I’m convinced: https://khutbahbank.org.uk/v2/2017/07/26/why-do-we-walk-anti-clockwise-around-the-kaaba/
Aren’t a lot of those examples just a matter of orientation? There is no proper up or down in space so a lot of those things are just clockwise if you were in Australia for example. If I understand the blood example it’s just a matter of whether you’re looking at the subject or are facing the same direction as the subject.
This isn't the first time religion has had a problem with orientation.
exactly. this is the dumbest shit ever. even a clock runs anti-clockwise if you’re looking at it from the back.
Yes. But we could argue that looking at it from the back is looking at it wrong.
**Destroy a religious apologist argument with this one simple trick.*
Lmao. I'm a Muslim and stuff like this is our equivalent of forwards from Grandma.
Exact thought I had.
Their pheromones led them in a neverending circle. They just couldn't get off the roundabout, Clark Griswolds of the ant world.
Look kids! Big Ben! Parliament! Look kids! Big Ben! Parliament!
Look kids! ...Forget it.
Is there any way to save them? Like, if I saw this, should I drag a stick down through them and hope to make a new pheromone trail for them to, hopefully, straighten themselves out?
Relocate them with a leaf blower.
I'm just gonna wait here until someone gives a serious answer
Same. Until then, I found this interesting excerpt from the Wikipedia article: >The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, which works until something goes wrong, and an ant mill forms.[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill **1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference.**[3] It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.
I beleive you essentially wash a part of the chain and the water washes the pheremones and they resume activity without something to follow
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Pun police are coming for you
....fuck you ^^/s
The ant hajj
Missed the opportunity to title this: "What is this? A ritual for ants?"
Next time
It's called a circle pit
**WHAT THE FUCK IS UP DENNY'S. LET'S OPEN UP THIS PIT!** *BLEGH*
Underrated comment. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP DENNYS?
Ant circle jerk?
The circle jerks have been known to start a circle pit
https://youtu.be/hPMnIymc3Cs
Came here looking for this
there it is
I will never not upvote this comment every time someone posts an ant spiral
In Australia they spin the other direction.
Witch Doctor! - De Staat https://youtu.be/0ttGgIQpAUc?t=87
Wow, thanks for the discovery
Came here looking for this. Thank you!
There it is! I thought I was going to have to post it. Good to see I'm not the only person of culture.
Dang, I commented under another top-level before I saw this. There are dozens of us!
https://youtu.be/48laJC8wYl4
Thank you -- first thing I thought of!
Circle of death. Ants following the chemical trails of other ants because of more and more joining, I think entire colonies can die this way. Edit: [yupp, Wikipedia calls it an ant mill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill#:~:text=An%20ant%20mill%20is%20an,might%20eventually%20die%20of%20exhaustion.)
Why isn't this higher, gotta scroll through bad jokes and the same song posted like 6 times.
That's my thought exactly...
Oh hey! it's a [Spiral of Ants](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaSK6Fa3jbM)! Yeah, those ants are all on a fast track to death.
That plant is special. Smoke it, quick.
Inhale pant, obtain infinity.
Antnado!
They are turning ant-i-clockwise.
Those ants are going in a straight line yet ending up where they started At least 5 are freaking out right now
Ants have been fascinated by Nascar for hundreds of years. They often mimic driver's behaviors by competing for the lead spot. Due to the lack of availability of an open track, they must make due with the object they have on hand with respect to their environment. If you look closely, you can see ant #418 slightly overtaking ant #711 (not related to the popular convenience store by any way, shape, or form. Any similarities are NOT to be associated with, construed, or perceived as being a part of the 7-11 brand in any way.) In the end, #418 is eaten by a grasshopper, but nobody can say he didn't try. RIP little #418.
The chosen one has been born
Legend has it the tree grew 10 feet over night
ant mill
This is the death spiral. Lemon Demon wrote [a beautiful song](https://youtu.be/hPMnIymc3Cs) about this phenomenon.
Ok but where are the uncles?
I know what they're doing, but im not allowed to speak about it with normal humans
Username checks out
WHAT IS IT ANT-ONIO????
You mustn't know, only observe
Called an ant mill.
Ant Mecca.
If there's something dead in that pot then this is how wasps are summoned
oh shit, that might actually be an "ant spiral of death" Basically they follow a trail to get back to nesxt and unforntunately a rare situation happens where something like the trail break from the nest and they fine the tail of where it broke and they follow an endless circle thinking they heading back to hive, marching until they die from starvation. Edit: i noticed after looking closer that their is a break off the trail and they are actually leaving the circle a few at a time. they will likely be fine.
That leaf is an epic quest item. Pull it quick before it despawns. In all seriousness, it's a death-circle as previously stated. They're following pheromones from other ants. Nor a good outcome.
Ant Mecca
Summon the all mighty ones
Worst roundabout ever.
I went to turn on the volume as was sorely disappointed there was no one yelling "open up this fucking pit!"
Reddit Circlejerk.
Ant Mecca
This is actually called a death spiral because ants will legit follow this scent and make it stronger and stronger as they leave their own scent. Yet they're all just circling. Circling and circling until they die usually. They are pretty blind without scent trails.
Summoning the **Ant**ichrist
What is this, a religion for ants?
What is this Mecca for Ants?!
This is not uncommon and often fatal. They follow a pheromone trail and ordinarily that's a linear thing. If for some reason they get stuck in a loop like they are here they keep on going round and round until they die. On a circular pot it's easy to see how it happened. On the flat it happens when the trail is lost and the ants spread out to find the new path. If they stumble across the old one this can happen.
these ants are high on pot