Related papers: Size and shape of terrestrial animals
Turbulence grounds aircraft and combating it in flight requires energy, yet volant wildlife fly effortlessly even on windy days. The nature of the interactions between soaring birds and transient turbulent gusts is not clear, especially…
Animal movement exhibits complex behavior which can be influenced by unobserved environmental conditions. We propose a model which allows for a spatially-varying movement rate and spatially-varying drift through a semiparametric potential…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
Large animal groups -- bird flocks, fish schools, insect swarms -- are often assumed to form by gradual aggregation of sparsely distributed individuals. Using a mathematically precise framework based on time-varying directed interaction…
The law of allometric growth is one of basic rules for understanding urban evolution. The general form of this law is allometric scaling law. However, the deep meaning and underlying rationale of the scaling exponents remain to be brought…
Recent studies claimed that planets around the same star have similar sizes and masses and regular spacings, and that planet pairs usually show ordered sizes such that the outer planet is usually the larger one. Here I show that these…
To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…
This paper focuses on size effects in periodic mechanical metamaterials driven by reversible pattern transformations due to local elastic buckling instabilities in their microstructure. Two distinct loading cases are studied: compression…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
1. Anthropogenic actions cause rapid ecological changes, meaning that animals have to respond before they have time to adapt. Tools to quantify emergent spatial patterns from animal-habitat interaction mechanisms are vital for predicting…
A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of…
The analysis of animal tracking data provides an important source of scientific understanding and discovery in ecology. Observations of animal trajectories using telemetry devices provide researchers with information about the way animals…
Surface constructs in snakes reflect desirable design traits for technical surface engineering. Their micro-textural patterns, however, do not lend themselves easily to unified analysis due to species-specific variations in surface geometry…
Epistatic interactions between mutations add substantial complexity to adaptive landscapes, and are often thought of as detrimental to our ability to predict evolution. Yet, patterns of global epistasis, in which the fitness effect of a…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
Animal pose estimation has recently come into the limelight due to its application in biology, zoology, and aquaculture. Deep learning methods have effectively been applied to human pose estimation. However, the major bottleneck to the…
Topologically nontrivial adiabatic loops of the orientation of a homogeneous external magnetic field drive the walking of paramagnetic colloidal bipeds above a deformed quasi-periodic magnetic square pattern. Depending on the topological…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
The abelian sandpile model in two dimensions does not show the type of critical behavior familar from equilibrium systems. Rather, the properties of the stationary state follow from the condition that an avalanche started at a distance r…
Proteins display generic properties that are challenging to explain by direct selection, notably allostery, the capacity to be regulated through long-range effects, and evolvability, the capacity to adapt to new selective pressures. An…