✦ LIBER ✦

Self-organized Criticality in Ant Brood Tending

✍ Scribed by D.V. O'TOOLE; P.A. ROBINSON; M.R. MYERSCOUGH

Publisher: Elsevier Science
Year: 2003
Tongue: English
Weight: 287 KB
Volume: 221
Category: Article
ISSN: 0022-5193
DOI: 10.1006/jtbi.2003.3046

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

A new stochastic lattice gas model of ant brood tending is formulated to examine the role played by repulsive ant-ant interactions in the even distribution of care among brood members. The deterministic limit of the model is known to be self-organized critical. Numerical simulations of the model show that the ant-ant repulsion facilitates an even distribution of brood care in the middle of the brood. This provides a possible explanation for the fact that ants sort their brood so that the youngest brood (which are most in need of care) are placed in the middle. Simulations show that the uniformity of brood care distribution is optimal when ants operate in a regime intermediate between completely random and completely deterministic. A certain degree of randomness helps ants to avoid becoming trapped in suboptimal configurations but does not destroy the long-range correlations that are inherent to self-organized critical systems.

📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES

Evidence of self-organized criticality i

Evidence of self-organized criticality in insect populations

✍ Dale R. Lockwood; Jeffrey A. Lockwood 📂 Article 📅 1997 🏛 John Wiley and Sons 🌐 English ⚖ 140 KB

Self-organized criticality (SOC) occurs in systems consisting of a substrate or medium which can be locally stressed to a critical state. When the critical threshold is exceeded, the stress is distributed to the neighborhood around the locale, which can lead to critical states in the neighboring loc

Self-organized Criticality in Spatial Ev

Self-organized Criticality in Spatial Evolutionary Game Theory

✍ Timothy Killingback; Michael Doebeli 📂 Article 📅 1998 🏛 Elsevier Science 🌐 English ⚖ 211 KB

Self-organized criticality is an important framework for understanding the emergence of scale-free natural phenomena. Cellular automata provide simple interesting models in which to study self-organized criticality. We consider the dynamics of a new class of cellular automata which are constructed a

SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY IN CLOSED ECO

SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY IN CLOSED ECOSYSTEMS: CARBON DIOXIDE FLUCTUATIONS IN BIOSPHERE 2

✍ CRONISE, RAYMOND J.; NOEVER, DAVID A.; BRITIAN, ANDREW 📂 Article 📅 1996 🏛 John Wiley and Sons 🌐 English ⚖ 481 KB

A little understood question in climate and ecological modelling is when a system appropriately can be considered in statistical equilibrium or quasi-steady state. The answer bears on a host of central issues, including the ability of small perturbations to cause large catastrophes, the constant dri

Self-Organized Criticality and Emergent

Self-Organized Criticality and Emergent Oscillations in Models of Termite Architecture with Crowding

✍ D.V. O'TOOLE; P.A. ROBINSON; M.R. MYERSCOUGH 📂 Article 📅 2003 🏛 Elsevier Science 🌐 English ⚖ 299 KB

The termite architecture model of O'Toole et'al. (1999) is extended to incorporate arbitrary halting time-scales. It is shown that this also means that the assumption of synchronous building must be relaxed. Numerical simulations show that ordered nest architecture emerges under a wide range of time

Self-organized Criticality in Termite Ar

Self-organized Criticality in Termite Architecture: a Role for Crowding in Ensuring Ordered Nest Expansion

✍ D.V. O'Toole; P.A. Robinson; M.R. Myerscough 📂 Article 📅 1999 🏛 Elsevier Science 🌐 English ⚖ 326 KB

A cellular automaton model of the vertical and lateral growth that occurs in a termite nest expansion is formulated. The model consists of a lattice of building sites permeated by a trail network of termites. Termites are recruited from the network to build at these sites by an attractive pheromone