Occupancy patterns in superorganisms : a spin-glass approach to ant exploration
Cristín, Javier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Física)
Bartumeus, Frederic (Centre de Recerca Ecològica i d'Aplicacions Forestals)
Méndez López, Vicenç (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Física)
Campos, Daniel (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Física)

Data:	2020
Resum:	Emergence of collective, as well as superorganism-like, behaviour in biological populations requires the existence of rules of communication, either direct or indirect, between organisms. Because reaching an understanding of such rules at the individual level can be often difficult, approaches carried out at higher, or effective, levels of description can represent a useful alternative. In the present work, we show how a spin-glass approach characteristic of statistical physics can be used as a tool to characterize the properties of the spatial occupancy patterns of a biological population. We exploit the presence of pairwise interactions in spin-glass models for detecting correlations between occupancies at different sites in the media. Such correlations, we claim, represent a proxy to the existence of planned and/or social strategies in the spatial organization of the population. Our spin-glass approach does not only identify those correlations but produces a statistical replica of the system (at the level of occupancy patterns) that can be subsequently used for testing alternative conditions/hypothesis. Here, this methodology is presented and illustrated for a particular case of study: we analyse occupancy patterns of Aphaenogaster senilis ants during foraging through a simplified environment consisting of a discrete (tree-like) artificial lattice. Our spin-glass approach consistently reproduces the experimental occupancy patterns across time, and besides, an intuitive biological interpretation of the parameters is attainable. Likewise, we prove that pairwise correlations are important for reproducing these dynamics by showing how a null model, where such correlations are neglected, would perform much worse; this provides a solid evidence to the existence of superorganism-like strategies in the colony.
Ajuts:	Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad CGL2016-78156-C2-1-R Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad FIS2015-72434-EXP Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad CGL2016-78156-C2-2-R
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Matèria:	Occupancy patterns ; Ant exploration ; Spin-glass
Publicat a:	Royal Society Open Science, Vol. 7, Issue 12 (December 2020) , art. 201250, ISSN 2054-5703

DOI: 10.1098/rsos.201250
PMID: 33489274

16 p, 2.0 MB

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