Army ant colonies display complex foraging raid patterns involving thousands of individuals communicating through chemical trails. In this paper we explore, by means of a simple search algorithm, the properties of these trails in order to test the hypothesis that their structure reflects an...

An elementary model of animal aggregation is presented. The gorup size distributions resulting from this model are truncated power laws. The predictions of the model are found to be consistent with data that describe the group size distributions of tuna fish, sardinellas, and African buffalos.<p> <p>...</p></p>

Self-organizing maps (SOM) are unsupervised, competitive neural networks used to project high-dimensional data onto a low-dimensial space. In this article we show how SOM can be sued to draw graphs in the plane. The SOM-based approach to graph drawing, which belongs to the general class of...

In several species of ants, workers cooperate to retrieve large prey. Usually, one ant finds a prey item, tries to move it, and, when unsucessful for some time, recuits nestmates through direct contact or chemical marking. When a group of ants tries to move large prey, the ants change position...

Transport networks are a key component of human and natural societies that enable efficient communication at a low cost. Here, we study the topological efficiency of the three-dimensional networks of galleries in termite nests and how spatial constraints affect the organisation of these...

The dominant paradigm to explain asymmetries in the spatial distribution of foraging animals is that they track the spatial heterogeneity of their environment. However, in social insects, endogenous spatial asymmetries can emerge within a uniform environment as an outcome from the...