Collective Decision-Making Based on Individual Discrimination Capability in Pre-social Insects

Gregarious insects, like cockroaches, aggregate in shelters during their resting period. How do individuals reach a collegial decision? What is the relation between the distributions of the individuals and the parameter values characterizing the population and the environment? With a model based on experimental data, we demonstrated that the collegial decision is based on the relation between the individual resting time in a shelter and the population in this shelter. We extended this model to the case where different sub-groups may interact and where the crowding effect under the shelters influences the aggregation. This second model shows that depending on the interaction between the sub-groups and the crowding effect, different patterns are observed such as segregation of the different sub-group or the aggregation of the whole population.