How do they know to stop building and to not have a 10 meter high ant colony?
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As someone else has stated, the size of an ant mound/nest is mostly dependent on the population size vs available resources for the population which sustains the nest growth.
However, it is a fair bit more interesting than that. The way ants build their nests is dependent on the behavior of other ants as well as environmental cues. Population density, type of material, proximity to light or open air, the way other ants are building, pheromones, etc, are all important variables. They are able to “decide” the size of the nest according to the size of the population because the more ants there are, the more interactions there are between individuals that drive the collective need for more space. So the size of the nest is more of an emergent phenomena arising from interactions between nestmates and the environment that cascade into the final “output”, i.e. the nest. The complex architectural designs of ant nests operate on the same principles, but would be more difficult to simplify. The whole process is known as stigmergy.
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