Modeling tropotaxis in ant colonies: recruitment and trail formation

Abstract

We propose an active walker model for the motion of individual ants communicating via chemical signals. It is assumed that communication takes the form of a time-dependent pheromone field that feedbacks into the motion ants through tropotaxis: individuals can sense the gradient of the pheromone concentration field and adjust their orientation accordingly. The individual model takes the form of a Langevin system of equations in polar coordinates driven by two-dimensional Gaussian fluctuations and with orientation changes in response to two pheromone fields: one emanating from the nest, and other actively produced by ants in their nest-bound journey after finding a food source. We explicitly track the evolution of both fields in three dimensions. The proposed tropotaxis model relating the pheromone field to the orientation changes is similar to Weber's law, but depends explicitly only on the gradient of the pheromone concentration. We identify ranges of values for the model parameters that yield the emergence of two key foraging patterns: successful recruitment to newly found sources, and colony-wide trail networks.