Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 14: Poster Session II

BP 14.88: Poster

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 18:00–21:00, P2

staged self-organized attack mechanisms of camponotus japonicus against intruders — •yifan zhang and zhangang han — School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

Social insect colonies display complex collective behaviors that emerge from local interactions, enabling decentralized strategies to counter external threats. Although ant collective activities such as foraging and nest construction are well studied, the self-organized attack mechanisms ants employ against specific intruders remain poorly understood. Using the camponotus japonicus and earwigs as research subjects, we show that ants exhibit a staged escalation pattern when confronting an invader: from individual probing, to small-group containment, and ultimately large-scale coordinated assaults. Building on a master-equation framework, we establish continuous-space dynamical equations and propose an ant attack behavior model to characterize these processes. Notably, the collective attack displays strong nonlinear synergy*six ants generate an attack intensity far exceeding a simple tripling of that from two ants. These findings highlight the adaptive advantages of coordinated aggression, demonstrating how cooperative interactions among individuals greatly amplify group-level defensive efficiency. Our study offers new insights into how decentralized biological systems achieve swarm intelligence and produce emergent combat behavior, and clarifies the role of self-organization in shaping effective group decision-making.

Keywords: collective behavior; ant colony; self-organization; swarm intelligence