Department of Information Systems Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Soka University, Tokyo, 192-8577, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2020 Feb 11;10(1):2344. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-59202-0.
When an ant dies within a nest, a worker ant carries its corpse away from the nest and drops it onto a pile known as an ant cemetery. These ant cemeteries form cluster patterns, and the dynamics of the corpse piles have been studied experimentally. The aim of the present study was to investigate how sensitivity to the presence of nest-mates would influence the corpse-carrying behaviour of ants, and how this would impact the dynamics of corpse pile clustering. This was achieved by developing an agent-based computational model in which simulated 'ants' (the agents) carry and drop 'corpses', resulting in the growth of the corpse pile. In the model, the probability of an ant dropping a corpse was tuned according to the presence or absence of nest-mates. The pile dynamics of the resulting model showed a partial match with the time series evolution of corpse piles observed with real ants in previous experimental studies. Although the switch of probabilities is a thought experiment, our results suggest that the corpse-carrying behaviour of worker ants might be influenced by interactions with their nest-mates because there is evidence that ant behaviour can be influenced by encounter rates.
当一只蚂蚁在蚁巢中死亡时，工蚁会将其尸体从蚁巢中取出，并将其丢弃在一个被称为蚁冢的堆积物上。这些蚁冢形成了集群模式，尸体堆积的动态已经过实验研究。本研究的目的是调查蚂蚁对同伴存在的敏感性如何影响它们的尸体搬运行为，以及这将如何影响尸体堆积的集群动态。这是通过开发一个基于代理的计算模型来实现的，在该模型中，模拟的“蚂蚁”（代理）携带并丢弃“尸体”，从而导致尸体堆积的增长。在该模型中，根据是否有同伴存在，调整蚂蚁丢弃尸体的概率。结果模型的堆积动态与之前实验研究中观察到的真实蚂蚁尸体堆积的时间序列演变有部分匹配。虽然这种概率的转换是一种思维实验，但我们的结果表明，工蚁的尸体搬运行为可能会受到与它们的蚁巢同伴的相互作用的影响，因为有证据表明蚂蚁的行为可以受到相遇率的影响。
