Data from "Foraging Ants as Liquid Brains: Movement Heterogeneity Shapes Collective Efficiency"

The data presented here were used to generate the figures and results of the research article titled "Foraging Ants as Liquid Brains: Movement Heterogeneity Shapes Collective Efficiency" (Fernández-López et al., 2025). To fully reproduce the analyses and figures, you will need to download the related code and instructions available in the GitHub repository cited below.

The data are organized into two main folders:

--- Raw Data ---

The raw_data folder contains tracking data from food and no-food experiments, as well as simulations using the default parameter set (see Table S1 in the manuscript and the script parameters.py in the linked GitHub repository for details).

Experimental data are stored as .csv files. Each file contains:

*N-ind: identity of each individual
*Frame: time in frames
*Xmm, Ymm: x and y coordinates in millimeters
*Crossings: whether an ant is interacting (1) or not (0)
*Time_sec: time in seconds (Frame / 2)
*node: the closest intersection in the Y-maze to the (x, y) position

Simulation data are divided into two folders, each containing 100 files, one per realization of the model:

The main folder, data, contains tracking data analogous to the experiments. These files are in Parquet format and should be read using libraries such as arrow (R) or pyarrow (Python). Each file includes:

*T: time in seconds
*Frame: time in frames (T x 2, as integer)
*N: number of ants in the arena
*pos: ant positions
*food_target: whether ants are being directed to a food source (0 for no, 1 for the first food patch, 2 for the second food patch)

The files in the food_data folder have the following columns:

*node: location of the food in the lattice
*t: time of detection by an ant
*origin: currently unused (contains no meaningful data)

--- Processed Data ---

This folder contains RData files with pre-processed data for immediate use in reproducing analyses:

*det.RData: data from food experiments
*nf.RData: data from no-food experiments
*hex.csv: Y-maze intersection coordinates (experiment)
*hex_sims.csv: Y-maze intersection coordinates (simulation)

Regarding simulations:

rho_eps.RData contains a summary of results across the parameter space defined by "rho" (scout proportion) and "epsilon" (social copying proportion), as used in Figure 5 of the manuscript.

simulations_n contains .csv files showing the number of ants in the arena (N) over time (Frame) for each simulation. Although this can be derived from the raw data, these files are included here to directly support Figure 4 reproduction.