Lecheval, V., Robinson, E.J.H. and Mann, R.P. orcid.org/0000-0003-0701-1274 (2024) Random walks with spatial and temporal resets can explain individual and colony-level searching patterns in ants. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 21 (216). 20240149. ISSN 1742-5689
Abstract
Central place foragers, such as many ants, exploit the environment around their nest. The extent of their foraging range is a function of individual movement, but how the movement patterns of large numbers of foragers result in an emergent colony foraging range remains unclear. Here, we introduce a random walk model with stochastic resetting to depict the movements of searching ants. Stochastic resetting refers to spatially resetting at random times the position of agents to a given location, here the nest of searching ants. We investigate the effect of a range of resetting mechanisms and compare the macroscopic predictions of our model to laboratory and field data. We find that all returning mechanisms very robustly ensure that scouts exploring the surroundings of a nest will be exponentially distributed with distance from the nest. We also find that a decreasing probability for searching ants to return to their nest is compatible with empirical data, resulting in scouts going further away from the nest as the number of foraging trips increases. Our findings highlight the importance of resetting random walk models for depicting the movements of central place foragers and nurture novel questions regarding the searching behaviour of ants.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | resetting random walks; collective behaviour; animal movements; central place foraging; social insects |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Statistics (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number MRC (Medical Research Council) MR/S032525/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Jun 2024 09:14 |
Last Modified: | 05 Aug 2024 11:49 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | The Royal Society |
Identification Number: | 10.1098/rsif.2024.0149 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:213225 |