Model of Droplet Dynamics in the Argentine Ant Linepithema Humile(Mayr)

Abstract

The formation of droplets of ants Linepithema humile (Mayr) is observed under certain experimental conditions: a fluctuating aggregate forms at the end of a rod and a droplet containing up to 40 ants eventually falls down. When the flux of incoming ants is sufficient, this process can continue for several hours, leading to the formation and fall of tens of droplets. Previous work indicates that the time series of drop-to-drop intervals may result from a nonlinear low-dimensional dynamics, and the interdrop increments exhibit long-range anticorrelations. A model of aggregation and droplet formation, based on experimental observations, is introduced and shown to reproduce these properties.

Self-organized structures in a superorganism: do ants “behave” like molecules?

“…1(d)). When the flux of incoming ants is sufficiently high, this process of droplets' fallings can continue for hours [120]. The magnitude of these displacements (i.e.…”

Hierarchical Summarisation of Video Using Ant-Tree Strategy

“…The work presented in this paper builds on generic AntTree Strategy, inspired by self-assembling behavior of ants and their ability to build mechanical structures. These types of self-assembly behavior have been observed with Linepithema humiles Argentina ants and African ants of gender Oecophylla longinoda [16]. These colonies of ants exhibit a clear size distribution of workers and they also vary in color from reddish to yellowish brown dependent on the species.…”

“…Frames are able of changing a previous assigned location in the tree structure and consequently they can be reallocated in an other, more adequate group. This procedure is inspired by real ants behaviour in formation of drops, where each ant can be detached from the tree or whole drop can sometimes fall down [16]. This iterative process considers each frame in the tree structure be evaluated in order to deciding if it should be disconnected from the tree or not.…”

Texture Segmentation using Ant Tree Clustering

“…These types of self-assembly behaviors have been observed with Linepithema humles Argentina ants and African ants of gender Oecophylla longinoda. This ability has been recently experimentally demonstrated in [7]. Ants exhibit self-assembling behavior by building the treelike structure from a fixed support, which could be a stem or a leaf.…”

“…Based on its similarity with the ants already attached to the root, the ants move and attach themselves to the tree. This behavior has been demonstrated in [7] and used in [8] to estimate the number of clusters a given data can be partitioned into. In this work, the number of partitions is fixed to the actual number of clusters present in the data.…”