  We propose two modeling approaches to describe the dynamics of ant battles,
starting from laboratory experiments on the behavior of two ant species, the
invasive Lasius neglectus and the authocthonus Lasius paralienus. This work is
mainly motivated by the need to have realistic models to predict the
interaction dynamics of invasive species. The two considered species exhibit
different fighting strategies. In order to describe the observed battle
dynamics, we start by building a chemical model considering the ants and the
fighting groups (for instance two ants of a species and one of the other one)
as a chemical species. From the chemical equations we deduce a system of
differential equations, whose parameters are estimated by minimizing the
difference between the experimental data and the model output. We model the
fluctuations observed in the experiments by means of a standard Gillespie
algorithm. In order to better reproduce the observed behavior, we adopt a
spatial agent-based model, in which ants not engaged in fighting groups move
randomly (diffusion) among compartments, and the Gillespie algorithm is used to
model the reactions inside a compartment.
