Biomimicry

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.

Researchers have developed a way to infer which neighbours an animal is actually responding to directly from collective-movement data. The method tests combinations of interaction distance and viewing angle, then measures how strongly the average heading of candidate neighbours predicts an individual’s subsequent direction.

To operate autonomously, minimal robot swarms must make timely and reliable collective decisions despite noisy individual sensing and severe constraints on communication, computation, and memory.

An RFID study of stingless bees found that seemingly minor environmental cues strongly affected how reliably returning foragers identified their own colonies.

A theoretical model of flying insect swarms proposes acoustic interaction as a local communication mechanism, with each insect attracted toward a weighted mean field generated by nearby swarm members.

A mathematical model of the dawn chorus shows how synchronized singing can emerge without central coordination. Each simulated bird has its own threshold for beginning to sing, determined by increasing ambient light and the amount of nearby birdsong it hears.

Longhorn crazy ants cooperatively transporting awkward loads through mazes reveal a striking scaling effect: larger teams solve geometrically difficult problems much more effectively than smaller ones, even when the physical burden per ant is held constant.

Groups of American cockroaches can continue occupying a shelter after environmental cues change, even though isolated individuals quickly move elsewhere.

A minimal wake-vortex model explains how a bird following behind and to the side of another can reduce the mechanical power needed for flight by about 11 percent.

A new agent-based model suggests that Andean condors can reduce the energetic cost of long-distance flight by using the movements of other birds as continuously updated social information.