An agent-based model for community formation process of vampire bats that survive by sharing food
- PDF / 2,097,520 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 46 Downloads / 152 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
An agent‑based model for community formation process of vampire bats that survive by sharing food Taishi Mikami1 · Takeshi Kano1 · Akio Ishiguro1 Received: 20 May 2020 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 / Published online: 15 October 2020 © International Society of Artificial Life and Robotics (ISAROB) 2020
Abstract Animals often swarm and form communities to survive in harsh and complex environments. Toward improving the vulnerability of engineering systems against power-source limitations, we focused on food-sharing community of vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus). Although vampire bats die within 3 days if they fail to acquire any food, they can survive over 10 years by forming a highly sophisticated community wherein they share food with each other. In this study, we developed a simple mathematical model for the community formation process and demonstrated its validity via simulation. Keywords Vampire bats · Food sharing · Survivability · Agent-based model
1 Introduction Many living organisms often form swarms to survive under unpredictable and complex environments, e.g., an environment where food sources are limited [1, 2]. It is well known that altruistic behaviors, in which individuals take costs for others, often play an important role for improving survivability of the swarms [2, 3]. Extracting an essential mechanism underlying such systems by focusing on a proper model animal is important for developing robust engineering systems that can function in severe and unpredictable environments. This study is focused on common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) [4]. Desmodus rotundus is a social animal and forms groups of 8–12 adult females in a common set of roosts in hollow trees [4, 5]. It is also a blood-feeding bat [6]. They die within 3 days if they cannot acquire any food. However, they can survive over 10 years by forming a community This work was presented in part at the 3rd International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (Okinawa, Japan, November 20–22, 2019). This work was supported in part by the WISE Program for AI Electronics, Tohoku University. * Taishi Mikami [email protected] 1
Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
in which some community members spit back the food to other starving members and, in return, the recipients donate food to the donors in the opposite condition (food sharing) [4, 5]. Interestingly, this behavior also occurs among no blood-related members in addition to blood-related members [4–8]. It is also indicated that social interactions, such as grooming which cleans others’ body [7] and food sharing, are important for developing the food-sharing community [8]. Thus far, several mathematical models for vampire bat community have been proposed [9–13] based on the behavioral findings [5, 7, 14]. They have been studied from various contexts: the effect of network structures of the developed food-sharing community [10, 11], the community formation process through food sharing [12, 13], and t
Data Loading...
