Related papers: Size and shape of terrestrial animals
We investigate the properties of a deterministic walk, whose locomotion rule is always to travel to the nearest site. Initially the sites are randomly distributed in a closed rectangular ($A/L \times L)$ landscape and, once reached, they…
Scaling mobility patterns have been widely observed for animals. In this paper, we propose a deterministic walk model to understand the scaling mobility patterns, where walkers take the least-action walks on a lattice landscape and prey.…
Bird flocking is a striking example of collective animal behaviour. A vivid illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the aerial display of vast flocks of starlings gathering at dusk over the roost and swirling with extraordinary…
Understanding the cross-species behavior of cancer is important for uncovering fundamental mechanisms of carcinogenesis, and for translating results of model systems between species. One of the most famous interspecific considerations of…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
Scaling the design of robots up or down remains a fundamental challenge. While biological systems follow well-established isometric and allometric scaling laws relating mass, stride frequency, velocity, and torque, it is unclear how these…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
Receptive field profiles registered by cell recordings have shown that mammalian vision has developed receptive fields tuned to different sizes and orientations in the image domain as well as to different image velocities in space-time.…
The prevailing theory for metabolic scaling is based on area-preserved, space-filling fractal vascular networks. However, it's known both theoretically and experimentally that animals' vascular systems obey Murray's cubic branching law.…
The growth of ballistic aggregates on deterministic fractal substrates is studied by means of numerical simulations. First, we attempt the description of the evolving interface of the aggregates by applying the well-established…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…
Many snakes live in deserts, forests, and river valleys and traverse challenging 3-D terrain like rocks, felled trees, and rubble, with obstacles as large as themselves and variable surface properties. By contrast, apart from branch…
The distribution of species body size within taxonomic groups exhibits a heavy right-tail extending over many orders of magnitude, where most species are significantly larger than the smallest species. We provide a simple model of…
Experimental studies on enzyme evolution show that only a small fraction of all possible mutation trajectories are accessible to evolution. However, these experiments deal with individual enzymes and explore a tiny part of the fitness…
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…
The origin and shape of metabolic scaling has been controversial since Kleiber found that basal metabolic rate of animals seemed to vary as a power law of their body mass with exponent 3/4, instead of 2/3, as a surface-to-volume argument…
We investigate theoretically the ballistic motion of small legged insects and legless larvae after a jump. Notwithstanding their completely different morphologies and jumping strategies, these legged and legless animals have convergently…
Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic…
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and…
Evolution and geometry generate complexity in similar ways. Evolution drives natural selection while geometry may capture the logic of this selection and express it visually, in terms of specific generic properties representing some kind of…