From individual to collective dynamics in Argentine ants (Linepithema humile)

•We describe the distribution of turning angles of individual ants foraging.•We propose a mathematical model of ants foraging in an empty arena.•We compare the proposed model to the experiment results.•Persistence and reinforcement are sufficient to describe motion of ants.

In this paper we propose a model for the formation of paths in Argentine ants when foraging in an empty arena. Based on experimental observations, we provide a distribution for the random change in direction that they approximately undergo while foraging as a mixture of a Gaussian and a Pareto distribution. By following the principles described in previous work [32], we consider persistence and reinforcement to create a model for the motion of ants in the plane. Numerical simulations based on this model lead to the formation of branched ant-trails analogous to those observed experimentally.