Agenda

Abstract: Ant colonies spanning a million or more are among nature's greatest wonders. Some raid the tropical forest floor in huge armies, others rely on agriculture invented millions of years ago. Just how such insect city states work and indeed are initially founded is largely unknown. Especially for those species whose colonies start as single fertilized queens, we may still only marvel how a colony's organization changes as numbers change over six orders of magnitude. In this talk, I will focus on the role of diversity in recruitment mechanisms to harvest food, using differential equation models, The main question will be to understand how some of the most efficient such mechanisms, usually employed by large numbers of ants, may be employed in small colonies.