When ants go exploring in search of food they end up choosing
collective routes that fit statistical distributions of probability. This has
been demonstrated by a team of mathematicians after analysing the trails of a
species of Argentine ant. Studies like this could be applied to coordinate the
movement of micro-robots in cleaning contaminated areas for example.
Scientists have yet to discover the mechanisms explaining
how flocks of birds, shoals of fish, lines of ants and other complex natural
systems organise themselves so well when moving collectively.
To tackle this problem, researchers from Spain and the U.S.
have analysed the movements of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile, an invasive
species in many parts of the world) while they forage or explore an empty space
(a petri dish) and propose a model explaining how they form their routes.
The authors, whose study has been published in the journal
Mathematical Biosciences, started by observing the behaviour of ants
individually and subsequently as a collective group. They recorded all their
movements and based on these experiments, detected that the random changes in
the direction of the insects follow mathematical patterns.
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