Random walks with spatial and temporal resets may underlie searching movements in ants

Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWMany ant species are central place foragers, living in a nest and exploiting the surrounding environment. It is however unclear how their exploration behaviour relates to the emerging exploited area. Ants provide a great opportunity to study the emergence of foraging range from individual movements, given the potentially large number of scouting workers involved. Here, we introduce a random walk model with stochastic resetting to depict the movements of searching ants. Stochastic resetting refers to spatially reset at random times the position of agents to a given location, here the nest of searching ants. We investigate the effect of a range of resetting mechanisms by changing how the probability of returning to the nest depends on the duration of unsuccessful foraging trips. We compare the macroscopic predictions of our model to laboratory and field data. We find that the probability for searching ants to return to their nest decreases as the number of foraging trips increases, resulting in scouts going further away from the nest as the number of foraging trips increases. Our findings highlight the importance of resetting random walk models to depict the movements of central place foragers and nurtures novel questions regarding the searching behaviour of ants.