Eciton burchelli is a unique species of army ants that demonstrate distinct swarm behavior. An important characteristic of these ants is their extremely poor eyesight which causes them to rely heavily on the distribution and tracking of pheromone to survive. We create a simulated ant world to observe their reactions to different initial food distributions and determine the stability of their swarm patterns to perturbations. The goal is to recover the swarm behavior observed in nature using the simplest possible behavioral rules. The focus of this study is to investigate the impact of intensity and direction of the pheromone trails on the emergent behavior of ants through simulations. We choose the pheromone trail because it is a key element in the survival of the E. burchelli colony. We study several cases including a single food source, multiple food sources, and perturbations to the multiple food sources implemented by randomly placing barriers over established trails. In addition to the simulations, we propose a modified version of Fisher's equation to demonstrate ant swarm behavior from a mathematical approach. Fisher's Equation have traveling wave solutions that integrate the logistic growth and the diffusion of the ant population density. We add a taxis and a removal rate into the equation to include pheromone trail drift and loss of population during a swarm.

Authors: Jose Almora, Albert Izarraraz, Qiao Liang, Crystal Nesmith, David Murillo.