A video capturing a swarm of ants encircling a speaker playing AC/DC has rapidly gained popularity on TikTok and Instagram, accumulating a staggering 124 million views within a mere two days with many wanting to know if the death spiral video is real or fake
Shared on Gabriel Benício’s TikTok account on January 24, 2024, the footage spurred widespread speculation regarding its authenticity, with many questioning whether it was a genuine occurrence or a skillfully edited trick.
Is the ants AC/DC song speaker circle death spiral video real or fake as it goes viral on TikTok
🐜@MrJgCilver 🐜 An ant mill is a small group of army ants away from the other ants. They lose the pheromone track and begin to follow each other, making a spinning circle. This circle is also known as a "death spiral" because the ants will eventually die of exhaustion. People… pic.twitter.com/bSfeGln7o6
— 𝓚𝓪𝓩 🦋 (@kaz122780668465) January 27, 2024
What’s the Death Spiral Video About?
In the initial TikTok post, the video portrays a colony of ants forming a circle around a blue JBL speaker, resonating with the dynamic guitar riffs of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”
While the video amassed over 15.8 million likes and 134.6k comments on TikTok, subsequent investigations revealed it to be a well-crafted CGI creation by the video’s originator, Gabriel Benício.
Death Spiral Video’s Authenticity
In a separate TikTok upload, Benício demonstrated the meticulous editing techniques employed in fabricating the original video.
Despite the video’s artificial nature, it mirrors a real phenomenon observed in nature known as the “death spiral,” where ants instinctively circulate in loops when disrupted from their intended path.
The term “death spiral” was coined based on the documented behavior of ants going in continuous circles until exhaustion leads to their demise.
The original observation of this phenomenon dates back to the 1930s when animal psychologist T C Schneirla recorded the first instance.
Ants, being communal creatures, navigate in large colonies and rely on scent rather than sight to locate food. If the leader gets displaced, the ants can inadvertently form a circular procession, perpetuating this behavior until exhaustion claims their lives—a phenomenon referred to as an ant mill.
While the intricacies of why ants exhibit this behavior remain incompletely understood, it is reminiscent of the broader challenge of discerning truth from falsehood on the internet.
Social media, as exemplified by the rapid dissemination of fake news, can become a breeding ground for misinformation.
Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led a study on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, revealing that false information tends to spread faster due to its novelty and the varied emotional responses it evokes.
The prevalence of viral fake videos is not a new occurrence, as evidenced by prior instances such as the 2023 TikTok sensation featuring a man extracting a giant lawn worm from a drain and the 2021 viral video depicting two bees seemingly collaborating to unscrew a soda bottle cap.
So, I was told that the video of ants death spiral I quoted could be vfx. That's why I decided to being a real life video of it.
These aren't ants would not stop till die unless rain, heavy wind or human influence stops them https://t.co/mmbELtkBCZ pic.twitter.com/QZEWLFwRci
— Arojinle (@arojinle1) January 25, 2024
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