Walk This Way: Modeling Foraging Ant Dynamics in Multiple Food Source Environments

Abstract

Foraging for resources is an essential process for the daily life of an ant colony. What makes this process so fascinating is the self-organization of ants into trails using chemical pheromone in the absence of direct communication. Here we present a stochastic lattice model that captures essential features of foraging ant dynamics inspired by recent agent-based models while forgoing more detailed interactions that may not be essential to trail formation. Nevertheless, our model's results coincide with those presented in more sophisticated theoretical models and experiment. Furthermore, it captures the phenomenon of multiple trail formation in environments with multiple food sources. This latter phenomenon is not described well by other more detailed models. An additional feature of this approach is the ability to derive a corresponding macroscopic PDE from the stochastic lattice model which can be described via first principle interactions and is amenable to analysis. Linear stability analysis of this PDE reveals the key biophysical parameters that give rise to trail formation. We also highlight universal features of the modeling framework that this simple formation may allow it to be used to study complex systems beyond ants.