Daily activity time series of ants, Camponotus japonicus

Social insects often share tasks among individuals. In this study, we analyzed the foraging activity of ants (Camponotus japonicus) and recorded the daily passage event counts of individual workers between a nest chamber and a foraging arena using five monodomous colonies. We proposed two hypotheses on the time series of foraging frequency by individual worker ants:
(i) Regarding the time series of foraging frequency by individual worker ants, the foraging frequency on a certain day could be expressed by the product of the foraging frequency on the previous day and the exponential of a random number.(ii) The random numbers are correlated between some pairs of worker ants.
The results for the five tested ant colonies showed that the probability of total daily passage counts (the sum of an individual's passage count) were characterized by a log-normal distribution. The worker ants behaved differently in terms of active days and foraging frequency. However, for >54% of the worker ants, ...