Faster-is-slower effect in escaping ants revisited: Ants do not behave like humans

Abstract

In this work we studied the trajectories, velocities and densities of ants when egressing under controlled levels of stress produced by a chemical repellent at different concentrations. We found that, unlike other animals escaping under life-and-death conditions and pedestrian simulations, ants do not produce a higher density zone near the exit door. Instead, ants are uniformly distributed over the available space allowing for efficient evacuations. Consequently, the faster-is-slower effect observed in ants (Soria et al., 2012) is clearly of a different nature to that predicted by de social force model. In the case of ants, the minimum evacuation time is correlated with the lower probability of taking backward steps. Thus, as biological model ants have important differences that make their use inadvisable for the design of human facilities.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Examining effect of architectural adjustment on pedestrian crowd flow at bottleneck
• Jamming transitions in force-based models for pedestrian dynamics
• A simple model system for self-propelled particles passing a bottleneck
• Two dimensional outflows for cellular automata with shuffle updates
• How initial distribution affects symmetry breaking induced by panic in ants: experiment and flee-pheromone model