Occupancy patterns in superorganisms: a spin-glass approach to ant exploration.

ABSTRACT: 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 th

SUBMITTER: Cristin J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7813257 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature