The Physics of Ants [video]

When I posted this I also had a thought that despite taking standard metrics of viscosity, elasticity, etc. it seems like it would be very difficult to model something like a glob of ants since each ant is obviously a lot more complex than a molecule. Perhaps, as a material scientist, you could speak to the difficulty of doing this?

Is their sense of orientation really that great? In your simulation, when a wandering ant finds food, it heads right back to the anthill in a straight line. All I know from this is from reading about Feynman's experiments, but what he says seems to be more realistic:

One question that I wondered about was why the ant trails look so straight and nice. The ants look as if they know what they're doing, as if they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to demonstrate their sense of geom­etry didn't work. Many years later, when I was at Caltech … some ants came out around the bath­tub… I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub… The moment the ant found the sugar, I picked up a colored pencil … and behind where the ant went I drew a line so I could tell where his trail was. The ant wandered a little bit wrong to get back to the hole, so the line was quite wiggly, unlike a typical ant trail.

When the next ant to find the sugar began to go back, I marked his trail with another color… he followed the first ant's return trail back, rather than his own incoming trail. (My theory is that when an ant has found some food, he leaves a much stronger trail than when he's just wandering around.) This second ant was in a great hurry and followed, pretty much, the original trail. But because he was going so fast he would go straight out, as if he were coasting, when the trail was wiggly. Often, as the ant was "coasting," he would find the trail again. Already it was apparent that the second ant's return was slightly straighter. With successive ants the same "improvement" of the trail by hurriedly and carelessly "following" it occurred. I followed eight or ten ants with my pencil until their trails became a neat line right along the bathtub.

Look to the end of the video -- these sorts of studies could tell us more about making interesting new materials or perhaps small robots that can behave similarly when clumped together.