| dc.contributor.advisor | Katifori, Eleni Prof. Dr. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Gräwer, Johannes Sebastian | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2017-09-14T09:38:28Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2017-09-14T09:38:28Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017-09-14 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1735-0000-0023-3F05-E | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-6485 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | de |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject.ddc | 571.4 | de |
| dc.title | Food Distribution in Ant Colonies: Trophallaxis and Self-Organization | de |
| dc.type | doctoralThesis | de |
| dc.contributor.referee | Katifori, Eleni Prof. Dr. | |
| dc.date.examination | 2017-06-01 | |
| dc.description.abstracteng | Roughly one hundred million years ago, solitary insect species evolved
social interactions that enabled the formation of colonies. A main reason for this
advance was their ability to feed each other with previously ingested food.
Among other things, this allowed them to develop the well-known division of labor:
groups or castes of individuals specializing in certain tasks. This social organization reached its climax in the evolution of non-reproductive castes, sacrificing their own
reproduction to the benefit of the colony. The mutual feeding technique that
supported this social evolution is called ‘trophallaxis’.
This thesis is based on the question how ant colonies use trophallaxis to supply
their members with food. The main goal of this thesis is to understand the collective properties of the food
distribution in ant colonies with the simplest possible computational and analytical
models. To this end, we construct a series of biophysically motivated simulation
models and analytical descriptions of trophallaxis that include all its essential
features. Our models are the first complete theoretical description of the physical
mechanisms behind the self-organized food distribution in ant colonies. Despite
our reductionist approach, the models exhibit a number of interesting properties
that reproduce some of the behaviors seen in real ant colonies.
We are confident that our models can serve as benchmarks for the behavior of real
ant colonies or more biologically detailed models. As statistical null models, they
can be used to assess to what extent an observed behavior is due to non-random
strategies or due to the collective properties of a stochastic system. We find and analytically predict the characteristic time scales of trophallaxis
for both well-mixed colonies and colonies with small spatial fidelity zones. We
even successfully cover the range between these two limits with semi-analytic
predictions.
These newly discovered relationships between individual behavior and global
food distribution dynamics provide microscopic explanations of experimental observations
and phenomenological theories that were unknown so far. | de |
| dc.contributor.coReferee | Wörgötter, Florentin Prof. Dr. | |
| dc.subject.eng | ants | de |
| dc.subject.eng | food distribution | de |
| dc.subject.eng | collective behavior | de |
| dc.subject.eng | trophallaxis | de |
| dc.subject.eng | self-organization | de |
| dc.subject.eng | agent-based model | de |
| dc.identifier.urn | urn:nbn:de:gbv:7-11858/00-1735-0000-0023-3F05-E-8 | |
| dc.affiliation.institute | Göttinger Graduiertenschule für Neurowissenschaften, Biophysik und molekulare Biowissenschaften (GGNB) | de |
| dc.subject.gokfull | Biologie (PPN619462639) | de |
| dc.identifier.ppn | 1006091033 | |