Emerging patterns and food recruitment in ants: an analytical study

A model of food recruitment by social insects accounting for the competitio n between trails in the presence of an arbitrary number of sources is devel oped and analysed in detail. Both the case of identical environmental chara cteristics and the case where one source and the corresponding trail are di fferent from the others are considered. Different collective responses depe nding on the environmental conditions, and without change of individual beh aviour, are shown to exist, associated with the possibility that the colony may be led to exploit one source or a group of sources preferentially. The full bifurcation diagram of steady-state solutions is constructed from whi ch the dominant exploitation patterns are identified. The biological releva nce of the results is discussed and suggestions are made for their experime ntal testing in connection with the recruitment behavior of species using t rail recruitment. The same phenomenological model can be used for different trail-laying species since the predictions are generic and not restricted to a given species, except for the parameter values used. (C) 1999 Academic Press.