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Academic Researcher (CNRS — France)

Lab    Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale

Université de Toulouse - CNRS (UMR 5169)

This project, named Mesomorph, aims at deciphering individual behavioral rules that allow the remarkable architectures made by social insects through self-organized dynamics.

Collaborations with

• Christian Jost, Vincent Fourcassié & Guy Theraulaz in my lab

• Pascale Kuntz, Fabien Picarougne (COD, Nantes)

• Andrea Perna (CIM, Uppsala)

• Stéphane Douady (LPS-ENS, Paris)

• Sergi Valverde & Ricard Solé (ICREA, Barcelona)

• Richard Fournier & Stéphane Blanco (Laplace, Toulouse)

• Jean-Jacques Bezian & Mouna El Hafi (Rapsodee, Ecoles des Mines Albi)

Anaïs Khuong makes her PhD under my supervision on this topic. Our aim is to decipher the behavioral rules followed by the ant Lasius niger involved in the collective building behavior (especially the sponge-like structure of the mound). Starting from experiments in lab, where ants were offered a mix of clay, sand and water to build with, we progress on the formulation of a model to explain the large-scale properties of the structure as a result of numerous tiny actions : picking a small pellet of material, transport it for a while, and dropping it where it suits.

Anaïs has presented the first steps of this work to the European Conference on Artificial Life :

In collaboration with physicists of thermal transfert (Bezian, Fournier, El Hafi, Blanco), we are also interested in understanding how the microclimate within the nests is controlled (optimising the conditions for the brood to develop) through individual decisions and self-organized processes.