Related papers: Escape dynamics of confined undulating worms
We investigate the behavior of {\it Lumbriculus variegatus} in circular and polygonal chambers and show that the worms align with the boundaries as they move forward and then become dynamically trapped at the concave corners over prolonged…
We investigate the dynamics of \textbf{\textit{Lumbriculus variegatus}} in water-saturated sediment beds to understand limbless locomotion in the benthic zone found at the bottom of lakes and oceans. These slender aquatic worms are observed…
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)]…
We numerically investigate the mean exit time of an inertial active Brownian particle from a circular cavity with single or multiple exit windows. Our simulation results witness distinct escape mechanisms depending upon the relative…
Many types of organisms utilize group aggregation as a method for survival. The freshwater oligochaete, California blackworms Lumbriculus variegatus form tightly entangled structures, or worm "blobs", that have adapted to survive in…
We exploit the reduced space of C. elegans postures to develop a novel tracking algorithm which captures both simple shapes and also self-occluding coils, an important, yet unexplored, component of worm behavior. We apply our algorithm to…
Insects exhibit remarkable cognitive skills in the field and several cognitive abilities have been demonstrated in Drosophila in the laboratory. By devising an ethologically relevant experimental setup that also allows comparison of…
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…
Cells have evolved efficient strategies to probe their surroundings and navigate through complex environments. From metastatic spread in the body to swimming cells in porous materials, escape through narrow constrictions - a key component…
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 aim of this work is to review and also explore even further the escape properties of orbits in a dynamical system of a two-dimensional perturbed harmonic oscillator, which is a characteristic example of open Hamiltonian systems. In…
Thiovulum majus, which is one of the fastest known bacteria, swims using hundreds of flagella. Unlike typical pusher cells, which swim in circular paths over hard surfaces, a T. majus cell turns its flagella normal to the surface. To probe…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
We explore the escape dynamics in open Hamiltonian systems with multiple channels of escape continuing the work initiated in Part I. A thorough numerical investigation is conducted distinguishing between trapped (ordered and chaotic) and…
Living organisms employ diverse strategies to navigate confined environments. Inspired by translocation observations on California blackworms (\textit{Lumbriculus variegatus}), we combine biological experiments and active-polymer…
The out-of-equilibrium character of active particles, responsible for accumulation at boundaries in confining domains, determines not-trivial effects when considering escape processes. Non-monotonous behavior of exit times with respect to…
Motion in bounded domains is a fundamental concept in various fields, including billiard dynamics and random walks on finite lattices, with important applications in physics, ecology and biology. An important universal property related to…
Robots are still poor at traversing cluttered large obstacles required for important applications like search and rescue. By contrast, animals are excellent at doing so, often using direct physical interaction with obstacles rather than…
We study the escape of Brownian motion from the domain of attraction $\Omega$ of a stable focus with a strong drift. The boundary $\partial \Omega$ of $\Omega$ is an unstable limit cycle of the drift and the focus is very close to the limit…
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…