Abstract
When an ant dies within a nest, a worker ant carries its corpse away from the nest and drops it onto a pile known as an ant cemetery. These ant cemeteries form cluster patterns, and the dynamics of the corpse piles have been studied experimentally. The aim of the present study was to investigate how sensitivity to the presence of nest-mates would influence the corpse-carrying behaviour of ants, and how this would impact the dynamics of corpse pile clustering. This was achieved by developing an agent-based computational model in which simulated ‘ants’ (the agents) carry and drop ‘corpses’, resulting in the growth of the corpse pile. In the model, the probability of an ant dropping a corpse was tuned according to the presence or absence of nest-mates. The pile dynamics of the resulting model showed a partial match with the time series evolution of corpse piles observed with real ants in previous experimental studies. Although the switch of probabilities is a thought experiment, our results suggest that the corpse-carrying behaviour of worker ants might be influenced by interactions with their nest-mates because there is evidence that ant behaviour can be influenced by encounter rates.
Highlights
Www.nature.com/scientificreports of worker ants are facilitated and regulated by interactions with nest-mates, and this can contribute to the collective behaviours of colonies[18,19]
This study investigated the growth of ant corpse piles by developing an agent-based model
The resulting model reproduced phenomena observed in the pile growth of real ants[13]
Summary
Www.nature.com/scientificreports of worker ants are facilitated and regulated by interactions with nest-mates, and this can contribute to the collective behaviours of colonies[18,19]. Simulations, such as agent-based computational models, have been widely used to investigate the collective behaviours and decision-making processes of insects, including ants[24,25,26,27,28] This methodology has been applied to the formation of ant cemeteries, with the development of an activator–substrate model, a complex function describing the time evolution of a local cluster of corpses[13]. The aim of this study was to develop an agent-based model that describes the growth of ant corpse piles It hypothesises two criteria for determining whether an ant drops the corpse it is carrying: the ant encounters more than a threshold number of corpses, and there is at least one nest–mate present locally. The results of this model were in agreement with aspects of those found in experimental studies of ant cemeteries
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