Hobbies And Interests
The Ant Community
When you see ants on the march, ants milling around their nests or ants engaged in a mighty war, you almost certainly are seeing females. Female ants overwhelmingly outnumber males, whose sole function is to breed with the queen, after which they normally die. For her part, the queen's sole function is to lay thousands of eggs, the more the better, as a nest's survival often depends on having a large population.
Feeding Themselves
There are, of course, many thousands of species of ant, and they don't all eat the same things. But the ants that you're likely to find in your neighborhood normally live on a diet of seeds, fungi or even other insects. Specialized, wingless workers search randomly for food. When a source is found, they return to the nest with a sample and alert their fellow ants to the discovery.
Communication
The ant that found the food needed also to find its way home and to mark the trail back to where more food can be found. It accomplishes that by secreting a powerful chemical attractor called a pheromone. There are many different types of pheromones, not all of them are purposed for route-finding, and they are so specialized that one pheromone marks the way to the food and another marks the way back to the nest. Once a route to the food is established, the worker ants continually secrete more of the pheromones to reinforce the trail.
When the Trail is Broken
Most commonly, when you see ants marching in single file -- look closely because some ants are traveling in one direction and some in the opposite direction -- they are marching to or from their food source. But if you see one ant or more moving in what looks like a circle, the likelihood is that somehow, perhaps after a heavy rain or a pheromone-marked leaf along the route got blown away, the pheromone trail has been broken. The ants are hunting for the missing trail, and it may be that in their search one or more of them marches in a circle trying to find the scent.