Anant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants, separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. This circle is commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and in ant colony simulations.[1]
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 a slight deviation begins to occur, typically by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms.[2] An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference.[3] It took each ant two and a half hours to make one revolution.[3] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.[4]
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