Natures wonders: ant food foraging (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 17, 2024, 19:54 (4 days ago) @ David Turell

Latest study:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241116195633.htm

"Researchers have discovered that in a foraging ant's search for food, it will leave pheromone trails connecting its colony to multiple food sources when they're available, successfully creating the first model that explains the phenomenon of trail formation to multiple food sources.

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"A team of Florida State University researchers led by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Bhargav Karamched has discovered that in a foraging ant's search for food, it will leave pheromone trails connecting its colony to multiple food sources when they're available, successfully creating the first model that explains the phenomenon of trail formation to multiple food sources.

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"'In this case, we uncovered something that hasn't been described well by other models: if an ant has access to multiple food sources from its nest, it will initially make multiple trails to each of the sources."

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"Foraging for resources is an essential process for the daily life of an ant colony, and ants will self-organize using chemical pheromones. Once an ant detects a food source, it secretes a chemical trail to lead other ants to the source. Using computational simulations of ants searching for food, stochastic modeling and a system of partial-differential equations, the researchers also observed that over time, ants will selectively travel to the food source that is the shortest distance from its nest in an environment with multiple sources.

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"'For this research, we divided the ants into two subpopulations: foragers and returners," Karamched said. "These subpopulations behave differently, as foragers tend to wander around in search of food while returners always return directly to the nest after finding food, making their motion less stochastic or random. This allows us to predict with 100 percent certainty what they're doing or where they would go."

"The team, including collaborator Shawn Ryan, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Cleveland State University, considered the concentration of chemical pheromones that the ants secreted, signaling to other ants where food is. The probability of their models was based on the dynamics of these pheromones. The returning ants would secrete less pheromones depending on how close the food source was to the nest. More pheromones created a stronger scent for the ants to follow, a critical factor when the food source is located far from the nest.

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"'The framework for analyzing this collective behavior resides in the fundamental pheromone concentration gradient, then working from there," Karamched said. "From a microbial level to complex organisms, using this chemical signaling to communicate allows certain organisms to coordinate activity on huge spatial scales, which is fascinating.'"

Comment: the use of pheromones in all of nature is quite wide spread. The last comment above really applies.