I am still new to the Fediverse so please let me know if it is bad form to share one's own experiences in a topic like this one.
"We have seen that large groups of ants often outperform small ones by following the most direct path when transitioning between states" On a field trip to a local park, I encouraged my students to interact with Nature. One student with persistent allergies saw a two-way trail of ants crossing a sidewalk and decided to spit a gob of mucus on the sidewalk in the path of the ants. Surprisingly, instead of walking around of this small barrier, first one ant and then more and more ants began "attacking" the mucus and worked diligently to attempt to very painstakingly move this obstacle out of their path. No ants were trapped in the mucus. It was not long before a small army of ants joined in on the activity of breaking down the barrier which had appeared in their apparent food-pheromone trail. When we left the park 15 minutes later, there were more than two dozen ants which had come from the two sides of the original pheromone path blocked by the mucus, working away at chewing and removing the obstacle.