Engineering Commons^™

Detection Of Pheromone Laying Event In Foraging Data Of Harvester Ants Using Change Point Analysis Method, Safeeul Bashir Safee

Computer Science ETDs

Communication is an important factor in the foraging performance of social insects, such as ants. During foraging, ants keep track of food sources by using memory (site fidelity) or by communicating through pheromones. Previous field experiments showed that the rate of seed collection depends on the distribution of food in the environment. If food is spatially clustered, then it is beneficial for ants recruit nest mates to collect seeds from large clusters. However, we do not know when the recruitment occurs in natural ant population. To explore this question, we used a power law distribution to arrange seeds in piles …