Bifurcation angles in ant foraging networks: A trade-off between exploration and exploitation?

The distribution of bifurcation angles found in ant foraging networks has been shown to give polarity to the networks so that nest-bound ants reaching a bifurcation can choose the appropriate direction. In this paper, we use an individual-based model to test the hypothesis that this distribution is an emergent property of a population of foraging ants optimising the trade-off between exploitation of the existing network to maximise food intake and exploration of the environment to maximise the population's ability to rapidly adapt to novel or changing environments. We identify a parameter regulating an ant's drives to forage existing trails and explore uncovered areas of the environment as a collective variable controlling the distribution of bifurcation angles in the foraging network and we show that when the exploration- exploitation trade-off is realised, the resulting distribution exhibits the same informational characteristics as that found in the original study.