Speaker
Description
Ant colonies regulate foraging via nest-entrance contacts and short-lived pheromone cues. We propose a mechanistic mathematical model tracking an entrance pool, outbound foragers, successful and unsuccessful returners, and a transient pheromone signal. Analytic reductions connect equilibrium geometry to colony-level regimes. In the contact-only limit, a forager generation number and a quadratic balance law predict either forward onset or fold-induced bistability. In the pheromone-only limit, equilibria follow a cubic in cue intensity, yielding a sharp threshold between collapse and sustained activity. With mixed feedback, simple algebraic conditions classify equilibria and their stability. Bifurcation maps show that combining contacts and pheromone can lower persistence thresholds, create oscillatory foraging via Hopf bifurcation, and produce multistability across activity levels.
