Related papers: Ants as Fluids: Physics-Inspired Biology
We investigate an interacting particle model to simulate a foraging colony of ants, where each ant is represented as an active Brownian particle. The interactions among ants are mediated through chemotaxis, aligning their orientations with…
Lizards and insects can strongly attach to walls and then detach applying negligible additional forces. We propose a simple mechanical model of this phenomenon which implies active muscle control. We show that the detachment force may…
We study active surface wetting using a minimal model of bacteria that takes into account the intrinsic motility diversity of living matter. A mixture of "fast" and "slow" self-propelled Brownian particles is considered in the presence of a…
We propose a simple mathematical model by applying Michaelis-Menton equations of enzyme kinetics to study the mutualistic interaction between the leaf cutter ant and its fungus garden at the early stage of colony expansion. We derive the…
Diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) is a well studied phenomenon in which diffusing particles cumulatively aggregate on a starting fixed seed point, forming a pattern which is fractal in structure. Here we report an interesting DLA process…
Living collectives and artificial swarms frequently employ a division of labor, wherein individuals take on different tasks or perform different amounts of work. However, the mechanisms used by collectives to divide labor remain poorly…
The traffic-like collective movement of ants on a trail can be described by a stochastic cellular automaton model. We have earlier investigated its unusual flow-density relation by using various mean field approximations and computer…
Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in…
A recently proposed stochastic cellular automaton model ({\it J. Phys. A 35, L573 (2002)}), motivated by the motions of ants in a trail, is investigated in detail in this paper. The flux of ants in this model is sensitive to the probability…
We study the long-time hydrodynamic behavior of systems of multi-species which arise from agent-based description of alignment dynamics. The interaction between species is governed by an array of symmetric communication kernels. We prove…
We introduce a simulation environment to facilitate research into emergent collective behaviour, with a focus on replicating the dynamics of ant colonies. By leveraging real-world data, the environment simulates a target ant trail that a…
In this paper, we study the "free exploration" of individual ants of the species Atta insularis, i.e., their motion on a featureless flat, horizontal surface. Two basic preliminary results emerge from our work (a) the free exploration is…
Several types of active agents self-propel by spinning around their propulsion axis, thus behaving as active screws. Examples include cytoskeletal filaments in gliding assays, magnetically-driven colloidal helices, and microorganisms like…
Ferrofluids are liquids exhibiting remarkably strong response to magnetic fields, which leads to fascinating properties useful in various applications. Understanding the wetting properties and spreading of ferrofluids is important for their…
Populations of agents often exhibit surprising collective behavior emerging from simple local interactions. The common belief is that the agents must posses a certain level of cognitive abilities for such an emerging collective behavior to…
Circular milling, a stunning manifestation of collective motion, is found across the natural world, from fish shoals to army ants. It has been observed recently that the plant-animal worm $Symsagittifera~roscoffensis$ exhibits circular…
Active walker models have recently proved their great value for describing the formation of clusters, periodic patterns, and spiral waves as well as the development of rivers, dielectric breakdown patterns, and many other structures. It is…
We report on the onset of fluid entrainment when a contact line is forced to advance over a dry solid of arbitrary wettability. We show that entrainment occurs at a critical advancing speed beyond which the balance between capillary,…
The collective behavior of active semiflexible filaments is studied with a model of tangentially driven self-propelled worm-like chains. The combination of excluded-volume interactions and self-propulsion leads to several distinct dynamic…
Capillary forces guide the motion of biomolecular condensates, water-borne insects, and breakfast cereal. These surface-mediated interactions can be harnessed to build units into materials with exotic properties deriving from mesoscale…