A computational model shows that natural selection can cause populations to evolve a distinctive population-level phenotype: the ability to transition between collective states in response to the environment.
High-resolution GPS data revealed a quadratic relationship between group size and movement, with vulturine guineafowl groups of intermediate size exhibiting the largest home-range size and greater variation in site use.
For baboons on the move, habitat features across multiple spatial scales combine with social interactions to impact the movements of individuals, ultimately shaping the structure of the whole group.
Selection for undifferentiated multicellularity emerges in an evolutionary cell-based model because a collective of cells performs chemotaxis better than single cells in a noisy environment.
Quorum sensing enables heterogeneous production of autoinducers in microbial populations, suggesting an alternative mechanism to stochastic gene expression in bistable gene-regulatory circuits to control phenotypic heterogeneity.
Two seemingly distinct behaviors in social C. elegans worms, namely aggregating into groups and swarming over food, are driven by the same underlying mechanisms.
Collective responses of animals are generally controlled by complex biological mechanisms and in Caenorhabditis eleganscollective dynamics are purely controlled by physical parameters such as oxygen penetration and bacterial diffusion.
Animal-to-animal variability in neural circuit elements is often hidden under normal conditions, but becomes functionally relevant when the system is challenged by injury.
Children with autism often 'tune out' the voices in their environment and new results show that impaired processing of voices in the brain's reward system may underlie this social behavior.
A systematic experimental comparison of prosocial behavior in eight corvid species reveals sex-specific effects of cooperative breeding and colonial nesting, thereby adding important new insights regarding the evolution of prosociality.
