How ants move: individual and collective scaling properties

Understand

The motion of social insects is often used a paradigmatic example of complex adaptive dynamics arising from decentralized individual behavior.

• In this paper we revisit the topic of the ruling laws behind burst of activity in ants.
• The analysis, done over previously reported data, reconsider the causation arrows, proposed at individual level, not finding any link between the duration of the ants' activity and its moving speed.
• Secondly, synthetic trajectories created from steps of different ants, demonstrate that a Markov process can explain the previously reported speed shape profile.