Related papers: Size and shape of terrestrial animals
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
Sea urchin feeding fronts are a striking example of spatial pattern formation in an ecological system. If it is assumed that urchins are asocial, and that they move randomly, then the formation of these dense fronts is an apparent paradox.…
Robots deployed at orders of magnitude different size scales, and that retain the same desired behavior at any of those scales, would greatly expand the environments in which the robots could operate. However it is currently not known…
Topography is the expression of both internal and external processes of a planetary body. Thus hypsometry (the study of topography) is a way to decipher the dynamic of a planet. For that purpose, the statistics of height and slopes may be…
Reliably predicting the geomorphology and climate of planetary bodies requires knowledge of the dynamic threshold wind shear velocity below which saltation transport ceases. Here we measure this threshold in a wind tunnel for four…
Life presents fascinating examples of self-organization and emergent phenomena. In multi-cellular organisms, a multitude of cells interact to form and maintain highly complex body plans of well-defined size. In this thesis, we investigate…
The study of animal movement is challenging because it is a process modulated by many factors acting at different spatial and temporal scales. Several models have been proposed which differ primarily in the temporal conceptualization,…
The theories of aero- and hydrodynamics predict animal movement and device design in air and water through the computation of lift, drag, and thrust forces. Although models of terrestrial legged locomotion have focused on interactions with…
Primate visual system samples different parts of the world unevenly. The part of the visual scene corresponding to the eye center is represented densely, while away from the center the sampling becomes progressively sparser. Such…
Identifying animals from a large group of possible individuals is very important for biodiversity monitoring and especially for collecting data on a small number of particularly interesting individuals, as these have to be identified first…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Background. Organisms use a variety of mechanisms to protect themselves against perturbations. For example, repair mechanisms fix damage, feedback loops keep homeostatic systems at their setpoints, and biochemical filters distinguish signal…
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…
Relationships between sediment flux and geomorphic processes are combined with statements of mass conservation, in order to create continuum models of hillslope evolution. These models have parameters which can be calibrated using available…
Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
The consistency of the species abundance distribution across diverse communities has attracted widespread attention. In this paper, I argue that the consistency of pattern arises because diverse ecological mechanisms share a common symmetry…
In this paper, we study the number of moves in a multidimensional elephant random walk with stops. We establish several convergence results for the number of moves, including the law of large numbers and the law of iterated logarithm. Using…
The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…