World of the Bizarre

Video surfaces of ants circling an iPhone

By T.K. Randall
September 6, 2015

Image: Red Ant
Credit: William Cho / CC BY-SA 2.0 (adapted) At the beginning of the footage the ants can be seen running around haphazardly without any obvious pattern, but when the iPhone starts to ring the insects suddenly form a circle around it.

Since appearing online the video has attracted a great deal of attention with Internet users speculating over what might be responsible for the ants' behavior.

One possibility is that the insects are sensitive to the phone's electromagnetic radiation."[Ants] have magnetic receptors in their antennae," said Nigel Andrew from the University of New England. "If they're traveling long distances they use magnetic cues from the earth to know if they are going north, east, south or west."

Social insect specialist Simon Robson from James Cook University however has played down this theory in favor of the idea that ants are simply prone to circling around things and that they could have been doing this whether the mobile phone was ringing or not.

Entomologist Sanford Porter meanwhile has suggested that the ants are following each other's "trail pheromone" and that in this case these chemicals happen to have formed a circlular pattern.

There is also the possibility that the video might simply be little more than a clever hoax.


Source: Independent

Tags: Ants, Phone