EE Seminar: Physical modeling of collective motion in animal groups: carrying ants

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Prof. Niv Gov
Weizmann Institute

Monday, June 8th, 2015
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Physical modeling of collective motion in animal groups: carrying ants
Abstract

Examples of collective motion exist throughout biology, from the collective motion of cells during morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer, and for animal groups that migrate, forage and hunt together. We have been applying physical modeling for such systems, at the different scales. At the level of animal groups, we have been studying the collective load carrying by ants, as they transport food to the nest. In this system we propose a model where the decision making at the level of the single ants is affected by the whole group through the forces transmitted by the load. The model for this system is therefore inherently mean-field in nature, and exhibits a thermodynamic order-disorder transition. Due to the mean-field nature, the critical temperature for the system increases with the system size, which allows to probe it by simply changing the load size. These predictions agree with observations.