Programme

L.6.1 -- Lecture, ANSWCCMS-2023

Date: Tuesday, 7 November 2023

Time: 15:00 - 16:00

Modeling the movement of weaver ants

Michael Smith

Suranaree University of Technology, Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand

The weaver ants of tropical Asia are notable for exhibiting complex, highly-coordinated motion: hundreds of individuals work together to construct (i.e. weave) tree nests by bending and gluing broad leaves. They also build 'living bridges', out of the bodies of many ants, that the colony uses to traverse gaps. Since these feats require sophisticated communication on multiple length scales, the weaver ant has attracted research interest in many fields as an example of a complex biosystem. As a first step towards understanding basic features of one-to-one communication, we tracked the motion of weaver ant individuals and pairs in a featureless, unfamiliar environment and then developed an appropriate model of the algorithm that the ant uses to directs its motion. The model, based on Langevin theory of Brownian motion, described all qualitative features of their motion with minimal parameters. For example, the tendency of ants to remain near arena boundaries was explained as a property of bounded stochastic motion--usually, this tendency is attributed to specific wall-following adapted behavior among ants. The motion of pairs was studied to look for any trace of a leader-follower dynamic, but we found that movement was strictly egalitarian. New to the field, our approach was to make no assumption about ant intentions or behavior and to study movement like a condensed matter many-body system.

Presenter: Michael Smith