Related papers: Do swimming animals mix the ocean?
Animal groups frequently move in a highly organized manner, as represented by flocks of birds and schools of fish. Despite being an everyday occurrence, we do not yet fully understand how this works. What type of social interactions between…
The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Collective motion in animal groups emerges from the interplay between individual variability and social coordination, yet connecting these scales quantitatively has remained a major challenge.Using high-resolution trajectories of schooling…
Changes that occur on our planet can be tracked back to one of two energy sources: the sun and the Earth's internal energy. The motion of tectonic plates, volcanism, mountain building and the reshaping of our planet's surface over geologic…
In this paper we study the locomotion of a shape-changing body swimming in a two-dimensional perfect fluid of infinite extent. The shape-changes are prescribed as functions of time satisfying constraints ensuring that they result from the…
Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…
Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Eco-evolutionary game dynamics which characterizes the mutual interactions and the coupled evolutions of strategies and environments has been of growing interests in very recent years. Since such feedback loops widely exist in a range of…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
A new modelling approach shows how the Earth's hidden vibrations may drive global weather dynamics and atmospheric pressure variations, hinting that the planet's own beat could be imprinted on our climate. The atmospheric rotational…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
The study of navigation behaviour and the associated brain dynamics have been a focus increasing research over the last decades. Coinciding with this has been an increased focus on a more ecological understanding of cognition. Here we…
Sheep are gregarious animals, and they often aggregate into dense, cohesive flocks, especially under stress. In this paper, we use image processing tools to analyze a publicly available aerial video showing a dense sheep flock moving under…
Zooplankton live in dynamic environments where turbulence may challenge their limited swimming abilities. How this interferes with fundamental behavioral processes remains elusive. We reconstruct simultaneously the trajectories of flow…