Modeling individual-to-collective behavior in mound-building termites

描述(申请人提供)：筑丘白蚁为复杂的社会行为和集体行为提供了一个伟大的经典例子，这些行为是由个人的共同行动产生的，它们的数百万独立昆虫群体一起构成了大规模的复杂的丘陵。然而，白蚁的个体和社会行为，以及这些昆虫规模的行动如何产生集体群体规模的结果，还没有被很好地理解。一对关系密切的白蚁物种，它们的行为相似，但惊人 不同的土丘形态，以及在实验环境中跟踪个别昆虫的最新进展，为量化和建模白蚁与环境的相互作用以及这些行为如何转化为更高尺度的系统特性提供了机会。这个应用程序的目标是开发定量的实验方法和数据驱动的计算模型，以将这种社会昆虫的个人行为与集体结果联系起来。我们将进行实验，量化白蚁行为对环境驱动因素的响应，构建和评估模拟模型，我们假设将使用相同的模型结构但不同的参数值来捕捉两个物种的行为，并系统地探索参数空间以连接其他物种，并在多个尺度上提供关于连接行为的更广泛的见解。从这项研究中获得的关于复杂社会系统中自组织原理的见解可能适用于更好地理解从细菌群体到人类机构的集体系统。这项工作是哈佛大学复杂和紧急系统建模专家贾斯汀·韦费尔和拉迪卡·纳格帕尔，以及纽约州立大学ESF白蚁和土丘生理学和行为专家J·斯科特·特纳密切合作的结果。所有三个私人投资机构都合作(大学种子基金)为拟议的工作进行初步研究，包括在纳米比亚现场评估原型实验技术。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Mound-building termites provide one of the great classic examples of complex social behavior and of collective behaviors emerging from the actions of individuals working together, with their colonies of millions of independent insects tha together construct large-scale, complex mounds. However, termite individual and social behaviors, and how these insect-scale actions give rise to collective colony-scale outcomes, are not well understood. A pair of closely related termite species with similar behavior but strikingly different mound morphologies, and recent advances in tracking individual insects in experimental settings, provides an opportunity to quantify and model how termites interact with their environment and how these behaviors translate to higher-scale system properties. The goal of this application is to develop quantitative experimental methods and data-driven computational models to relate individual behavior to collective outcomes for this social insect. We will conduct experiments to quantify termite behavior in response to environmental drivers, construct and evaluate simulation models that we hypothesize will capture the behavior of the two species using the same model structure but different parameter values, and systematically explore the parameter space to connect to other species and provide broader insights about connecting behaviors at multiple scales. Insights gained from this study regarding principles of self-organization in complex social systems will potentially be applicable to better understanding of collective systems from bacterial colonies to human institutions. This work is a close collaboration among Justin Werfel and Radhika Nagpal, both experts in modeling complex and emergent systems at Harvard, and J. Scott Turner, expert in termite and mound physiology and behavior at SUNY-ESF. All three PIs collaborated (university seed funding) to conduct preliminary studies for the proposed work, including evaluation of prototype experimental techniques onsite in Namibia.