Berlin 2024 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 4: Collective Dynamics

SOE 4.1: Talk

Monday, March 18, 2024, 15:00–15:15, MA 001

Resetting random walks may underlie movements of foraging ants — •Valentin Lecheval^1,2,4, Elva JH Robinson³, and Richard P Mann⁴ — ¹Institute for Theoretical Biology, Department of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany — ²Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Berlin, Germany — ³Department of Biology, University of York, York, UK — ⁴School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Animals that carry resources back to a particular site are called central place foragers, and they generally have a nest to which they bring resources. 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 are a great opportunity to study the emergence of foraging territory from individual movements, given the potentially large number of scouting workers involved. Here, we introduce a resetting random walk model to depict ant exploration movements. We investigate various resetting mechanisms by varying how the probability to return to the nest changes with the number of foraging trips. We compare the macroscopic predictions to laboratory and field data. This reveals that the probability for scouting ants to return to their nest decreases as the number of foraging trips increases, resulting in scouts going further away as the number of foraging trips increases. Our findings highlight the importance of resetting random walk models for central place foragers and nurtures novel questions regarding the behaviour of ants.

Keywords: resetting random walks; collective behaviour; animal movements; central place foraging; ants