Ants combine systematic meandering and correlated random walks when searching for unknown resources

Popp, Stefan

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.105916

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…And how does the age of the worker interfere with this probability, with older scouts maybe having a lower probability to return on average, that would allow them to explore further away than younger ones – the colony age structure therefore affecting the foraging area? Different movement [22, 49] or returning rules coexisting may also underlie a complex stationary distribution made of several distinct exponential distributions. These questions are important to understand better the emergence of foraging or searching area in an unknown environment in ants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Random walks with spatial and temporal resets may underlie searching movements in ants

Lecheval,

Robinson,

Mann

2024

Preprint

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Many ant species are central place foragers, living in a nest and exploiting the surrounding environment. It is however unclear how their exploration behaviour relates to the emerging exploited area. Ants provide a great opportunity to study the emergence of foraging range from individual movements, given the potentially large number of scouting workers involved. Here, we introduce a random walk model with stochastic resetting to depict the movements of searching ants. Stochastic resetting refers to spatially reset at random times the position of agents to a given location, here the nest of searching ants. We investigate the effect of a range of resetting mechanisms by changing how the probability of returning to the nest depends on the duration of unsuccessful foraging trips. We compare the macroscopic predictions of our model to laboratory and field data. We find that the probability for searching ants to return to their nest decreases as the number of foraging trips increases, resulting in scouts going further away from the nest as the number of foraging trips increases. Our findings highlight the importance of resetting random walk models to depict the movements of central place foragers and nurtures novel questions regarding the searching behaviour of ants.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The searching behaviour of ants has been investigated theoretically with models developed at the individual scale, but with little consideration for the associated emerging collective pattern, namely the foraging area [e.g. 22,23,29,30].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Random walks with spatial and temporal resets may underlie searching movements in ants

Lecheval,

Robinson,

Mann

2024

Preprint

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“…Foraging ants are those that are searching for a food source. They undergo a random walk modeled as a Brownian motion [21, 53]. That is, a foraging ant at a given site moves to any adjacent site in its Moore neighborhood with equal probability.…”

Section: Bio-inspired Lattice Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Walk This Way: Modeling Foraging Ant Dynamics in Multiple Food Source Environments

Hartman,

Ryan,

Karamched

2024

Preprint

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Foraging for resources is an essential process for the daily life of an ant colony. What makes this process so fascinating is the self-organization of ants into trails using chemical pheromone in the absence of direct communication. Here we present a stochastic lattice model that captures essential features of foraging ant dynamics inspired by recent agent-based models while forgoing more detailed interactions that may not be essential to trail formation. Nevertheless, our model's results coincide with those presented in more sophisticated theoretical models and experiment. Furthermore, it captures the phenomenon of multiple trail formation in environments with multiple food sources. This latter phenomenon is not described well by other more detailed models. An additional feature of this approach is the ability to derive a corresponding macroscopic PDE from the stochastic lattice model which can be described via first principle interactions and is amenable to analysis. Linear stability analysis of this PDE reveals the key biophysical parameters that give rise to trail formation. We also highlight universal features of the modeling framework that this simple formation may allow it to be used to study complex systems beyond ants.

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“…In central place foragers, who return to a fixed base like a nest between exploration trips, long-term search efficiency is mostly determined by how much individuals avoid already searched areas, balanced with how close they can stay to the nest to minimize return travel. One way of doing so, for example, is a regular meandering pattern [ 1 ]. For colonies of central place foragers like social insects, the success of individuals is additionally tied to that of the whole colony.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective search in ants: Movement determines footprints, and footprints influence movement

Popp,

Dornhaus

2024

PLoS ONE

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Collectively searching animals might be expected to coordinate with their groupmates to cover ground more evenly or efficiently than uncoordinated groups. Communication can lead to coordination in many ways. Previous work in ants suggests that chemical ‘footprints’, left behind by individuals as they walk, might serve this function by modulating the movement patterns of following ants. Here, we test this hypothesis by considering the two predictions that, first, ants may turn away from sites with higher footprint concentrations (klinotaxis), or, second, that they may change their turning patterns depending on the presence of footprints (klinokinesis). We tracked 5 whole colonies of Temnothorax rugatulus ants in a large arena over 5h. We approximated the footprint concentration by summing ant visitations for each point in the arena and calculated the speed and local path straightness for each point of the ant trajectories. We counterintuitively find that ants walk slightly faster and straighter in areas with fewer footprints. This is partially explained by the effect that ants who start out from the nest walking straighter move on average further away from the nest, where there are naturally fewer footprints, leading to an apparent relationship between footprint density and straightness However, ants walk slightly faster and straighter off footprints even when controlling for this effect. We tested for klinotaxis by calculating the footprint concentrations perceived by the left and right antennae of ants and found no evidence for a turning-away (nor turning-towards) behavior. Instead, we found noticeable effects of environmental idiosyncrasies on the behavior of ants which are likely to overpower any reactions to pheromones. Our results indicate that search density around an ant colony is affected by several independent processes, including individual differences in movement pattern, local spatial heterogeneities, and ants’ reactions to chemical footprints. The multitude of effects illustrates that non-communicative coordination, individual biases and interactions with the environment might have a greater impact on group search efficiency and exploratory movements than pheromone communication.

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Ants combine systematic meandering and correlated random walks when searching for unknown resources

Cited by 11 publications

References 69 publications

Random walks with spatial and temporal resets may underlie searching movements in ants

Random walks with spatial and temporal resets may underlie searching movements in ants

Walk This Way: Modeling Foraging Ant Dynamics in Multiple Food Source Environments

Collective search in ants: Movement determines footprints, and footprints influence movement

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