Related papers: Unexpected trends in termite survival
Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and…
The probability of the survival of the population of individuals of both sexes of given mature age, procreation rate and structure stability has been searched in the numerical experiment. The populations with long period of reproduction and…
Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human…
Termites form complex dynamical trail networks from simple individual rules when exploring their environment. To help identify those simple rules, we reconstructed trail networks from time-lapse images of roaming termites. We quantified the…
Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Most cells possess the capacity to locomote. Alone or collectively, this allows them to adapt, to rearrange, and to explore their surroundings. The biophysical characterization of such motile processes, in health and disease, has so far…
Collective motion by animal groups is affected by internal interactions, external constraints and the influx of information. A quantitative understanding of how these different factors give rise to different modes of collective motion is,…
Collectives form non-equilibrium social structures characterised by a volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
It is widely recognized that biological collectives operate near criticality to amplify their capability of collective response. The peak in susceptibility near criticality renders these groups highly responsive to external stimuli. While…
Social animals self-organise to create groups to increase protection against predators and productivity. One-to-one interactions are the building blocks of these emergent social structures and may correspond to friendship, grooming,…
We investigate the emergence of self-organised trails between two specific target areas in collective motion of social organisms by means of an agent-based model. We present numerical evidences that an increase in the efficiency of…
Longevity of a taxonomic group is an important issue in understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this respect a key observation is that genera, families or orders can each be assigned a characteristic average lifetime [Van Valen, L.,…
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…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
One of the most impressive features of moving animal groups is their ability to perform sudden coherent changes in travel direction. While this collective decision can be a response to an external perturbation, such as the presence of a…
Sperm cooperation has evolved in a variety of taxa and is often considered a response to sperm competition, yet the benefit of this form of collective movement remains unclear. Here we use fine-scale imaging and a minimal mathematical model…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
For any system, whether physical or non-physical, knowledge of the form and strength of inter-individual interactions is a key-information. In an approach based on statistical physics one needs to know the interaction Hamiltonian. For…