How does ants know where to find food? And how do they get on like 6th floor of an apartment
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They don’t. They pull a *successful* Hansel and Gretel, and wander far and wide while leaving a trail of pheromones. Once they accidentally find something, they follow that trail back and tell their ant buddies and they all follow that trail back to the food.
It’s probably not actually completely accidental, there’s likely some amount of searching in a pattern for completeness, and/or returning to areas where food has been found before. It’s pretty cool that nature can put all the programming of an entire roomba in a container that small.
There’s two super cool videos that were on Reddit recently about this.
1. One, a guy lets the ant find a nut, then picks it up while it’s away. When the ant comes back with friends they are all very confused.
2. In the other video, ants have crossed their own pheromone trail at some point and lost the real one that continues forward or back so they’re just marching in a circle until they die of exhaustion. The nut one is a little cuter. At least they’re just starving them a little in that one.
As to how they get 6 floors up, I figure there’s two possibilities and I can’t tell you which is more likely.
1. They just accidentally wandered that far.
2. They live somewhere in the building higher than ground level. Quite possibly in the walls, they seem to be full of all other kinds of bugs.
3. EDIT TO ADD OPTION #3: they came in on your flowers
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