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We experimentally studied the locomotion of the nematode C. elegans in both fluidic and granular media. In this fluid dynamics video, we show the motility gaits of the nematode in these two environments. The motility of the nematode C.…
Free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful genetic model, essential for investigations ranging from behavior to neuroscience to aging, and locomotion is a key observable used in these studies. However, despite the fact that…
How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm $C. elegans$, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with…
Organisms move through the world by changing their shape, and here we explore the mapping from shape space to movements in the nematode C. elegans as it crawls on a planar agar surface. We characterize the statistics of the trajectories…
The physical and bio-mechanical principles that govern undulatory movement on wet surfaces have important applications in physiology, physics, and engineering. The nematode {\it C. elegans}, with its highly stereotypical and functionally…
Undulatory locomotion is common to nematodes as well as to limbless vertebrates, but its control is not understood in spite of the identification of hundred of genes involved in Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion. To reveal the mechanisms of…
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans responds to an impressive range of chemical, mechanical and thermal stimuli and is extensively used to investigate the molecular mechanisms that mediate chemosensation, mechanotransduction and…
Animal locomotion is often subject to constraints arising from anatomical/physiological asymmetries. We use the nematode C.~elegans as a minimal model system to ask whether such constraints might shape locomotion patterns optimized during…
The neural dynamics of the nematode C. elegans are experimentally low-dimensional and correspond to discrete behavioral states, where previous modeling work has found neural proxies for some of these states. Experimental results further…
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a well-known model organism used to investigate fundamental questions in biology. Motility assays of this small roundworm are designed to study the relationships between genes and behavior. Commonly,…
The motility of the worm nematode \textit{Caenorhabditis elegans} is investigated in shallow, wet granular media as a function of particle size dispersity and area density ($\phi$). Surprisingly, we find that the nematode's propulsion speed…
Animal behaviors are sometimes decomposable into discrete, stereotyped elements. In one model, such behaviors are triggered by specific commands; in the extreme case, the discreteness of behavior is traced to the discreteness of action…
The millimeter-long soil-dwelling nematode {\it C. elegans} propels itself by producing undulations that propagate along its body and turns by assuming highly curved shapes. According to our recent study [PLoS ONE \textbf{7}, e40121 (2012)]…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
Recent whole-brain calcium imaging recordings of the nematode C. elegans have demonstrated that neural activity is dominated by dynamics on a low-dimensional manifold that can be clustered according to behavioral states. Despite progress in…
Undulatory locomotion, as seen in the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans}, is a common swimming gait of organisms in the low Reynolds number regime, where viscous forces are dominant. While the nematode's motility is expected to be a…
A major challenge in analyzing animal behavior is to discover some underlying simplicity in complex motor actions. Here we show that the space of shapes adopted by the nematode C. elegans is surprisingly low dimensional, with just four…
Animals adjust their behavioral response to sensory input adaptively depending on past experiences. The flexible brain computation is crucial for survival and is of great interest in neuroscience. The nematode C. elegans modulates its…
To survive in ever-changing environments, living organisms need to continuously combine the ongoing external inputs they receive, representing present conditions, with their dynamical internal state, which includes influences of past…
Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode, propels itself by producing undulatory body motion and displays a rich variety of body shapes and trajectories during its locomotion in complex environments. Here we show that the complex…