Trust-Centered Design and Feasibility Evaluation of an AI-Enabled Conversational Health Tool for Sexual and Reproductive Health Among Rural Young Adults: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Study.

Movement is central to just about every facet of life for organisms spanning from the smallest bacteria to the largest mammals. The path an animal or other organism follows is affected by a wide range of internal and external factors including anatomy [,], sensory capabilities [], hunger [], the presence of other individuals [,], and environmental structure []. Quantifications of an organism’s motion, typically involving analyses of trajectories or movement statistics, are crucial to understanding their ecology, biology, and behavior — altogether referred to as their []. This plays a role in how and why we find populations distributed across continents, though also how an individual explores its local surroundings. Ants are particularly well-studied when it comes to movement and foraging behavior [], primarily because of their rich collective interactions [,]. This wealth of work includes experiments conducted in natural environments [,] and in the laboratory [,], and across a wide range of species. Indeed, these collective interactions are often so rich that the movement ecology of individuals has been understudied in comparison, leaving many questions about foraging and navigation on the single specimen scale unanswered. We explore the structure and statistics of motion on this individual specimen scale here, focusing on one particular species, the long-legged ant, []. This species is chosen not only for its convenience and availability, but also its international (invasive) presence, and the fact that it has been shown to demonstrate particularly efficient foraging and recruitment behavior []. This efficient social behavior has led to these ants establishing overwhelming dominance in non-native areas []. While the communication and synchronization methods using pheromones play a large role in this dominance, the relatively microscopic behavior of individuals also plays an important role in building up this collective interaction. Owed to both their invasive capabilities and ongoing urbanization of previously wooded areas, the contexts in which these ants are found are becoming more and more synthetic — in what resources are available, what potential shelters are made from, and how open or confined their foraging grounds are []. Previous work has demonstrated that, even in confined spaces, various insects, including locusts [] and ants [] display rich behavior when it comes to locomotion. The biggest effect of such artificial confined spaces often has to do with the edges or boundaries. Many different types of ants are known to demonstrate thigmotactic or other wall-following behavior both in natural [] and laboratory settings [,,]. This observation can reveal important information about the behavioural responses of the organism [,], and even about the capabilities of their sensory systems []. Other studies have described how different ants’ locomotion is affected by external sensory stimuli including visual and olfactory stimuli [,]