Animals drift when they enter a fluid (liquid or gas) and are transported to a new location by gravity or currents. Drift is best known from rivers and ocean currents, but can also occur on land, whenever organisms leave their former solid position, pass into the air, and are moved significant distances by the combined […]
The biological world is composed of dense, communicating, and difficult to understand ensembles. Animals living in groups –a school of fish, a flock of birds– have evolved to act in concert, a quality needed for coordinated movement. More complex than just moving together, group carrying is fairly rare in nature and only social spiders, dung […]
Phragmosis is a method by which an animal defends itself in its burrow by using its own body as a barrier. This term was coined by W.M. Wheeler in 1927 to describe a cryptic defensive technique employed by arthropods that use specially modified body structures to block nest entrances. A well example is the mygalomorph […]
Bulldog ants ( Myrmecia pyriformis ) are the most dangerous ants on Earth. The name of these Australian native ants is due to the way they bite and hang off their victims using their mandibles: they sink their teeth and they keep gnawing at it. These mandibles were used by the Australian natives to temporarily […]
Slime mold is an informal name given to several kinds of unrelated eukaryotic organisms that can live freely as single cells but when food is in short supply, many of these unicellular organisms will congregate to form multicellular structures that move together as a single body. Thus, the aggregation and joint movement require the coordination […]
Looking for a sexual partner outside your species is not very common, but that is what the males of a type of spider mite do. Even more, a recent work suggests that this kinky behaviour could have been key to colonization of new environments. Tetranychus evansi is a species of red spider mite originally from […]
Brood parasites are organisms that rely on others to raise their young. The strategy appears among fishes, birds and insects, including some species of ants. Slave-making ants capture brood from other ant species to increase the worker force of their colony through regular, destructive raids that frequently finish with the killing of many workers and […]
Ants are among the most diverse, abundant and ecologically significant organisms on earth. They have colonized almost every landmass on Earth and the only places lacking indigenous ants are Antarctica and a few remote or inhospitable islands. Ants thrive in most ecosystems and may form 15–25% of the terrestrial animal biomass. Although their species richness […]
Mutualistic interactions are ubiquitous phenomena occurring between many classes of organisms . The mutually beneficial relationship between ants and honeydew-producing mealybugs (hemipterans) is a very well-studied example. Mealybugs belong to the family Pseudococcidae and they are unarmored scale insects found in moist and warm climates. The ants collect and exploit the honeydew produced by the […]
Swarm robotics studies the coordination of many simple physical robots that act as a single multirobot system. The interactions between the individual robots and the interaction of the robots with the environment generate a collective behavior that is named swarm behavior. This new discipline moves from the artificial intelligence to the biological world and vice […]