Related papers: Subcritical escape waves in schooling fish
Bacteria often develop distinct phenotypes to adapt to environmental stress. In particular, they can produce biofilms, dense communities of bacteria that live in a complex extracellular matrix. Bacterial biofilms provide a safe haven from…
The existing consensus is that flocks are poised at criticality, entailing long correlation lengths and a maximal value of Shannon mutual information in the large-system limit. We show, by contrast, that for finite flocks in the long…
Feedback in sensory biochemical networks can give rise to bifurcations in cells' behavioral response. These bifurcations share many properties with thermodynamic critical points. Evidence suggests that biological systems may operate near…
When cells measure concentrations of chemical signals, they may average multiple measurements over time in order to reduce noise in their measurements. However, when cells are in a environment that changes over time, past measurements may…
Crossing survival curves complicate how we interpret results from a clinical trial's primary endpoint. We find the function to determine a crossing point's location depends exponentially on individual survival curves. This exponential…
Gene regulatory networks can be successfully modeled as Boolean networks. A much discussed hypothesis says that such model networks reproduce empirical findings the best if they are tuned to operate at criticality, i.e. at the borderline…
Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes…
Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation, often with uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information,…
We run stochastic simulations of the spatial version of the rock-paper-scissors game, considering that individuals use sensory abilities to scan the environment to detect the presence of enemies. If the local dangerousness level is above a…
We derive a class of macroscopic differential equations that describe collective adaptation, starting from a discrete-time stochastic microscopic model. The behavior of each agent is a dynamic balance between adaptation that locally…
It is widely accepted that the brain operates near a critical state, characterized by neural avalanches that follow power-law distributions. However, the functional rationale for why neural systems attain criticality remains unclear. Here,…
Fish rheotaxis, or alignment into flow currents, results from intertwined sensory, neural and actuation mechanisms, all coupled with hydrodynamics to produce a behavior that is critical for upstream migration and position holding in…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
We determine the basic phase diagram of the fish school model derived from data by Gautrais etal (PLoS Comp. Biol. 8, e1002678 (2012)), exploring its parameter space beyond the parameter values determined experimentally on groups of barred…
Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point.…
In biology and ecology, individuals or communities of individuals living in unpredictable environments often alternate between different evolutionary strategies to spread and reduce risks. Such behavior is commonly referred to as…
The "critical brain hypothesis" posits that neural circuitry may be tuned close to a "critical point" or "phase transition" -- a boundary between different operating regimes of the circuit. The renormalization group and theory of critical…
During the last two decades, various models have been proposed for fish collective motion. These models are mainly developed to decipher the biological mechanisms of social interaction between animals. They consider very simple homogeneous…
An important characteristic of flocks of birds, school of fish, and many similar assemblies of self-propelled particles is the emergence of states of collective order in which the particles move in the same direction. When noise is added…
Critical learning periods are periods early in development where temporary sensory deficits can have a permanent effect on behavior and learned representations. Despite the radical differences between biological and artificial networks,…