Qiao Liang
(University of New Mexico,Department of Mathematics and Statistics)

06/07/11, 15:30 at Room 3631 (6th floor of building 3 of the Faculty of Sciences)

Eciton burchelli are a unique species of army ants that demonstrate distinct swarm behavior. These ants have extremely poor eyesight, and therefore, they depend on the distribution and tracking of pheromone significantly in order to survive. A simulated ant world is created in this project to observe the ants’ reactions to different initial food distributions, and to determine the stability of their swarm patterns. The goal of this project is to recover the swarm behavior observed in nature using the simplest possible behavioral rules, and to investigate the impact of intensity and direction of the pheromone trails on the emergent behavior of ants through simulations. Several cases including a single food source, multiple food sources, and perturbations to the multiple food sources implemented by randomly placing barriers over established trails, are studied in this project. In addition, a modified Fisher’s equation is proposed to demonstrate ant swarm behavior. This equation has a traveling wave solution that integrates the logistic growth and the diffusion of the ants’ population density, and it incorporates the fact of pheromone trail drift and loss of population during a swarm.

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