In recent years, the concept of self-organization has been used to understand collective
behaviour of animals. The central tenet of self-organization is that simple repeated …

Self-organization was introduced originally in the context of physics and chemistry to
describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic stuctures in out-of-equilibrium …

Fish travel in schools, birds migrate in flocks, honeybees swarm, and ants build trails. How
and why do these collective behaviors occur? Exploring how coordinated group patterns …

Abstract Fifty years ago David Lack put forward a key hypothesis in life-history theory: that
avian clutch is ultimately determined by the number of young that parents can provide with …

While the striking structures (eg nest architecture, trail networks) of insect societies may
seem familiar to many of us, the understanding of pattern formation still constitutes a …

Social insects provide us with a powerful metaphor to create decentralized systems of
simple interacting, and often mobile, agents. The emergent collective intelligence of social …

From the rapidly expanding spiral waves exhibited by colonies of giant honeybees to the
ripples of light that cross a turning school of fish, synchrony proves essential to the lives of …

Social animals exchange information during social interaction. The rate of interaction and,
hence, the rate of information exchange, typically changes with density and density may be …

The pattern and process of building in an ant, Leptothorax (Myrafant) tubero-interruptus (F.),
is described. This species naturally uses flat crevices in rock, so they do not have to …

As conditions change, social insect colonies adjust the numbers of workers engaged in
various tasks, such as foraging and nest work. This process of task allocation operates …