DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11992135
title: Reverse social contagion as a mechanism for regulating mass behaviors in highly integrated social systems

description: Reverse social contagion as a mechanism for regulating mass behaviors in highly integrated social systems

This repository houses supporting data for “Reverse social contagion as a mechanism for regulating mass behaviors in highly integrated social systems”. It contains three archives consisting of multiple files storing inter-individual interactions, trajectory data for multiple colonies of desert harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex californicus), and the code necessary to reproduce the study results. The behavioral data sets were obtained from 30s videos filmed at 15fps. 

Description of the data and file structure

Supplementary_Archive_1.zip

This collection of CSV files contains the antennal contact interactions among individual workers from colonies. Each file name represents the colony code and the data contained in each file belongs to a single colony. Each file contains three columns: The first (1) column represents the tag of an individual observed, the second (2) column represents the tag of the individual it interacted with, and the third (3) column represents the frame of the video at which the interaction occurred.

Supplementary_Archive_2.zip

This group of mdf files contains the trajectory data for each individual of a harvester ant colony. The files were generated using the ImageJ plugin MTrackJ. Each file contains the data of one colony and the filename represents the code of said colony. The data contained in this file is organized in rows and columns. The first row indicates the MTrackJ software version used to generate the file. The second row indicates the displaying preferences for the MTrackJ software. The third and fourth rows indicate the number of assemblies and clusters, respectively. However, this can be safely ignored as the colony was treated as a whole. The rows starting with ‘Track’ indicate the tag of the individual observed followed by its identifying number “Track 1” belongs to individual 1, “Track 2” belongs to individual 2, “Track 3 to individual 3, and so forth. The lines that start with ‘Point’ after each ‘Track’ represent the point in space in the video for each individual in a given frame. The second column after ‘Point’ simply refers to the point ID in the frame “e.g. Point 1”. The third and fourth columns represent the ‘x’ and ‘y’ coordinates in the video frame. The fourth, fifth, and sixth columns represent the dimensions of an image stack. In this case, the fourth and sixth columns are fixed to 1 and the fifth column represents the frame at which the point is taken. Each point is captured in 5-frame increments.

Code/Software

Supplementary_Archive_3.zip

This archive contains the code necessary to reproduce the results of the study in the form of a Mathematica notebook. It also contains a folder with the trajectory data for each individual of a harvester ant colony, in a simplified format from that available in Supplementary_Archive_2.zip. Each CSV file in this folder corresponds to a different colony. It has four columns, respectively representing the identifying number of the individual observed, the frame number at which the observation, and the ‘x’ and ‘y’ coordinates, in that order. Finally, a XLSX file contains the number of individuals in each colony (first column), the metabolic rate of the colony (second column), and the identifying number of the colony (third column; numbers followed by the letter 's' correspond to size-reduced colonies).