Related papers: Ants as Fluids: Physics-Inspired Biology
The motion of social insects is often used a paradigmatic example of complex adaptive dynamics arising from decentralized individual behavior. In this paper we revisit the topic of the ruling laws behind burst of activity in ants. The…
Condensed active matter is exemplary for its capacity to morph and exhibit internal flows despite remaining cohered. To facilitate understanding of this ability, we investigate the cause of finger-like protrusions that emerge from…
In this work we studied the trajectories, velocities and densities of ants when egressing under controlled levels of stress produced by a chemical repellent at different concentrations. We found that, unlike other animals escaping under…
We develop the hydrodynamic theory of dry, polar ordered, active matter (``flocking") with autochemotaxis; i.e., self-propelled entities moving in the same direction, each emitting a substance which attracts the others (e.g., ants). We find…
Motivated by recent experimental work of Burd et al., we propose a model of bi-directional ant-traffic on pre-existing ant-trails. It captures in a simple way some of the generic collective features of movements of real ants on a trail.…
Using elementary distributed computing techniques we suggest an explanation for two unexplained phenomena in regards to ant colonies, (a) a substantial amount of ants in an ant colony are idle, and (b) the observed low survivability of new…
Collective motion by animal groups is affected by internal interactions, external constraints and the influx of information. A quantitative understanding of how these different factors give rise to different modes of collective motion is,…
We report experimental results on unidirectional traffic-like collective movement of ants on trails. Our work is primarily motivated by fundamental questions on the collective spatio-temporal organization in systems of interacting motile…
Many insects like ants communicate chemically via chemotaxis. This allows them to build large trail systems which in many respects are similar to human-build highway networks. Using a recently proposed stochastic cellular automaton model we…
Locomotion emerges from effective interactions of an individual with its environment. Principles of biological terrestrial locomotion have been discovered on unconfined vertical and horizontal substrates. However a diversity of organisms…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…
The unique ability of fire ants to form a raft to survive flooding rain has enchanted biologists as well as researchers in other disciplines. It has been established during the last decade that an aggregation of fire ants exhibits…
Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) cohesively aggregate via the formation of voluntary ant-to-ant attachments when under confinement or exposed to water. Once formed, these aggregations act as viscoelastic solids due to dynamic bond exchange…
Branched flow governs the transition from ballistic to diffusive motion of waves and conservative particle flows in spatially correlated random or complex environments. It occurs in many physical systems from micrometer to interstellar…
There is great potential if we understand how nature functions, particularly the animals taking down from the ant to the larger animals. In this paper we will make an attempt to learn about ants colonization processing by studying their…
In this study, we synthesize a novel dynamical approach for ant colonies enabling them to migrate to new nest sites in a self-organizing fashion. In other words, we realize ant colony migration as a self-organizing phenotype-level…
Under certain circumstances, a swarm of a species of trail-laying ants known as army ants can become caught in a doomed revolving motion known as the death spiral, in which each ant follows the one in front of it in a never-ending loop…
Swarm intelligence is widely recognized as a powerful paradigm of self-organized optimization, with numerous examples of successful applications in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the role of physical interactions in the…
We investigate the organization of traffic flow on preexisting uni- and bidirectional ant trails. Our investigations comprise a theoretical as well as an empirical part. We propose minimal models of uni- and bi-directional traffic flow…
For any system, whether physical or non-physical, knowledge of the form and strength of inter-individual interactions is a key-information. In an approach based on statistical physics one needs to know the interaction Hamiltonian. For…