The food seeking behavior of slime mold: a macroscopic approach

TL;DR

This paper derives a macroscopic model for slime mold food seeking behavior from particle dynamics, analyzes its properties, and uses numerical simulations to explore how slime mold interacts with food sources.

Contribution

It introduces a new macroscopic aggregation-diffusion equation for slime mold based on particle models and provides detailed analysis and simulations of its behavior.

Findings

The model captures slime mold behavior between food sources.

Numerical simulations reveal the interplay of drift, interaction, and diffusion.

Stationary solutions exhibit specific aggregation patterns.

Abstract

Starting from a particle model we derive a macroscopic aggregation-diffusion equation for the evolution of slime mold under the assumption of propagation of chaos in the large particle limit. We analyze properties of the macroscopic model in the stationary case and study the behavior of the slime mold between food sources. The efficient numerical simulation of the aggregation-diffusion equation allows for a detailed analysis of the interplay between the different regimes drift, interaction and diffusion.