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Genetically identical fish can develop strikingly different collective behaviours despite growing up under standardised conditions. Researchers followed ten groups of four Amazon mollies over 55 days, recording how their movements and social relationships developed.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria use physical collisions with neighbours as information, dynamically switching between disorder and coordinated movement without chemical signalling.

African elephants appear to make their calls more alike as some group conversations unfold, potentially helping a herd coordinate a shared course of action.

Engineered bacterial communities can use chemical communication to coordinate a metabolic division of labour that no single strain performs as effectively alone.

Bacterial collectives combine signalling, division of labour, environmental memory and local decision rules to achieve capabilities unavailable to individual cells.

The collective sounds of a healthy coral reef provide environmental information that influences where young marine organisms settle. Researchers recorded the acoustic environment of a functioning Hawaiian reef, including fish vocalisations and snapping crustaceans, then replayed those sounds around artificial reef structures.

Sperm cooperation turns out to be widespread across arthropods rather than an evolutionary curiosity. Researchers mapped sperm traits across hundreds of insects, spiders, crustaceans, centipedes and related animals and found that sperm conjugation — cells physically joining into coordinated groups — has repeatedly appeared, disappeared and reappeared over roughly 600 million years.

Extremophile microbes use quorum sensing to coordinate population-level behaviour even under conditions of extreme heat, cold, salinity or acidity. A new review maps signalling across thermophiles, psychrophiles, halophiles and acidophiles, showing that these organisms produce and detect autoinducer molecules whose accumulating concentration provides local information about population density.

An injured plant root can transmit a mechanical warning through its vascular system far faster than the calcium signals normally associated with plant defence.

A real-world intrusion campaign used hundreds of coordinated AI agents to compress exploit development and mass compromise into machine-speed parallel work.