Insect

In this experiment I will model a simple World of insects with:

• Food that randomly appears in different places of the world.
• Capacity for the Creatures to eat that food, but also harvest and transport it.
• Nests that can be created by the Creatures to consume the transported food.

Ground Model

A boolean parameter Spot is created to identify the places where there is food available. Parameters MaxFood and Food are created for the accumulation and consumption of the food made available to the Creatures. A parameter Nest is created to identify places where Creatures have created a nest.

Note that:

• Food spots are created only where there is no existing Nest: having many nests would reduce the number of spots of food available to the creatures.
• When all the food available on a food spot has been consumed (eaten or harvested), it is no more a food spot.

Creature Model

Details of the Creature's attributes (nothing much different from the previous experiments, except for the new Food attribute to capture the ground food that has been harvested and is being carried by the Creature):

The changes are more important in the available Actions (Move, Est, Harvest and Nest):

Note that:

• Eating ground food with Move action (the default behaviour) converts only 10% of the food eaten in Energy.
• Eating ground food with Eat action converts only 30% of the food eaten in Energy.
• Eating harvested food with Eat action when in a Nest converts 200% of the food carried in Energy.
• Creating a Nest on an existing food spot is possible, but would immediately stop any food generation there (it is no more a food spot).
• Creating a Nest has a cost for the Creature. This is to avoid having a large proportion of the population creating nests which results in 20% or more of the world being nests and the Creature do not end up intentionally looking for nests to consume the food they carry.

Results

After some time of simulation we observe that:

• A small percentage of the world are nests (some 1%).
• Creatures do not eat the food found in food spots, but they harvest it.
• Once a Creature is carrying some food, it looks for the nearby biggest nest to est it.
• Finally, once the carried food has been eaten in a nest, they reproduce in the nest.

Here are some videos:

• The grey squares are the places where food is available (the spot).
• The squares are the nests.

In the following 3 videos, the Creatures have 2 numbers on their left side: the top is their Energy and the bottom is the food they carry. We can see that Creatures accumulate food when they are in an a place of ground food, which is then converted in Energy when they reach a nest.

Conclusions

We see that with some simple model, we can reach a population exhibiting an insect type of behaviour: the Creatures are searching for available Food, and then for Nests to consume the food. However the model is quite artificial and far from the physical reality. It is most probable that the natural motivation of nests in real life insects are something like:

• Protect the colony from predators,
• Develop the colony from a single parent (the queen) and feed the queen, although the evolutionary benefit of this is no clear to me,
• Provide a secure and small environment to feed the newborns.

Further modeling experiment would be needed to reach a more realistic simulation.

But what I find most intriguing is the persistence of the Nests. Over thousands of generations, the population maintains a small number of Nests, a behaviour which is neither disappearing, nor predominant as a behaviour rule in the population. Somehow the DNA sequence and the mutation rate are such that a small percentage of the population mutate to create nests.

So I have decided to make some more experiments around the same subject:

• First, let's see what happens when the nest protects the insect.