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Under certain circumstances, a swarm of a species of trail-laying ants known as army ants can become caught in a doomed revolving motion known as the death spiral, in which each ant follows the one in front of it in a never-ending loop…
Landforms such as sand dunes act as roughness elements to Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) flows, triggering the development of new scales of turbulent motions. These turbulent motions, in turn, energize and kick-up sand particles,…
Dense suspensions of self-propelled rod-like particles exhibit a fascinating variety of non-equilibrium phenomena. By means of computer simulations of a minimal model for rigid self-propelled colloidal rods with variable shape we explore…
Theoretical models describing specific adhesion of membranes predict (for certain parameters) a macroscopic phase separation of bonds into adhesion domains. We show that this behavior is fundamentally altered if the membrane is pinned…
Termites which are able to forage in the open can be often seen, in the field or in the lab: (i) wandering around, forming no observable pattern, or (ii) clustering themselves in a dense and almost immobile pack, or (iii) milling about in a…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Landscape paradigm is ubiquitous in physics and other natural sciences, but it has to be supplemented with both quantitative and qualitatively meaningful tools for analyzing the topography of a given landscape. We here consider dynamic…
We study the morphological evolution of surfaces during ion sputtering and we compare their dynamical roughening with aeolian ripple formation in sandy deserts. We show that, although the two phenomena are physically different, they must…
Barchans are isolated mobile dunes often organized in large dune fields. Dune fields seem to present a characteristic dune size and spacing, which suggests a cooperative behavior based on dune interaction. In Duran et al. (2009), we propose…
Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals, and can show poor predictive performance in the presence of strong, smooth effects. Taking the perspective of random…
Topography on a wet rocky exoplanet could raise land above its sea level. Although land elevation is the product of many complex processes, the large-scale topographic features on any geodynamically-active planet are the expression of the…
Precisely how ecological factors influence animal social structure is far from clear. We explore this question using an agent-based model inspired by the fission-fusion society of Spider monkeys (Ateles spp). Our model introduces a…
Seagrasses are vital organisms in coastal waters, and the drastic demise of their population in the last decades has worrying implications for marine ecosystems. Spatial models for seagrass meadows provide a mathematical framework to study…
We propose a model to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of biocrust and vegetation cover on sand dunes. The model consists of two coupled partial nonlinear differential equations and includes diffusion and advection terms for modeling the…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
A number of microorganisms leave persistent trails while moving along surfaces. For single-cell organisms, the trail-mediated self-interaction will influence its dynamics. It has been discussed recently [Kranz \textit{et al.} Phys. Rev.…
Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (such as sand dunes) that induce failure in…