How Do Ants Make Sense of Gravity? A Boltzmann Walker Analysis of Lasius niger Trajectories on Various Inclines

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076531

How Do Ants Make Sense of Gravity? A Boltzmann Walker Analysis of Lasius niger Trajectories on Various Inclines

Figure 4

Mean Square Displacement of ants on the horizontal plane ().

The MSD () is shown as a function of the number of reorientation events along the trajectory. Points and dotted lines report the observed values (mean, 95% CI). The square-curve “ballistic” shape for few events are a trace of the direction persistence of ants, which disappears after some direction changes, yielding then a linear dependence of the MSD to the number of reorientation events, a well-known indication of diffusive behavior. For even larger numbers of reorientation events, the censoring effect of the domain frontier becomes dominant. The red line reports the MSD predicted by simulating the isotropic BW with the parameters estimated from the segmented trajectories for the null inclination.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0076531.g004