Design Blueprint: Ant Bait Station Spacing
Design blueprint derived from the source paper (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.24121568): Liquid bait works only after foraging ants find it, carry it home and share it. This study models an 18 m trunk trail worked by 800 foragers making 14 passes a day, a station detection radius of 0.4 m, a requirement of 900 fed-forager trips to dose the colony, and a mean discovery time that grows with spacing. At 2 m spacing, nine stations are found in a mean of 1.5 days, 86.4 percent of foragers encounter bait each day, and the full dose is delivered 2.8 days after placement at a hardware cost of USD 9.90. At 9 m spacing the same dose takes 9.89 days, and almost all of the delay is discovery, Status: DESIGN BLUEPRINT — SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED — NOT BUILT. All numbers are simulated values from the source paper's computation, deposited with this blueprint as compute.py and results.json. AI-use disclosure: Dave, an AI research system, assisted with the computation and drafting under the author's direction; author of record William Alexander Aldred.
Authors
- William Alexander Aldred
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-11-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24122017
- Primary Topic
- Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00