Figure 2. Quantification of the parameters of the digging dynamics from experimental data with A(0) = 200 workers.
(a) Ant activity parameters (
and 
) are retrieved from the evolution of the dug length 
: three typical experimental cases are shown as solid lines and their corresponding predictions by the model as dashed lines (see also fig. S1 for all experimental results). (b, c) The rates of initiation of new peripheral nodes 
and of new lateral nodes 
are retrieved respectively from (b) the regression slope of the number of peripheral nodes 
as a function of 
and (c) the number of lateral nodes 
as a function of 
(each symbols corresponds to each of the three experiments shown in (a)). Regressions for all cases can be found in fig. S2 and S3. (d) The rates of initiation of new lateral 
and peripheral 
nodes converge to a common value (one symbol per experiment, dashed line: 
).