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Ants at the Wheel
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
Tom Vanderbilt, Knopf
Colonies of the army ant (Eciton burchelli) can number over 1 million inhabitants. Each morning, ants stream out by the hundreds of thousands in several wide corridors, hunting for food to carry back to their nest. While the task seems simple, all this coming and going poses a logistical problem: the ants encumbered with food threaten to snarl the whole operation by moving slower than the outbound ants.
Over thousands of years, the species has evolved a solution. Where traffic is densest, they lay a trail of pheromones for other ants to follow. Each corridor then organizes itself into a middle lane occupied by the slow ants, flanked on either side by the speedier ants headed in the opposite direction. Every now and then ants crash, causing a momentary delay, but on the whole the process is a marvel of coordination and efficiency.
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