Modelling ecology and evolution of Foraminifera in the agent-oriented distributed platform

- We have developed a novel agent-based model of foraminiferal ecology and evolution.
- Agents are defined by parameters representing hypergenes that follow genetic empirical rules.
- User (experimenter) can program the behaviour of agents (foraminifera) using JavaScript functions invoked by Java code through ScriptEngine API.
- Hazelcast framework is used to implement the distributed version of the simulator.

We present a new software platform called eVolutus for simulating evolution of living organisms. We choose Foraminifera as model organisms that represent a group of single-cellular, mainly marine, organisms that construct well fossilisable protective shells. They have lived on Earth for more than 540 million years and have left an extraordinary fossil record that is excellent for testing palaeoecological and evolutionary hypotheses. We use the AgE platform, which is a lightweight agent-oriented platform supporting distributed computation. The paper presents the general architecture of this modelling environment as well as more detailed descriptions of the implemented rules and applied solutions. The utility of this software is demonstrated by presenting the configuration and results of sample experiments.