Related papers: Ants as Fluids: Physics-Inspired Biology
Ant raiding, the process of identifying and returning food to the nest or bivouac, is a fascinating example of collective motion in nature. During such raids ants lay pheromones to form trails for others to find a food source. In this work…
Collective behavior of active elements inspired by mass of biological organisms is addressed. Especially, two topics are focused on among amazing behaviors performed by colony of ants. First, task allocation phenomena are treated from the…
Generically, in models of driven interacting particles the average speed of the particles decreases monotonically with increasing density. We propose a counter-example, motivated by the motion of ants in a trail, where the average speed of…
Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of individuals, and spreads via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise individual level…
Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…
Wasps, bees, ants and termites all make effective use of their environment and resources by displaying collective swarm intelligence. Termite colonies - for instance - build nests with a complexity far beyond the comprehension of the…
Ants are highly capable of grasping objects in clutter, and we have recently observed that this involves substantial use of their forelegs. The forelegs, more specifically the tarsi, have high friction microstructures (setal pads), are…
Spectacular collective phenomena such as jamming, turbulence, wetting, and waves emerge when living cells migrate in groups.
Flocks of birds and schools of fish are familiar examples of spatial patterns formed by living organisms. In contrast to the patterns on the skins of, say, zebra and giraffe, the patterns of our interest are {\it transient} although…
Although human beings have known about the phenomenon of "flocking"- that is, the coherent movement of large numbers of creatures (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of woolly mammoths, etc.)- since prehistoric times, it is only in the…
Many ant species employ distributed population density estimation in applications ranging from quorum sensing [Pra05], to task allocation [Gor99], to appraisal of enemy colony strength [Ada90]. It has been shown that ants estimate density…
Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by…
Using a simple model for the trail formation of ants, the relation between i)the schedule of feeding which represents the unsteady natural environment, ii)emerging patterns of trails connecting a nest with food resources, and iii)the…
We present a model of ant traffic considering individual ants as self-propelled particles undergoing single file motion on a one-dimensional trail. Recent experiments on unidirectional ant traffic in well-formed natural trails showed that…
In tissues as diverse as amphibian skin and the human airway, the cilia that propel fluid are grouped in sparsely distributed multiciliated cells (MCCs). We investigate fluid transport in this "mosaic" architecture, with emphasis on the…
The self-organised motion of vast numbers of creatures in a single direction is a spectacular example of emergent order. We recreate this phenomenon using actuated non-living components. We report here that millimetre-sized tapered rods,…
Ants use their mandibles - effectively a two-finger gripper - for a wide range of grasping activities. Here we investigate whether mimicking the internal hairs found on ant mandibles can improve performance of a two-finger parallel plate…
The sustainable biodiversity associated with a specific ecological niche as a function of land area is analysed computationally by considering the interaction of ant societies over a collection of islands. A power law relationship between…
A spacially extended model of the collective behavior of a large number of locally acting organisms is proposed in which organisms move probabilistically between local cells in space, but with weights dependent on local morphogenetic…
Local interactions, when individuals meet, can regulate collective behavior. In a system without any central control, the rate of interaction may depend simply on how the individuals move around. But interactions could in turn influence…