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The study of self-propelled particles is a fast-growing research topic where biologically inspired movement is increasingly becoming of much interest. A relevant example is the collective motion of social insects, whose variety and…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
Termites which are able to forage in the open can be often seen, in the field or in the lab: (i) wandering around, forming no observable pattern, or (ii) clustering themselves in a dense and almost immobile pack, or (iii) milling about in a…
Collective behaviour is a widespread phenomenon in biology, cutting through a huge span of scales, from cell colonies up to bird flocks and fish schools. The most prominent trait of collective behaviour is the emergence of global order:…
The rich set of interactions between individuals in the society results in complex community structure, capturing highly connected circles of friends, families, or professional cliques in a social network. Thanks to frequent changes in the…
We use dynamical generating functionals to study the stability and size of communities evolving in Lotka-Volterra systems with random interaction coefficients. The size of the eco-system is not set from the beginning. Instead, we start from…
We present a model for the growth of the transportation network inside nests of the social insect subfamily Termitinae (Isoptera, termitidae). These nests consist of large chambers (nodes) connected by tunnels (edges). The model based on…
From the formation of animal flocks to the emergence of coordinate motion in bacterial swarms, at all scales populations of motile organisms display coherent collective motion. This consistent behavior strongly contrasts with the difference…
Computational models of collective behavior in birds has allowed us to infer interaction rules directly from experimental data. Using a generic form of these rules we explore the collective behavior and emergent dynamics of a simulated…
Social insect colonies can be seen as a distinct form of biological organization because they function as superorganisms. Understanding how natural selection acts on the emergence and maintenance of these colonies remains a major question…
The phenomenon of apoptosis observed in cell cultures consists in the fact that unless cells permanently receive a "Stay alive" signal from their neighbors, they are bound to die. A natural question is whether manifestations of this…
The social brain hypothesis states that the relative size of the neocortex is larger for species with higher social complexity as a result of evolution. Various lines of empirical evidence have supported the social brain hypothesis,…
Social insects are ecologically and evolutionarily most successful organisms on earth, which can achieve robust collective behaviors through local interactions among group members. Colony migration has been considered as a leading example…
Energy saving mechanisms in nature allow following organisms to expend less energy than leaders. Queues, or ordered rows of individuals, may form when organisms exploit the available energy saving mechanism while travelling at near-maximal…
For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances…
Collective behaviour in living systems is observed across many scales, from bacteria to insects, to fish shoals. Zebrafish have emerged as a model system amenable to laboratory study. Here we report a three-dimensional study of the…
Selection on the level of loosely associated groups has been suggested as a route towards the evolution of cooperation between individuals and the subsequent formation of higher-level biological entities. Such group selection explanations…
Soaring migrants exploit columns of rising air (thermals) to cover large distances with minimal energy. Employing social information while locating thermals may be beneficial, but examining collective movements in wild migrants has been a…
Rodents serve as an important model for examining both individual and collective behavior. Dominance within rodent social structures can determine access to critical resources, such as food and mating opportunities. Yet, many aspects of the…
We investigate a class of continuum models for the motion of a two-dimensional biological group under the influence of nonlocal social interactions. The dynamics may be uniquely decomposed into incompressible motion and potential motion.…