You’ll Never See An Ant In A Traffic Jam
by irms
You’ll never see an ant driving my MINI either. I might let Bruce drive, but never a leafcutter.
Day Drive
But research suggests that we have a lot to learn from ants. (If you’ve read Dadisms, you know there is something to learn from everything.) Ants organize themselves into separate and tightly-regulated streams of traffic when traveling — even on narrow paths.
If the ants behaved like we do when driving, they’d crash into eachother headfirst. But that never happens.
“They never get stuck in traffic,” said Audrey Dussutour, a University of Sydney entomologist. “We should use their rules. I’ve been working with ants for eight years, and have never seen a traffic jam — and I’ve tried.”
(I’m not going to address the part where he says he’s been working with ants for eight years. I know you’re all picturing ants in pant-suits strutting about your office, sipping coffee complaining about the weather. There’s an ant in the corner giggling and making Xeroxes of his mandibles. I am too. We’ll leave it there.)
Apprently, each ant gets “traffic updates” through pheromone trails and physical contact. In English, that means that just passing through in the ruckus, each ant is updated on the flow patterns and moves accordingly. For instance, the ants that were empty-mandibled, rather than passing their leaf-carrying, slow-moving brethren, they gathered in clusters and moved behind them.
Imagine that. Instead of passing the semi on the freeway, we all just get in line behind it and let it lead the way.
Gosh. I can’t even claim to be smarter than an ant. I zoom around the truck everytime.