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Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel…
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such…
We analyze evolutionary dynamics in a confluent, branching cellular population, such as in a growing duct, vasculature, or in a branching microbial colony. We focus on the coarse-grained features of the evolution and build a statistical…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
Complex adaptive systems have been the subject of much recent attention. It is by now well-established that members (`agents') tend to self-segregate into opposing groups characterized by extreme behavior. However, while different social…
Studies of cooperation have traditionally focused on discrete games such as the well-known prisoner's dilemma, in which players choose between two pure strategies: cooperation and defection. Increasingly, however, cooperation is being…
Range migrations in response to climate change, invasive species and the emergence of novel ecosystems highlight the importance of temporal turnover in community composition as a fundamental part of global change in the Anthropocene.…
In order to understand the phenomenon of longevity in biological world, the relationship between the potential of longevity and the structural complexity of an organism is analyzed. I. The potential of longevity is the maximum lifespan of…
The mean size of exponentially dividing E. coli cells cultured in different nutrient conditions is known to depend on the mean growth rate only. However, the joint fluctuations relating cell size, doubling time and individual growth rate…
A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
In a metastable de Sitter space any object has a finite life expectancy beyond which it undergoes vacuum decay. However, by spreading into different parts of the universe which will fall out of causal contact of each other in future, a…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
We characterize cell motion in experiments and show that the transition to collective motion in colonies of gliding bacterial cells confined to a monolayer appears through the organization of cells into larger moving clusters. Collective…
Disease outbreaks affect many ecosystems threatening species that also fight against other natural enemies. We investigate a cyclic game system with $5$ species, whose organisms outcompete according to the rules of a generalised spatial…
Collective motion is ubiquitous in nature; groups of animals, such as fish, birds, and ungulates appear to move as a whole, exhibiting a rich behavioral repertoire that ranges from directed movement to milling to disordered swarming.…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
We report the results of a game-theoretic experiment with human players who solve the problems of increasing complexity by cooperating in groups of increasing size. Our experimental environment is set up to make it complicated for players…
Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…
The structure of social networks is a key determinant in fostering cooperation and other altruistic behavior among naturally selfish individuals. However, most real social interactions are temporal, being both finite in duration and spread…