How do ants selectively travel to the food source that is the shortest distance from their nests?

Researchers have discovered that in a foraging ant’s search for food, it will leave pheromone trails connecting its colony to multiple food sources when they are available, successfully creating the first model that explains the phenomenon of trail formation to multiple food sources. Foraging for resources is an essential process for the daily life of an ant colony, and ants will self-organize using chemical pheromones. Once an ant detects a food source, it secretes a chemical trail to lead other ants to the source. Using computational simulations of ants searching for food, stochastic modeling and a system of partial-differential equations, the researchers also observed that over time, ants will selectively travel to the food source that is the shortest distance from its nest in an environment with multiple sources. “It was so cool to see how equidistant food sources could maintain multiple food trails as an equilibrium. If one food source was just slightly closer to the ants’ nest, the ants would eventually form one singular trail to the closest source,” Florida State University researcher Bhargav Karamched said in a release.