Related papers: Size and shape of terrestrial animals
A correlation is established between the macro-scale friction regimes of metals and a transition between two dominant atomistic mechanisms of deformation. Metals tend to exhibit bi-stable friction behavior -- low and converging or high and…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
Groups of animals often tend to arrange themselves in flocks that have characteristic spatial attributes and temporal dynamics. Using a dynamic continuum model for a flock of individuals, we find equilibria of finite spatial extent where…
Human motor activities are known to exhibit scale-free long-term correlated fluctuations over a wide range of timescales, from few to thousands of seconds. The fundamental processes originating such fractal-like behavior are not yet…
Animal movements have been related to optimal foraging strategies where self-similar trajectories are central. Most of the experimental studies done so far have focused mainly on fitting statistical models to data in order to test for…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
We note that in a system far from equilibrium the interface roughening may depend on the system size which plays the role of control parameter. To detect the size effect on the interface roughness, we study the scaling properties of rough…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
Deformable substrates such as sand and mud present significant challenges for terrestrial robots due to complex robot-terrain interactions. Inspired by mudskippers, amphibious animals that naturally adjust their tail morphology and movement…
The original problem of phyllotaxis was focused on the regular arrangements of leaves on mature stems represented by common fractions such as 1/2, 1/3, 2/5, 3/8, 5/13, etc. The phyllotaxis fraction is not fixed for each plant but it may…
The explosion of data on animal behavior in more natural contexts highlights the fact that these behaviors exhibit correlations across many time scales. But there are major challenges in analyzing these data: records of behavior in single…
Inferring the identity of wildlife species from daily movement data alone is a challenging task. We train sequence models on large-scale, 7-species GPS trajectories from the Movebank platform. Trajectories models are evaluated using a…
A bonded particle model is used to explore how variations in the material properties of brittle, isotropic solids affect critical behavior in fragmentation. To control material properties, a new model is proposed which includes breakable…
The ongoing discovery of terrestrial exoplanets accentuates the importance of studying planetary evolution for a wide range of initial conditions. We perform thermal evolution simulations for generic terrestrial planets with masses ranging…
Motivated by a possible convergence of terrestrial limbless locomotion strategies ultimately determined by interfacial effects, we show how both 3D gait alterations and locomotory adaptations to heterogeneous terrains can be understood…
In order to keep their cohesiveness during locomotion gregarious animals must make collective decisions. Many species boast complex societies with multiple levels of communities. A common case is when two dominant levels exist, one…
The study of the movement of flocks, whether biological or technological is motivated by the desire to understand the capability of coherent motion of a large number of agents that only receive very limited information. In a biological…
Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles.…
Snake moves across various terrains by bending its elongated body. Recent studies discovered that snakes can use vertical bending to traverse terrain of large height variation, such as horizontally oriented cylinders, a wedge (Jurestovsky,…