‘Walk this Way’: FSU researchers’ model explains how ants create trails to multiple food sources 

It’s a common sight — ants marching in an orderly line over and around obstacles from their nest to a food source, guided by scent trails left by scouts marking the find. But what happens when those scouts find a comestible motherlode?

A team of Florida State University researchers led by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Bhargav Karamched has discovered that in a foraging ant’s search for food, it will leave pheromone trails connecting its colony to multiple food sources when they’re available, successfully creating the first model that explains the phenomenon of trail formation to multiple food sources.

Karamched, who also serves as faculty in FSU’s Institute of Molecular Biophysics, and music arts administration graduate student Sean Hartman, published “Walk This Way: Modeling Foraging Ant Dynamics in Multiple Food Source Environments” in the Journal of Mathematical Biology in September.

“The power of mathematics is that we can devise models that reproduce experimentally observed data and make concrete predictions about what will happen next,” Karamched said. “In this case, we uncovered something that hasn’t been described well by other models: if an ant has access to multiple food sources from its nest, it will initially make multiple trails to each of the sources.”

Karamched uses modeling, mathematical analysis and computer simulations to understand and solve problems in neuroscience and cell biology. Hartman, who earned dual bachelor’s degrees from FSU’s Department of Mathematics and College of Music in May 2023 and expects to complete his graduate studies this spring, approached Karamched about assisting with a Directed Individual Study (DIS). DIS allows students in FSU’s Honors Program to work one-on-one with faculty mentors in an open-ended, hands-on research experience and would allow Hartman to be more involved with mathematical modeling.

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