Tim Brown - Poster Abstract.PDF

The exact behavioral rules through which E. burchelli organize their raiding behavior are still poorly understood. Previous individual-based lattice models of army ant swarms (Deneubourg, J. et al. 1989, Sole, R.. et al. 2000) demonstrated that raiding patterns which were visually similar to characteristic swarm patterns of existing army ant species, could be generated through variations in resource distribution, without changes to the behavioral parameter values. These results suggest that differing patterns of prey distribution in the wild may play an important role in generating species-specific differences in raiding patterns. Sole et al. (2000) re-analyzed the Deneubourg et al. model using a simplified genetic algorithm approach to find optimal parameter values which maximized fitness under different food distributions. Their work also indicated that resource distribution may strongly influence raiding patterns, but their results yielded very different parameter values from those chosen by Deneubourg et al.