An aggregation model of cockroaches with fast-or-slow motion dichotomy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reaction-diffusion model for cockroach social behavior, incorporating both aggregation and dispersion effects, revealing new phenomena and analyzing the fast reaction limit to derive a reaction-cross-diffusion system.

Contribution

It presents a novel reaction-diffusion model that accounts for overcrowding-induced dispersion and demonstrates convergence to a reaction-cross-diffusion system in the fast reaction limit.

Findings

Discovered aggregation at pheromone transition zones due to competing behaviors.

Proved convergence of the reaction-diffusion system to a reaction-cross-diffusion system.

Identified new phenomena not previously observed in cockroach social behavior models.

Abstract

We propose a mathematical model, namely a reaction-diffusion system, to describe social behaviour of cockroaches. An essential new aspect in our model is that the dispersion behaviour due to overcrowding effect is taken into account {as a counterpart to commonly studied aggregation}. This consideration leads to an intriguing new phenomenon which has not been observed in the literature. Namely, due to the competition between aggregation towards areas of higher concentration of pheromone and dispersion avoiding overcrowded areas, the cockroaches aggregate more at the transition area of pheromone. Moreover, we also consider the fast reaction limit where the switching rate between active and inactive subpopulations tends to infinity. By utilising improved duality and energy methods, together with the regularisation of heat operator, we prove that the weak solution of the reaction-diffusion system converges to that of a reaction-cross-diffusion system.