Related papers: Size and shape of terrestrial animals
Animals often exhibit changes in their behavior during migration. Telemetry data provide a way to observe geographic position of animals over time, but not necessarily changes in the dynamics of the movement process. Continuous-time models…
Medium and large insects in normal hovering have horizontal, planar up- and downstrokes1-4. The lift of the two half-strokes, generated by the leading-edge vortex, provides the weight-supporting vertical force. But for small insects (wing…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
The semicircular canals of the inner ear are involved in balance and velocity control. Being crucial to ensure efficient mobility, their morphology exhibits an evolutionary conservatism attributed to stabilizing selection. Release of…
The dynamics of a population undergoing selection is a central topic in evolutionary biology. This question is particularly intriguing in the case where selective forces act in opposing directions at two population scales. For example, a…
1. Animal movement patterns contribute to our understanding of variation in breeding success and survival of individuals, and the implications for population dynamics. 2. Over time, sensor technology for measuring movement patterns has…
Darwinian evolution is driven by random mutations, genetic recombination (gene shuffling) and selection that favors genotypes with high fitness. For systems where each genotype can be represented as a bitstring of length $L$, an overview of…
Friction, the resistive force between two surfaces sliding past each other, is at the core of a wide diversity of locomotion schemes. While such schemes are somewhat understood for homogeneous environments, locomotion based on friction in…
This work provides a ground for a quantitative interpretation of experiments on step bunching during sublimation of crystals with a pronounced Ehrlich-Schwoebel (ES) barrier in the regime of weak desorption. A strong step bunching…
Self-arrangement of individuals into spatial patterns often accompanies and promotes species diversity in ecological systems. Here, we investigate pattern formation arising from cyclic dominance of three species, operating near a…
It has recently been noted that the relative prevalence of the various kinds of epistasis varies along an adaptive walk. This has been explained as a result of mean regression in NK model fitness landscapes. Here we show that this…
Allometric scaling is one of the most pervasive laws in biology. Its origin, however, is still a matter of dispute. Recent studies have established that maximum metabolic rate scales with an exponent larger than that found for basal…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…
In a recent paper [Ferrari et al., Phys. Rev. E 69, 035102(R) (2004)], the scaling law of the fluctuations of the step limiting a crystal facet has been computed as a function of the facet size. Ferrari et al. use rigorous, but physically…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
Elephant random walk is a special type of random walk that incorporates the memory of the past to determine its future steps. The probability of this walk taking a particular step (+1 or -1) at a time point, conditioned on the entire…
We present a model for stable crack growth in a constrained geometry. The morphology of such cracks show scaling properties consistent with self affinity. Recent experiments show that there are two distinct self-affine regimes, one on small…
Effective locomotion in nature happens by transitioning across multiple modes (e.g., walk, run, climb). Despite this, far more mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion has been on how to generate and stabilize around…
Concerns about biodiversity and the long-term stability of forest ecosystems have lead to changing attitudes with respect to plantations. These artificial communities are ubiquitous, yet provide reduced habitat value in comparison to their…