Design Blueprint: Ant Bait Station Spacing
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Insect Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225735089
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