Ant Adaptation Web

A Complexity Curriculum About Ants

Life Cycle of Ants

In this model, our ants will become a little bit more realistic. Just like real ants, we can program our ants to have a life cycle. That is, we can program them to reproduce and to die. We have a new procedure called create-more-ants to control the production of new ants. In order for the queen to give birth in the nest, she has to have enough food. This amount of food is called the build cost. If there is more food stored than the build cost, we should ask the queen to give birth to an ant. Attributes that increase the ants' chance of survival may also increase the build cost. For example, increasing the starting energy of the ants will also increase their build cost.

Eventually, the ants will die of old age. Ants eat some of the food they bring back to the nest in order to give them energy to live longer.

Competition

There is a new danger facing our ants: competing colonies. Ants from the same species are the number one constraint on ant populations. For this model, grab a friend. In this model, you each will control one of the colonies. Make sure to set how aggressive, and how big your ants are. Different values of the adaptations of size and aggression, will make the ants cost more food for the queen to produce. Bigger and meaner ants will have a higher build cost. What do you notice?

Did you notice the blocks were more "abstract", that is, they didn't say as simply what the ants did. Don't worry all the intructions are still there. We just moved them into the NetLogo Code. Try clicking on that blue bar name "NetLogo Code." That's all the code required to run this model.

In this model, you can touch the screen to add chemical, flowers, or vinegar.

Abstraction

Did you notice the blocks were more "abstract", that is, they didn't say as simply what the ants did. Don't worry, all the ants' instructions are still there. I just moved them into the NetLogo Code. Try clicking on that blue bar name "NetLogo Code" just below the population graph. That's all the code required to run this model. What do you notice when looking at it?

Congratulations! You've reached the end of the Ant Adaptation Web curriculum. You've learned about ant colonies, food foraging, pheromones, complexity, and more.