I’m going to share some unpublished results from my PhD thesis, from 1999,for #SmallDiscoverySunday, started by @RolandKays. I had developed software to automatically identify and track large number (several hundred) of ants. Not easy at the time.

The ants seemed to have a pretty good sense of their colony size. If from a relatively small colony, the first ten ants exploring a new arena took careful looping searches, each tending to get further from the nest.

But the first ten ants from large colonies (the nest entrance being in the center of the right hand side) were immediately bold and ventured far into the new environment.

Previous work had suggested that ants would modify their search paths as a function of density to optimize search efficiency. However, if I excluded contacts among the ants (like billiard balls they will turn upon contact) the ants showed no such regulation.

I also conducted experiments to ask whether colonies could modify the amount of noise/error they exhibit when foraging in order to optimize the trade off between exploration and exploitation. #SmallDiscoverySunday

And developed agent/individual based simulations of this process, including response to, and diffusion of, multiple pheromones. #SmallDiscoverySunday

I never published any of this work. Always meant to get back to it and do so, but somehow never did. #SmallDiscoverySunday