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In this video, you can see virtual ants looking for food and carrying it to a central 'nest'. There are no group-level rules in the simulation: ants just walk following other ants, releasing a trail pheromone. They automatically recover food items as they step on them, and occasionally drop them based on how many ants they have around. In my simulations, dropping food halfway to the nest seems to increase the food yield of colonies when there are relatively low numbers of foragers.
I use agent-based simulations to explore hypotheses on the foraging dynamics of ants.
In such simulations, I recreate the behavior of ant colonies by manipulating properties of virtual individual entities, the 'ants', moving in a bidimensional world.
In a recent study, I developed simulations of army ants, which are somehow difficult to study in real life experiments. I used this approach to investigate a peculiar behavior of these ants, the temporary storage of prey in piles within foraging columns.
This behavior has fascinated generations of researchers since the early XX century, but its possible function is still unknown. The simulation approach allows formulating hypotheses to investigate in empirical, real-life experiments.
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