An agent-based model of one colony of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius, from the day a mated queen lands to the death of the colony. It runs in a web browser and, unchanged, headless in Node for replicate studies.

What the ants do: a claustral queen digs her own shaft and raises the first workers on her reserves; workers dig the nest under local rules, with no ant holding a plan; a one-way, age-based division of labour set by the season of birth, which no shortage reverses; trunk-trail foraging with site fidelity and recruitment; seed storage, opening and germination in the chambers, which is what feeds the larvae; daily weather from the climate normals of the study site, with drought years; nuptial flights after heavy rain; corpse removal; alarm at a disturbance on the foraging ground; and annual nest relocation, in which the store and then the brood are carried along the trail to a new nest the colony digs.

Every value in the model is tagged as measured in this species, borrowed from another ant, or invented, with its source, in a single parameter file. The model is deterministic: one seeded stream per system and a fixed one-minute timestep, so a seed reproduces a run bit for bit in the browser and in Node, which a test pins. A study writes a methods report listing the invented values the results rest on and the acceptance tests the model fails.

…

This NetLogo model simulates the impact of mowing frequency, mower type and the percentage of refuge strips on the abundance of arthropods in managed grasslands. It represents five functional arthropod groups: holometabolous plant-dwelling arthropods (HoP, represented by butterflies); holometabolous ground-dwelling arthropods (HoG, represented by ants); nesting pollinators (NP, represented by bees); hemimetabolous plant-dwelling arthropods (HeP, represented by grasshoppers); and ground-resident arthropods (GR, represented by spiders). Three mowing frequencies are simulated: intensive (four mowings per year), intermediate (two mowings per year) and extensive (one mowing per year). Bar and disc mowers differ in their effects on arthropod mortality and vegetation height. Refuge strip coverage can be set to 0%, 10% or 20%. Arthropod abundance changes over time through movement, reproduction, natural mortality, mower-related mortality and vegetation regrowth.

MicroAnts 2.5 is a general-purpose agent-based model designed as a flexible workhorse for simulating ecological and evolutionary dynamics in artificial populations, as well as, potentially, the emergence of political institutions and economic regimes. It builds on and extends Stephen Wright’s original MicroAnts 2.0 by introducing configurable predators, inequality tracking, and other options.
Ant agents are of two tyes/casts and controlled by 16-bit chromosomes encoding traits such as vision, movement, mating thresholds, sensing, and combat strength. Predators (anteaters) operate in static, random, or targeted predatory modes. Ants reproduce, mutate, cooperate, fight, and die based on their traits and interactions. Environmental pressures (poison and predators) and social dynamics (sharing, mating, combat) drive emergent behavior across red and black ant populations.
The model supports insertion of custom agents at runtime, configurable mutation/inversion rates, and exports detailed statistics, including inequality metrics (e.g., Gini coefficients), trait frequencies, predator kills, and lineage data. Intended for rapid testing and educational experimentation, MicroAnts 2.5 serves as a modular base for more complex ecological and social simulations.

This is a NetLogo version of Buhl et al.’s (2005) model of self-organised digging activity in ant colonies. It was built for a master’s course on self-organisation and its intended use is still educational. The ants’ behavior can easily be changed by toggling switches on the interface, or, for more advanced students, there is R code included allowing the model to be run and analysed through RNetLogo.

Positive feedback can lead to “trapping” in local optima. Adding a simple negative feedback effect, based on ant behaviour, prevents this trapping

The model explores how two types of information - social (in the form of pheromone trails) and private (in the form of route memories) affect ant colony level foraging in a variable enviroment.

Simulates impacts of ants killing colony mates when in conflict with another nest. The murder rate is adjustable, and the environmental change is variable. The colonies employ social learning so knowledge diffusion proceeds if interactions occur.

The mode implements a variant of Ant Colony Optimization to explore routing on infrastructures through a landscape with forbidden zones, connecting multiple sinks to one source.

Ants in the genus Temnothorax use tandem runs (rather than pheromone trails) to recruit to food sources. This model explores the collective consequences of this linear recruitment (as opposed to highly nonlinear pheromone trails).